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Speaking with Gamasutra, Yoichi Wada, formerly the president of Square Enix and now the president of their streaming venture Shinra Technologies, discussed the advantages of cloud technology for game development, and his personal vision for what sorts of games would benefit most from Shinra’s services.
As previously reported, one of Shinra’s goals is to make it easier for other developers to prototype their games by using their cloud servers, since those are able to provide a developer with more hardware resources than a regular PC or console would.
Wada says that he feels this is best-suited to games with “fully-realized game worlds”.
“In terms of what I’d like to see, well…game design in general is sort of a simulation of reality, even the ones that aren’t ‘simulation’ games,” he says. “So like, 25 or 30 years ago, when computer games initially appeared, the goal was to make images, graphics and animation that were closer and closer to reality. Networked gaming also brought games closer to reality, because it allowed people to see other players moving around.”
“However, one thing that still isn’t reality yet is a fully-realized game world—worlds players can explore like nature. So for example, when a tsunami or tidal wave happens [in a game], it just happens as a scripter writes it to—when the script triggers, the tidal wave happens, and not before. With Shinra, we can change that.”
Shinra recently announced that one of their first partnerships is with Camouflaj LLC, the developers of Republique, who are making use of the company’s cloud technology in some way. Further details have yet to be announced.
