History of Video Game Distribution
Michael Mattioli
Abstract
Video games were originally distributed through fixed-function appliances or gaming consoles. As technology improved, various forms of physical media were used to distribute games, such as cartridges and discs. While this provided versatility, it also carried physical design considerations and complexities surrounding backward-compatibility. Today, digital distribution is growing rapidly and beginning to overtake physical media. Cloud gaming is disrupting distribution even further by eliminating local storage, compute, and rendering and shifting all of those tasks to cloud compute resources.
Topics & Concepts
Computer scienceCloud computingRendering (computer graphics)MultimediaComputer graphics (images)Video gameOperating systemCloud Computing and Remote Desktop TechnologiesAdvanced Data Storage TechnologiesComputer Graphics and Visualization Techniques