Game streaming’s latency problems will be over in a few years, CEO says

Was OnLive just way ahead of its time?

Since the hyped-up launch and dramatic fall of OnLive, there has been significant debate over when the idea of streaming games from remote servers will move from niche services like PlayStation Now and Nvidia’s GeForce Now to a market-moving mainstream force.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick weighed in on that debate recently, saying he thinks a large-scale market for streaming games could “happen in one to three years.”

Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia conference last week, Zelnick said the rise of streaming gaming was an inevitability that was just waiting on the technology to power it at scale. While Zelnick acknowledged that the streaming game servers “have to be pretty close to where the consumer is” to address latency issues, he said there are a few large-scale companies “that have hyperscale data centers all around the world,” and that infrastructure will be able to address that last remaining hurdle in a few years time.