At BE3 last night, Bethsoft took the wraps off Orion, a project that… well, it’s not Elder Scrolls VI, so I suspect most gamers just glazed right over it, but it couldn’t be more relevant right now with Google pushing Stadia streaming so hard. Orion, however, is not a service that will stream games to your house; it’s tech that reduces the overhead of streaming from a game optimization standpoint.
“Orion is a game- and platform-agnostic game streaming technology that will stream video games at lower latency and lower bandwidth, making streaming games accessible to more people, in more areas, at higher quality,” Bethsoft and id Software say in their follow-up blog. “In contrast to game streaming services that focus on hardware solutions to stream games, Orion is game engine-based technology that optimizes a game for the cloud. Integrated within the game engine itself, Orion can achieve dramatic latency reductions of up to 20% per frame and requires up to 40% less bandwidth. The Orion technology is complementary to the hardware technology in data centers built by other streaming providers, ensuring much better results when paired together.”
As the companies see it, games can “easily” integrate this tech with streaming in mind, and people who use services – like Stadia – will see better performance in integrated games while streaming while using up less of their precious bandwidth too. Given that data caps are one of the key reasons behind skepticism for modern streaming services, that could be a match made in gaming heaven.
According to Polygon, Bethsoft “wouldn’t comment on any developments or discussions regarding other notable partners” so far.
