Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
2
Game Streaming:
A Planned Approach
Jeffrey Aydelotte and Amir Ebrahimi
2.1 Introduction
The game industry has gradually been shifting away from traditional boxed titles
and toward digital distribution. As of the writing of this chapter, Steam, a digital
distribution service operated by Valve, currently has over 1,100 titles available
through its service [Steam 10]. You might be hard pressed to find that many
titles on the shelves at your local retail store. It's no surprise that this shift is
occurring, as the numbers are there to back it up. In early 2010, Valve announced
that it saw a 205% increase in Steam's unit sales year over year [O'Connor 10].
On September 20th of that very same year, NPD announced that PC digital game
downloads surpassed retail unit sales by three million units [Riley 10]. Traditional
game retailers finally took notice too, as GameStop announced in late 2009 that
they would begin offering digital downloads, which they began testing in early
2010 [Paul 09].
With this shift towards digital distribution, it's not only important to provide a
digital download, but it has become increasingly important to provide instant play.
OnLive, a streaming game service, mitigates downloads by moving them to a central
location: its own servers [OnLive 10]. There are inherently dicult problems that
OnLive has had to solve and continues to address in order to provide that service
to gamers, namely, overall bandwidth and latency. For the rest of game developers
who are not building their games this way, streaming game assets to the client is
de rigueur
.
Some games on Steam are developed in such a way that players can begin
playing the game before it finishes downloading. However, streaming has yet to
get the same widespread attention in a game production as memory budgets, poly
counts, textures limits, and bone counts. If that were not the case, then more
of our games would be instantly playable. Just as with traditional categories for
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