Where is John? That’s the question placing over you as your group of armored squaddies methodically searches this overseas vessel for a comrade—and conflict hero—seemingly long gone rogue. It’s the 12 months 2558; humans are under attack by alien forces. The final thing you want right now is to have one in every one of your educated killers switch sides. You carefully step through the cramped corridors of the spaceship. However, ‘it’s darkish—distressingly so—, for an eerie blue light emanating from the ship’s walls. Your teammates might be in an entire silhouette, but the cobalt flickers on their weapons. You see shadows you don’t understand and quietly increase your finger toward your rifle’s cause—a sapphire streak ripples throughout its scope.

But they pay attention to you! The extraterrestrial beings’ guns burst with a kaleidoscope of lethal laser fireplaces that ricochet off the ship’s panels. You avoid getting a clean shot—if only you had a bit more room—but it’s too past due. Before you can backfire, a well-placed beam sends you to a rainbow-colored grave.
Game over. (Start once more?)

For nearly years, scenes like this one have opened up in dwelling rooms across the globe, thanks to Microsoft’s long-going for-walks online game franchise Halo, playable on the tech giant’s ever-popular Xbox home console. But the wealthy gameplay described above, which Fortune witnessed all through a recent go to the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., wished no brawny patron electronics to run with the velocity and beauty anticipated of a present-day first-character shooter, as such computationally-intensive video games are known. In this example, it required the best phone paired with a traditional Xbox controller.

Have smartphones come to be that desirable? Not pretty. But their notable proliferation—more than five billion people across the globe own cellular phones, in line with 2019 Pew estimates, and more than half of these gadgets are Internet-connected smartphones—has dramatically modified the way media is consumed. Music, portable since the days of Sony’s Walkman, is now streamed on the Cross. Oncee limited to large fixed displays, movies, and TV  are introduced to people’s pockets over the air.

Now, video games are ready to take their turn. If you’re not a gamer, you can no longer understand simply how enormous a transformation streaming guarantees to be. Today’s video game enterprise is a behemoth expected to generate $152 billion worldwide in 12 months, according to marketplace researcher Newzoo. That’s 57% more than the $ ninety-seven billion generated through the worldwide theatrical and home-movie market remaining 12 months, and in eight instances, the $19.1 billion generated using the global recorded music market. Like the one industries, online game makers are grappling with the boundless potential of streaming, and the race is on to peer who gets it proper first.

The secret sauce powering all of this media streaming is a generic concept that each government is now familiar with: cloud computing. The off-loading of “compute” to staggeringly massive server farms in far-flung places, related to our non-public gadgets with continual Internet connections, offers each folk on-call access to supercomputer-degree variety-crunching energy. This capability—plus forecasts that the global gaming industry may want to attain $196 billion in annual sales by way of 2022, per Newzoo—is why Microsoft, a gaming enterprise stalwart that still occurs to be a leading provider of cloud services, is so intrigued by using so-called cloud gaming.

It’s additionally why Halo Five on a Samsung Galaxy cellphone can nevertheless manage such superb visual pyrotechnics. The demonstration in Redmond is genuinely strolling at the “racks” in a Microsoft records center in Quincy, Wash., 160 miles away. The Quincy facility is considered one of thirteen the enterprise plans to apply to host its formidable Project Xcloud game-streaming carrier while it begins a public trial this autumn.