Well, they finally did it, after years of talking about it, EA has officially unveiled its own game streaming platform called Project Atlas. Electronic Arts strongly believes that they're about to change the way we play our games forever.
Project Atlas is a platform designed from the core to harness the massive power of cloud gaming and artificial intelligence. It's some of the most transformative technologies bundled into one "game engine + services" platform. Over 1000 EA employees have been working on the project with a dozen studios all over the world. The game engine is the core of the platform in charge of fundamentals of the game like rendering, animation, audio and physics. Services, on the other hand, will take care of player identity, matchmaking and communications.
In a Medium post, chief technology officer at EA, Ken Moss called Project Atlas the combination of the power of Frostbite engine, machine learning and artificial intelligence to empower game developers to create and manage connected game experiences.
Describing the term, Moss said that he sees cloud network as one big data and storage management. "The word cloud is a global network of servers - which in the context of games are used to store and manage data, as well as run the games and related game services," Moss said and added that "it is a connected, distributed system that helps deliver services to a worldwide gaming population."
Xbox
With Project Atlas, the games will reside on EA's servers rather than on player's PC. The Players will only need a tiny client which will access EA's servers where the games are running.
If you're wondering about the effect of streaming services in multiplayer games, Moss says there is nothing to worry about and promises a silky smooth gaming experience.
"We’ve been developing software that utilizes the cloud to remotely process and stream blockbuster, multiplayer HD games with the lowest possible latency," Moss said, adding that they're looking to "unlock even more possibilities for dynamic social and cross-platform play."
EA joins Microsoft and Google, who are working on their own video game streaming services. Google's Project Stream requires internet speed of 25 megabits per second and Microsoft is currently on an internal testing phase with its own xCloud service.
You can read the full Project Atlas post
