Gamescom 2019 opened its doors at the Cologne trade fair last week Tuesday. This year, cloud gaming is one of the highlights. We will explain what it is all about!
What is Gamescom?
Gamescom is the world’s largest games fair for video and PC games. In addition to various games, new software and hardware are also presented. It takes place once a year at the Koelnmesse in Cologne. This year, the exhibition took place from August 20 to August 24, 2019. Up until 2009, the fair was held under the name Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany.
The Highlights of Gamescom 2019
The expectations for this year’s event were high. In addition to the special opening show, gamers looked forward to seeing many new games, such as:
- Death Stranding
- Gears of War 5
- Comanche
- Need For Speed Heat
- The Settlers
- Transport Fever 2
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
- Fifa 20
Visitors were able to catch some first glimpses of upcoming games in their respective Gamescom trailers. But, not only were gaming novelties expected, visitors were also eager to feast their eyes on some of the new technology, for example “Raytracing”, being presented. With this technology, the new RTX graphics cards, which have already found their place in many gaming computers, can use photorealism to realistically recreate light and shadows.
Hot Trend at Gamescom: Streaming Games
Cloud Gaming was a hot topic at this year’s Gamescom. The principle of cloud gaming is not new, but when we look around the gaming industry, we notice that more and more providers are keeping up to date with the latest gaming trends.
What is Cloud Gaming?
Cloud Gaming, also called “Gaming as a Service”, is a form of Cloud Computing and describes the playing of games on one’s own computer without the installation of software being necessary. The game thus runs on an external server. The advantages of games streaming are obvious. The latest game highlights can also be played without a high-end desktop PC, because the system requirements for the gaming PC are lower than for an installed game. In addition, there are no annoying updates because the games are automatically updated in the cloud at any time.
The disadvantage of cloud gaming is that PC games cannot be played without a fast Internet connection. For a game in HD, it needs at least a 10 Mbit/s connection. A game in Full HD resolution needs a bandwidth of at least 20 Mbit/s. If you want to play the best games in 4K, you need at least 50 Mbits/s.
What cloud gaming providers are there?
Even though for many Gamescom visitors the topic is still a dream of the future, there are already some cloud gaming service providers. The pioneer is the manufacturer NVIDIA with NVIDIA GeForce Now. GeForce Now’s game library includes more than 400 games.
Sony offers a similar concept. With its cloud gaming service “Playstation Now”, a wide variety of Playstation games can be streamed. Google also wants to enter the games streaming market in the future. Google’s new cloud service is called Stadia and will be available starting in November 2019. All streaming services charge a monthly fee, which is not exactly cheap.
In addition to gaming as a service offers, there are also DaaS services (Desktop as A Service). This provides the user with a completely usable desktop environment in the cloud. Providers for these services are, for example, Shadow and Parsec.
