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Cloud computing has been a revolutionary force in changing the way organizations deploy web applications and services. However, many of cloud computing's core design tenets, such as consolidating resources into a small number of datacenters and fine-grain partitioning of general purpose computing resources, conflict with an emerging class of multimedia applications that is highly latency sensitive and requires specialized hardware, such as graphic processing units (GPUs) and fast memory. In this paper, we look closely at one such application, namely, on-demand gaming (also known as cloud gaming), that has the potential to radically change the multi-billion dollar video game industry. We demonstrate through a large-scale measurement study that the current cloud computing infrastructure is unable to meet the strict latency requirements necessary for acceptable game play for many end-users, thus limiting …