Electronic Arts Patents Instant Game Launch Technology
Electronic Arts is working on a new technology to allow games to run instantly without having to download them first. It wants to use data streaming for this purpose.
It seems that an interesting idea appeared in the minds of developers from Electronic Arts - to reduce the waiting time for downloading games, especially the new ones, the weight of which on the disk reaches tens or even more than a hundred gigabytes. The company wants to use streaming technology, so that the players can start playing before the titles appear on their disks, and download the game in the background.
Request for exclusivity for such technology was submitted by EA to the U.S. patent office and was approved on February 16, this year. This is quite an interesting idea and certainly (of course, if the project would end successfully) would warm the hearts of impatient players, who could lose interest in the title during the download.
EA's patent in detail
Everything is supposed to work in the following way: a user who has never before installed a game on their drive, when trying to run it will notify the external server, and it will stream the game to their device. If the client's connection is good enough, the title will start downloading in the background. Once all the files are on the disk, the server will seamlessly hand over control of the game from the cloud to the local device. All this is supposed to enable us to run a game immediately without having to wait a long time for downloading and installation.
It seems that such technology seems like a dream. However, there may be some problems that will effectively deter players from using such an option. Streaming alone needs a good broadband, so that the game itself does not look like a moving bunch of pixels. If we add to that downloading a lot of files in the background, it may turn out that streaming does not remain without effect on the gameplay. Another potential problem is the availability of such a good internet connection, without it some countries will be deprived of the chance to use this service.
It should also be remembered that this is just a project that may never appear on the market for various reasons. But the idea is so interesting that we would love to see it in action, and maybe even use it regularly.