  Cloud gaming is a new class of services that promises to revolutionize the
videogame market. It allows the user to play a videogame with basic equipment
while using a remote server for the actual execution. The multimedia content is
streamed through the network from the server to the user. This service requires
low latency and a large bandwidth to work properly with low response time and
high-definition video. Three of the leading tech companies, (Google, Sony and
NVIDIA) entered this market with their own products, and others, like Microsoft
and Amazon, are planning to launch their own platforms in the near future.
However, these companies released so far little information about their cloud
gaming operation and how they utilize the network. In this work, we study these
new cloud gaming services from the network point of view. We collect more than
200 packet traces under different application settings and network conditions
for 3 cloud gaming services, namely Stadia from Google, GeForce Now from NVIDIA
and PS Now from Sony. We analyze the employed protocols and the workload they
impose on the network. We find that GeForce Now and Stadia use the RTP protocol
to stream the multimedia content, with the latter relying on the standard
WebRTC APIs. They result in bandwidth-hungry and consume up to 45 Mbit/s,
depending on the network and video quality. PS Now instead uses only
undocumented protocols and never exceeds 13 Mbit/s.
