I had an idea, but I'm not really sure if it's possible, or what to look into. Essentially, my idea was to have players download a very small sized program that collects player input. Then, this input is sent to a massive server, processed, and the visuals are sent back to the player's computer, and displayed through the original small program. I had this idea when thinking of ways to get around update times. Many games these days are 50-70GB in size, and you'll find yourself downloading 10GB updates every now and then. What if instead of having player/client-side computers download an update, that update was downloaded to a massive server, and all content is simply streamed to the player? Is this possible?

There are already companies working on this. One was called OnLive but they closed a while back. But there are others working on streaming game play to players instead of having them install the game locally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_gaming

The downsides are that you end up using more data over the long term, certain fast-paced games don't work very well because it takes time to transmit the input and receive the results, image and audio quality can deteriorate when the connection is bad, and also that it requires a lot of network infrastructure for the "massive server" (most likely thousands of separate servers).

How big does the game need to be? I take it you're not talking about a web/browser game?

12 hours ago, Kylotan said:

There are already companies working on this. One was called OnLive but they closed a while back. But there are others working on streaming game play to players instead of having them install the game locally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_gaming

The downsides are that you end up using more data over the long term, certain fast-paced games don't work very well because it takes time to transmit the input and receive the results, image and audio quality can deteriorate when the connection is bad, and also that it requires a lot of network infrastructure for the "massive server" (most likely thousands of separate servers).

Thank you for the help, I’ll have to look into cloud gaming and companies like OnLive.

57 minutes ago, masskonfuzion said:

How big does the game need to be? I take it you're not talking about a web/browser game?

Currently, I don’t have an exact size worked out. However, I’m looking to see if it would be possible to create a game that could expand from, say, 20GB, to 50GB, and maybe even larger over time, without requiring the player to take the time to download the extra content. 

https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-cloud-gaming-service-on-ec2.html

Doing all the calculation to generate video streams in realtime "upstream" in the server farm won't scale well, and the problem of laggy response to user actions will be insurmountable.

Implementing a system where content packages are downloaded when needed is probably more realistic, but far from trivial. Unity has support for it with assetbundles, and Blizzard games use techniques like that a lot.

I won't touch any of that with a 10 foot pole myself if I can help it because it adds a serious layer of complexity that I can't afford to deal with:)

 

I could see this happening for a window based game where not much is happening and just sending an image when something changed. But to send quality full HD on 30 FPS you need to send at least half an MB per second. This means after a couple of hours you already streamed 10GB. Now imagine 120FPS 4K, that is probably a couple dozen MB each second. Apart from that, the server bandwidth needs to be huge and the server needs to calculate and render everything for each client so you better have a insane battery of CPU and GPU ready. It is just not scalable and a waste of the clients hardware. For 99.9% of the games a server should just handle the bare minimum and let the clients do the dirty work. I understand that some games can eat your data bundle, just update when you are on wifi I suppose, plenty of public wifi available nowadays if you don't live in the middle of absolute nowhere.

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I could see this happening for a window based game where not much is happening and just sending an image when something changed. But to send quality full HD on 30 FPS you need to send at least half an MB per second.

These services already exist and have been around for more than five years.

Before you speculate too much, I suggest reading up on how they work, what they do, and how well/not-well they work.

Examples include:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaikai

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cloud-gaming.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive

https://parsecgaming.com/cloud-gaming

https://www.paperspace.com/gaming

and so on, and so forth.

There's also a number of "remote gaming" services that just connect your device to your own gaming PC, including Steam Streaming, and Xbox One Remote Play.