Hybrid-gaming (fusion of local and cloud gaming) is the best of both worlds scenario for the future of ‘hardcore’ gaming… Pixel streaming (which is what Stadia essentially is) cannot match the flexibility and robustness of hybrid gaming where core elements maintain/possess locality and it is only the optional components that must be offloaded to the cloud that are handed over for remote computing etc…
For example Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 covers photogammetry of basically the entire world, and that is nearly 2petabytes of information/data… there is no feasible way for a game such as Flight Simulator to ship as a 2pb install, since obviously no one has a harddrive that size for PC gaming… so the obvious solution is to stream that mapping information from the cloud over to the end-users machine where it is then rendered in the game relying on the user’s own hardware… however if the user has slow or no internet connection, it reverts to a base install comparable to the last version of Flight Simulator and the user can still play the game just not with the high level of terrain and mapping detail that would otherwise be aviable with a high speed connection to the internet.
Another application of this sort of hybrid computing that I foresee in the future is augmented ray-tracing… many people can already play in 4k with current gpu without ‘real time ray tracing’ turned on but add on the “RTX” effects and it becomes exceedingly burdensome… one way to solve this is to offload the ray tracing to the cloud but render everything else locally… kinda like a dynamic light-map but in real time… (instead of prebaked at game compile time etc) where the “light-map” is being computed in the cloud backend with beefy physical hardware and then the mathemtical values are merely transported over via the network/internet in real-time and layered on top to create the “RTX” layer… and then fused together as one composite image… so in essence even if the internet breaks down or slow speeds, the user is still playing localluy but just downgraded to a non-RTX experience rather than to have game experience cutoff entirely…
Back to the Flight Simulator 2020 example, most of the aircraft in flight simulator already have values pre-determined such as drag coefficent, etc etc… but during flight it is assumed the aircraft is never bent out of shape… in instances where a wing falls off the modeling becomes inaccurate but it is too computationally expensive for local compute resources to calculate CFD (Computational fluid dynamics) on the fly… whereas a datacenter can easily get these dynamic values in realtime… so say 99% of the time the flight simulator uses static information based upon precomputed models that aren’t changing and don’t change, but in extreme edge cases such as flight emergencies or damage to aircraft structural integrity then in order to preserve that level of fidelity an extra boost is needed in terms of recalculating the flight dynamics values in more or less real-time and this is something that could greatly benefit by offloading or loadshedding that component to the cloud /supercomputer as part of the hybrid gaming approach… again in this instance the game will still work without it, just that the flight model becomes increasingly inaccurate in edge cases that would greatly benefit from access to something much more powerful on the backend in order to deliver these sort of fidelity of simulation in a just-in-time manner…
Imagine a physics based sandbox games like Besiege or TABS, where after a certain scale/size it becomes no longer GPU limited but actually physics calculations become the bottleneck… or a game like Total War with thousands of units in the map at one time… the same or similiar applies to N-body calculations for the likes of UniverseSim etc in all of these instances either you can reduce the steps/compexity (thus suffer inaccuracy) or slow down the time (play it at much less than 100% rate) or a combination thereof, but you cannot really play back at ‘real time’ speed and still hope to get max realism… in cases like this it would be useful to use cloud computing to offload some of the most intensive calculations but the game itself still resides locally and all the graphics rendering is done locally, its just that the math intensive part of doing all the interactions/physics get taken care of by a remote data center and the values are transferred back to the user’s machine to be rendered by the engine…
Everyone is talking about CyberPunk 2077… one of the selling points of this game is the density of the city and the vertical scaling and attempts at being one of the best open world sandbox environments that like GTA and WatchDogs etc makes it feel like a real city come to live… One of the missing components of these open world sandbox city type of games is that there isn’t object permanence and the NPC’s don’t live unique lives… much in the same way FS2020 leverages a bing maps in the cloud that individual gamers/flight simmers draw upon since no one could cram all of that into one gaming box, the only way to bring a city realistically “to life” is if it was simulated by a supercomputer in a massive datacenter with hundreds of thousands of unique NPC going about their way in daily life, not just statistical models or cars that are spawned within the user’s visible radius just to disappear again once its outside of immediate perception etc… basically a city that is actually simulated from the grounds up each npc, every car, etc etc… with lives and history of their own that exists regardless of whether or not the game is being played… a centralized online cloud permanence that is always being simulated in a massive supercomputer inside a datacenter that individual gamers (even in single player mode) can stream that information and draw upon that data so that their own individual games of the cities truly come to life…
Another analogy take Siri, Cortona, OkGoogle for example… these virtual assistants are orders of magnitude more elaborate and useful than the simple “verbot” script based canned responses of the earlier generation in late 1990s… Sure they are far from being able to pass the Turing test or true AGI by any means, but they leverage deep learning, machine learning, and data available on the entire Internet… something that could never be replicated or duplicated in some sort of talking bot as a standalone offline application on a single computer sytems.
Likewise in the future perhaps in open world city games we will be able to talk with any NPC character using voice (without text or having to click amongst choices etc) and that will require natural language processing, AI to understand context, and access to vast array of information (just like Siri, Cortana, OkGoogle leverages etc) to make it smart and believable… the only way any such open world city sim game can achieve this with NPC that seems and act lifelike and with ability to “talk” naturally with us and carry on contextual conversation is if these characters were hosted in the cloud, online datacenter that individual games through their game session can access rather than trying to cram all of this locally on a single (each individual) gaming system which is basically impossible… these are the things that game developers should be thinking about and these are the things that a hybrid gaming would be most positioned to take advantage of…
Instead the best we have now is the likes of Cyberpunk coming on Google Stadia which is basically just running the game on Google’s server and with latency and bottlenecks at capped at 1080p unless you have fiber connection and then its barely goes up to 4k… doesn’t really do anything that you couldn’t do yourself locally with good decent hardware…
Hybrid gaming needs to offer things that locally gaming itself cannot offer, such as the bing maps of the world for flight simulator or my idea of a superrealistic always-on simulated persistent city of NPCs, cars, events, happening inside of a supercomputer/datacenter that is always running and then individual games can reference that to draw upon it to make their own single player cities imported with a realism that couldn’t be calculated by any one gaming machine alone (no matter how powerful) and would be way more realistic than the pityful strategies that current open world city games use to give the illusion of a living city… instead all we have in the Cyberpunk Stadia arrangement is a subpar experience that could never compare to local gaming on top hardware and none of the special functionalities that only hybrid gaming can bring that cannot be duplicated in local mode alone…