Utomik is one of our favorite all you can eat play cloud game subscriptions. For well under $10 a month, you get immediate access to over 1,400 PC games, 260 of which can be played in the cloud on all your devices – no installation required. This week the Utomik team announced the rollout of new technology called “CloudCaster” that should give cloud gamers “an even smoother and more responsive gaming experience than ever before.”
If you follow this site, you’ll be aware that the service has added some great games over just the last week from Atari and Tate Multimedia. However, while new games were getting added, the Utomik team was also making some big under the hood changes!
CloudCaster
CloudCaster is a pretty catchy name, and the promise of “smoother and more responsive gaming” sounds great. However, the official Utomik blog post was pretty sparse on details about what actually changed under the hood.
It does promise “enhanced gaming performance on Utomik Cloud” and gives the following information:
With the help of this new technology we have managed to minimize input latency to make sure you have near-instantaneous response times. This means you can now have an even more engaging and captivating gaming experience through Utomik Cloud. And with our new smart algorithms, the gaming stream will be adjusted dynamically to the user’s connection to ensure optimal video quality and minimal buffering.
One of the major changes appears to be the ability to dynamically change the bitrate of the encoded stream to match changes to your internet connection. This is particularly important when on wifi and mobile network that can be less than perfectly stable at times.
The improvements to latency are of course also important to cloud gaming! The team says that with these improvements, the service is also able to bring new games to the cloud including Call of the Sea, Kao the Kangaroo and GRIP Combat Racing.
It’s actually the first time we heard that the first and third of those titles were on their way to Utomik cloud! Those will be great pickups for the service.
More Details
We followed up with Utomik to try to learn a little bit more about what changed under the hood. The team was able to tell us that the enhancements are primarily resulting from software improvements. These improvements were designed to minimize the impact of “cloud capturing” on the gameplay itself.
In particular, the “encoding and algorithms/control system have been reconstructed entirely from scratch.” Putting the pieces together, it appears that “CloudCaster” is a complete rework of the stream encoding process that has been optimized to increase performance (reduce any latency added by encoding), minimize impact to game performance itself and to support dynamic bitrates.
These are all very important characteristics of cloud gaming stream encoding system; so, it is great to see Utomik taking their tech to the next level. Some of what is described above seems particularly novel while other bits appear to be commonly implemented by others in the space already.
Improving the underlying streaming tech is one of the ways cloud gaming services can gain mainstream adoption. We also recently reported on GFN beginning to use the AV1 codec for stream encoding; so, Utomik is certainly not alone in updating their tech in this space.
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