As with many new and emerging technologies, cloud gaming services are suffering from teething troubles.
Google’s Stadia was plagued by issues at launch, so it offers a vision of what the future might look like as opposed to a truly compelling console alternative.
Nvidia’s GeForce Now offers a more polished product, but still suffered from a counter-intuitive UI and lag with anything less than a high-speed internet connection.
Gamesanalysts.com’s Patrick Rose has indicated Amazon may be the latest company to try their hand at cloud gaming, suggesting it could tie in with the company’s upcoming New World game.
Amazon Game Studios has been developing games since 2012, but last year’s The Grand Tour Game was its first foray into console titles.
With two more PS4 and Xbox games in the works, it seems like now is the perfect time to create a dedicated platform to play them on.
Should this materialise, it feels like very exciting news for the cloud gaming sector as a whole. I’m not saying the retail giant will perfect its service – that will prove extremely difficult. But another major company investing in cloud gaming at this early stage suggests it has a bright and immediate future. Competition can only be positive as far as consumers are concerned.
A significant number of gamers seem to be willing to give up their consoles in favour of the convenience offered by cloud gaming, but not at the cost of user experience.
Currently, playing on a PS4 or Xbox One is so superior to cloud gaming services that it’s not even worth comparing the two. The PS5 and Xbox Series X only look set to extend that gap, but everyday gamers may be reluctant to drop hundreds of pounds on a new console at launch. This may provide may be reluctant to upgrade unless they
It’s unclear what an Amazon cloud service would look like, although I’d expect it to loosely resemble Google Stadia’s approach of a console-style controller and Chromecast. That would mean utilising the power of the Fire TV Stick, which is already able to output video up to 4K.
Amazon’s cloud gaming service could even be here before the late 2020 arrival of the PS5, so we might not be waiting long to see what the company has in store.
