What’s next for 5G? On Cloud Games
Up to now, cloud gaming is just a concept in the minds of the public, and THE concept of 5G stimulates cloud gaming to develop again.
Traditional games all have terminals, such as mobile games “King of Glory” and “Thrill battlefield”, which are mainly run on mobile phones. If the hardware equipment is not up to standard, it is easy to get stuck and heat up, or large single-player games, which have high requirements for computer host configuration. However, cloud game is to put the game on the cloud server to run, after loading the screen, it is transmitted to the user through the network. In the future, users only need a screen to load the game.
Does that mean that a thousand dollar machine and a low-powered PC can support a new gaming experience?
Does that mean no downloads, no patches, just click to start the game?
Does that mean multi-device compatibility, stop-and-play, cloud storage of game progress?
In fact, this is what everyone expects from the future of gaming, and what game developers and game operators are striving to do. Next, for 5G+ cloud games began to introduce when the situation of development.
The emergence of live video in the 4G era has driven the new development of the game industry — live video. In July 2019, Douyu Live was listed on NASDAQ in the United States, which was a flash of brilliance. The sports channel paid for live broadcast to meet the sports fans everywhere to watch the enthusiasm.
Keen gamers have spotted 5G opportunities, with Internet giants and gaming platform companies rolling out cloud gaming solutions.
Google’s Stadia cloud gaming platform promises that in the future, players won’t have to spend time downloading and installing games, but will simply click on them without waiting. It supports computer, laptop, mobile, tablet and TV platforms to play games through the web, and can switch devices at any time. (This is definitely not a simple web game.)
Tencent also launched its cloud gaming platform Tencent Instant Play and Start, following in Stadia’s footsteps.
At the same time, hardware giant NVIDIA has made a huge leap in cloud gaming performance and user expansion by creating GaaS concept — Game as a service and NVIDIA RTX server.
China Mobile’s Migu series products also participate in cloud games.
Domestic game market
In August 2019, ChinaJoy was still popular, but it has to be said that there was a lack of "highlights" in content. Blizzard, Ubisoft, Nintendo, and even Tencent, NetEase, Perfect and other domestic companies did not release any "grand" game end releases. However, one word was frequently mentioned during CJ, that is "cloud games". Tencent and Huawei have also brought content.
From the Paper
According to the Report of China’s game industry from January to June 2019, the actual sales revenue of China’s game market reached 114,002 billion yuan, up 8.6% year on year, among which mobile games accounted for 67.6% and client games accounted for 27.5%.
Figure: Game market
The development of cloud games requires high Internet speed and delay. For example, the Stadia platform mentioned above requires 25Mbps Internet speed and a delay less than 40ms. Tencent Start currently only provides cloud games in Guangzhou and Shanghai for pilot purposes.
Traditional mobile games need to be developed differently for different devices. For example, “King of Glory” differentiates ios and Android versions. If a game developer launches a full-platform game, it’s very expensive to develop.
From the perspective of enterprise layout, the game industry, from game platform enterprises to game publishers, manufacturers, hardware manufacturers, and even cloud service companies, are all involved in cloud services. Including Blizzard, EA, Nintendo, SONY, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, NetEase, NVIDIA, AMD, etc., in the early stage of development, the pattern of cloud gaming industry presents a state of “contention of a hundred schools of thought”.
Photo: Cloud services company
Key additions to cloud gaming market:
PC gamers
PC, especially for those who rely on AAA or high-quality games, costs are high; On the other hand, the popularity of high-quality games cannot be achieved due to the hardware barriers and usage limitations of such boutique games.
Internet cafe users
Internet cafes gradually “cloud”, Internet cafes do not need to purchase hosts, only need to purchase cloud servers. Shun net technology will transfer the Internet cafe private cloud to the public cloud after 2018.
Third, mobile game users
Although the domestic cloud game market is not yet in the ascendancy, but similar to 2013 when 4G era exploded the development of live video, 5G has lifted the network speed limit, the future games will slowly transition to cloud games.
Cloud Gaming
In the short term, cloud service companies and Internet giants have set up cloud game platforms. For game developers, there are many downstream platforms to choose from, and their bargaining power is expected to improve, breaking the control of game platforms on games and improving the quality of games.
According to Valve’s new announcement, the split between Steam and game developers used to be 3:7 (Steam takes a 30% cut). Now, if you make $10 million on Steam, the split will be 2.5:7.5. If revenue breaks $50 million, the margin drops another 2:8. — Steam Community
Game platforms have a huge impact on game developers.
In the long term, cloud gaming will eventually lead to a head platform, and the future gaming platform will become a gathering place for users and game developers (at which point developers and users will be harvested).
Cloud games will not replace mobile and terminal games in the future, just as 5G appears and 4G also exists, and the shortcomings of cloud games themselves are obvious:
Time delay
In terms of game performance, game latency is the most critical issue. There is a huge difference between 100ms and 200ms for players, and network latency combined with cloud computing can be much higher than standalone games.
Cloud cost/bandwidth cost
Games run in the cloud. The biggest problem for cloud service providers is not the cost of hardware such as CPU and server, but the redundancy of computing and the high allocation of resources. This, coupled with high bandwidth requirements, adds to the cost.
The future of cloud games can be expected, the existing problems can be slowly solved, Google and Tencent and other technology giants in the study of improving cloud computing capacity, hardware companies NVIDIA and AMD have proposed GPU virtualization, the emergence of 5G to reduce game delay, in the future development, cloud games will be able to shine.
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