Get Sparked

Get Sparked

The Cloud is the only way to solve the physical problem, but that too brings problems

Games are getting bigger in size, and not only the size of the game worlds. The actual size of a game install is getting unwieldy for a physical disc, even for UHD discs that can pack 100GB of data. In the last several years there have been numerous articles in the game press on the huge install size of modern games. PC Gamer ran an article that Call of Duty Warzone maps are running into 80GB. Optimizations and compressions can help with lazy and bloated coding, but they only go so far. Modern Warfare season 6 was so big, coming in at 375GB of data with a base install size and a patch, that it could not even fit on an Xbox Series S console and took up half the space of a PS5. For a Call of Duty gamer who owns Xbox Series S, it no longer became a question of what to uninstall to make room for Modern Warfare, it became an issue of which external hard drive to buy.

Read More

Technology will converge video games and films into a singularity

The acquisition of Weta Digital, the special effects company co-founded by Peter Jackson by a video game engine company, Unity, should not be a surprise given what video games and mainstream Hollywood films and TV shows want to achieve. Their end goals follow a similar path, that is to tell compelling stories and to immerse the audience into another universe or another life. Many films today rely on computer generated visual effects, either to save money or to film what looks like the impossible, something that modern video games have achieved for some time now

Read More

Cloud gaming is being sold as the next stage of video game innovation, but consumers will have the last word

The Xbox Series S gets filled up pretty quickly. Pondering which game to delete in order to make space for a new one isn't a nice problem to have. Even on a relatively fast wireless broadband connection a typical game on Game Pass can take over an hour to download.

However, a cloud option on numerous games is becoming the norm on the Ultimate tier. Not only does this overcome the storage issue, but it is also a great option to try games like the demos of days gone by.

Game Pass Ultimate currently classifies its cloud service as "beta". Until the service is more polished with faster Internet speeds and stronger connection stability, multiplayer and Esports won't be the default experience on the cloud any time soon. So, although it seems the broad trend is towards cloud gaming there are numerous barriers that need to be addressed first.

Let's explore some of these issues.

Read More

Launching Sparkers Audiences

We are very excited to publicly announce the launch of our Audiences solution.

Sparkers Audiences is the result of the increasing need from the Video Games Industry to have a neutral benchmark providing quality data and analytics for live streaming.

Read More