Streaming games

The advancements in superfast broadband hasn't just helped the cause of downloadable games. It will also have no some small impact on the future of streaming games over broadband, or at least that's the theory.

There are several companies pursuing and a significant amount of money invested in the idea that one day, your precious PC will be almost entirely redundant as a games machine.

The concept is simple: all the game's data is hosted on a central server and all you will have to do is receive the display and send back input commands. It's a little like the technology used for MMORPGs, except that the rendering engine isn't on your PC, it's actually in the same server farm as the core intelligence.

This idea was actually mooted some years ago with the Phantom console, which never made it to the stores. It's looking unlikely that OnLive (www. onlive.com), Gaikai and Microsoft's own streaming project will end up as vapourware though, despite the obvious concerns about input lag: the delay that occurs every time you press a key. The signal has to travel hundreds of miles before a character even moves.

Proponents say that even twitch gaming FPS games are possible but we're a little more sceptical. There's another reason that at least one of these services will be properly launched soon, and that's vested interest by games publishers.

Because no content is stored on your machine, of course, it's impossible to pirate a streamed game, which is obviously an attractive proposition for them. In the immediate future, though, it is more likely to be a technology that runs like games such as Quake Live, which use a combination of some local processing power and some server-based cycles. That's certainly the route Microsoft is taking, and seems more achievable than relying on 'the cloud' at this stage.