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This week, Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Gaming cloud games. These are games that are processed in the cloud and then streamed to your computer. Cloud-based gaming has been widely viewed by the industry as a way to make games more accessible by making them playable on less powerful hardware. Facebook is also betting that one day they will be able to do the same with virtual reality.
Facebook Gaming’s new cloud streaming functionality does not currently support virtual reality, but it is clear that the company is considering it as part of its roadmap.
Not only is the company’s newly launched cloud streaming service run by Jason Rubin, a former Oculus executive, but there is talk of virtual reality cloud streaming at the highest levels of the company.
Responding to a question during Facebook’s most recent quarterly earnings call this week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the intersection of Facebook’s virtual reality and cloud gaming initiatives:
“In the long term, I think the virtual reality piece will obviously come into play. [our gaming strategy] too. Some of the cloud gaming stuff that we’re doing will of course be useful for VR as well, and we’re building a great community around that at Oculus. But [our cloud gaming service]… I think it will be a very exciting growth opportunity and the ability to deliver a lot of innovation in the years to come, ”said Zuckerberg.
Jason Rubin, the former Oculus executive who became ‘vice president of gaming’ at Facebook, introduced the company’s cloud gaming vision this week, opening a not-so-secret comment to Google’s cloud streaming service. , Stadia:
We believe in the long-term future of cloud gaming, but we’re not going to try to surprise you with the wonders of our data centers, compression algorithms, resolutions, or frames per second. Cloud game streaming for the masses still has a way to go, and it’s important to take advantage of both the benefits and reality of technology rather than trying to exaggerate where it will be in the future.
Rubin also touched on the reality of game streaming latency as it stands today, knowing that virtual reality and competitive games share exceptionally demanding latency requirements that the service is not yet ready to handle.
Starting with latency-tolerant games is critical for us in order to deliver a good experience to gamers on a variety of devices. For the purposes of our beta version, that includes genres like sports, cards, simulation, and strategy games. These are cloud gaming, after all, so even with latency-tolerant games, gamers may notice some glitches. […]
As our beta progresses and cloud technology expands, we will increase the variety of game genres. That expansion will begin in 2021 with the addition of action and adventure games.
Although Rubin doesn’t mention VR in Facebook’s cloud gaming ad, he explicitly addressed it in an interview with Protocol at the beginning of this year:
I can tell you this: no one is betting on cloud processing to make standalone virtual reality headsets viable. We have to make them viable with the chipsets they contain. But in the long term, the cloud solves many problems because it places processing power most efficiently where it is needed. Now there are latency issues, resolution issues, frame rate issues, tons of issues. And it’s much more awkward when there’s a frame right in front of your face than when you lose a frame on a TV across the room. So all these things need to be solved, but nobody thinks it is impossible. It is a hypothesis that can be made, but it will not come soon. It is very, very complicated.
Elsewhere, he added, “Ultimately, we’ll put those processors in a server farm somewhere and stream them to your headsets. And a lot of people will say, ‘My God, that’s a million years away.’ It is not a million. It is not five o’clock. It’s somewhere in between. “
So while we don’t expect the company to roll out VR game streaming in the foreseeable future, Facebook is actively positioning itself to offer the service later on.
As the only company in the consumer space with a full technology stack for virtual reality cloud streaming, the strategy looks solid. While other companies such as Amazon, Google, NVIDIA, and Microsoft are developing their own cloud game streaming services, none of them have a standalone VR headset and VR ecosystem important for a complete end-to-end solution. .
