Sega Wants To Upgrade Arcades Into Data Centers

Arcade games may be dying in most of the world, but for Japan and other Asian countries they are still a popular way to play against live opponents. Sega owns and operates over 200 arcades, and is seeking a new way of reducing lag to their cloud servers: turn the arcade machine into the very data center it connects to.

 

Sega’s new “Fog Gaming” initiative is researching methods of turning untapped CPUs and GPUs within arcade cabinets and converting them into cloud capable machines. Rather than having to connect to servers in far off locations, all of the online data would stream within milliseconds. This will potentially reduce latency in genres where frame perfect timing is key to winning, such as fighting games, shooters, and driving games.

Sega also believes that this will be very cost effective, as utilizing existing owned hardware will be much cheaper than stores purchasing separate data servers and maintaining them on premise. If testing proves successful, Sega has plans to make all of their future arcade machines Fog Gaming compatible.

In the future, Sega also hopes to sell this technology to other companies. Outside of gameplay purposes, arcades could function as any other server farm. This may allow brick and mortar arcades to have a myriad of computing side businesses.
 

Kurtis Seid, NoobFeed
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