The future of gaming lives inside metal cages, if you believe some of the biggest gaming companies out there. Piled on hardware racks, blinking with little green lights, it’s calculated inside stacked-together computers and pumped out of a remote server through big underground tubes. It is distributed across the globe—Shanghai, London, Prague, Virginia—from nondescript, city block-sized architectural monoliths. To see it up close, you would need to pass through multiple levels of security.
Over the past two years, it seems every major gaming and tech company has launched a cloud gaming service: Microsoft’s Project xCloud, Sony’s PlayStation Now, Google’s Stadia, Nvidia’s GeForce Now, Tencent’s Start. Facebook and Amazon are reportedly sniffing around too. For a monthly fee—$10 to $35—users can play a library of videogames on demand, streamed to their phone, television, console, computer, or tablet.
Big Tech expects cloud gaming to be white-hot, if the major ante they’ve pushed into it says anything. Like a lot of cutting-edge tech, it cloaks the technology behind the magic, giving you the impression that you’re barely dealing with hardware at all. It’s a charming effect. Don’t fall for it. In interviews with WIRED, the people behind some of cloud gaming’s biggest services and data center organizations lifted the curtain on the infrastructure powering these immaterial services. Many agree that, as competition becomes more fierce, and cloud gaming sees mass adoption, success in cloud gaming could mean an infrastructure arms race.
“We live in a culture of ‘instant’ when it comes to any kind of electronic media,” says Microsoft corporate vice president of cloud gaming Kareem Choudhry. He was winding up for the cloud gaming pitch: Of the world’s 8 billion human beings, over 2 billion are gamers. Gaming is as culturally impactful as music, television, and movies. And until cloud gaming, there was no mass-market Netflix for videogames—on-demand content that’s device-agnostic. Besides, says Choudhry, “we know we’re not going to sell 2 billion consoles.”
Take something as simple as piloting Witcher 3’s Geralt a few steps to the left in a cloud gaming service. Flicking the controller’s analog stock initiates a ping-pong of invisible signals to an uber-powerful and remote computer: from the controller, through the internet, to the cloud gaming service’s nearest data center and then the cloud gaming server, which processes your action and calculates a new game state—which it then feeds back to your monitor, where Geralt has inched closer to the bar.
Cloud gaming is software as a service. That service is two-pronged: a library of videogames the cloud service provider has negotiated with game publishers, and a way to stream those games over the internet. This culture of “instant” has generated big demands for that delivery service: low-latency, so you can dodge a combo in Street Fighter V; and no packet loss, so your very alive-seeming Overwatch character isn’t suddenly dead. While a service’s performance depends in part on your home internet situation—and will change with the arrival of 5G, at least on your phone—much of its lasting success will hinge on data taking as short and uninterrupted a round trip as possible from your hardware to a data center.
“It’s everything besides bandwidth, second only to bandwidth,” says David Linthicum, Deloitte’s chief cloud strategy officer, of the importance of data centers to cloud gaming competitors. “The company that provides the fastest infrastructure and the largest points of presence in data centers around the world—that’s gonna go to who’s gonna be successful.”
If you’re playing God of War in Egypt, but your cloud gaming service’s closest data center is in Qatar, there might be enough delay between your inputs and Kratos’ mo