Cloud gaming was arguably not a concept that the public consciousness was aware of until Google Stadia stepped onto the scene. Suddenly, the idea of game streaming, cloud gaming or gaming on demand was on everyone’s mind. Although many mocked, and continue to mock, Stadia in the face of its difficulties and eventual shuttering, many other companies have opened cloud gaming divisions and gone on to substantial success. Xbox Game Pass, GeForce Now, Playstation Now and more, whatever you may think of the business model, the proposed advantages are hard to deny.
We looked into Newzoo’s latest report on the development of cloud gaming, and their insights for the future and the present, to get an overview of what we can learn about the state of this technology.
Head in the Clouds
As Newzoo states in their methodology and overview, one of the points that need to be reiterated is the key obstacle and biggest signifiers of an untapped player base is growing urbanisation and increasing data speeds. Without a decent connection, cloud gaming is virtually unplayable due to inherent issues with latency and synchronisation with a player’s controller inputs. They note that in total there are 32m cloud gamers by their estimates, with a serviceable, obtainable market of over 220m, representing the massive potential for growth in this type of service.
As they also note in “Key Developments”, the shuttering of Stadia remains big news for cloud gaming. As a pioneer it perhaps never achieved the heights it was capable of before being closed down. As Newzoo cites from their earlier March 2021 Cloud Gaming Report, “Google’s stumbles were primarily strategic ones and do not indicate that [cloud gaming] itself was faulty or was not well received by consumers.” Perhaps the fact that even the potential loss of overall players in cloud gaming is considered negligible by Newzoo is an indictment of the strategic missteps by Stadia.
We also see the appearance of Well-Link, the graphics-as-a-service provider we previously reported on, being interviewed on their work with Genshin Impact developer miHoYo. They discussed how they aimed to create a visually appealing, 1080p and 60 fps game experience with only a 10mbps bandwidth. This made the game, according to them, run even better on mobile than it did natively on high-end phones. A key takeaway there is how cloud gaming specifically can help with mobile games that are more graphically intensive.
Newzoo also offers a breakdown of the terminology around cloud gaming, so if you’ve ever wanted to know something but have been too afraid to ask what ‘cross-save’ or ‘cross-play’ are, then it’s well worth looking into. Newzoo also breaks down their ‘gaming personas’ to provide more insight into what sorts of people utilise cloud-gaming and their attitudes towards it.
Newzoo’s complete, paid version of this report covers even more info that we were not privy to. So if you want to read more, take a look at the original report here.
