Dori Exterman, CTO at Incredibuild, talks about how Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook are among the front runners in the race to cloud gaming. Game developers and game studios are watching closely to see which cloud giant they should back.
In a recent interviewOpens a new window , Microsoft Gaming Guru Phil Spencer offered a frank assessment of the future of gaming. Consoles will be around for hard-core gamers for years to come, Spencer believes, but the future is in subscription-based cloud gaming (Xbox Game Pass, Google Stadia, and others). Sony, Spencer says in another interviewOpens a new window , is not his primary competition.
In case you missed that: Microsoft, the maker of one of the world’s leading gaming consoles, does not consider the other gaming console behemoth, Sony as a competitor.
Game developers who’ve been reading the roadmap will not be surprised by this dramatic statement – and those that are surprised should see it as a wake-up call. The gaming market is clearly moving towards the cloud, with Microsoft Azure and the other big cloud providers racing to attract users to their Netflix-like, subscription-based game streaming platforms. The global cloud gaming market, valued at just $0.32 billion in 2019, is expected to growOpens a new window at a CAGR of nearly 50% through 2027, reaching a value of nearly $57 billionOpens a new window that year.
As Facebook and EA climb aboard the cloud gaming train, it’s clear why Microsoft discounts Sony as a cloud gaming competitor – especially considering that Sony missed the cloud gaming boat and chose Microsoft Azure as a cloud hosting platform. As the big three cloud providers leave cloud gaming competition in their collective dust, game developers wonder: what comes next?
Learn More: How Will Facebook’s Cloud Gaming Service Impact the Mobile Gaming Industry?
The Content Arms Race
The rapid shift towards cloud gaming has set off a global gaming content arms race. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are scrambling to attract more game developers to their respective cloud gaming development frameworks.Â
They’re so hungry for content that they’re going to great lengths to attract or acquire it. Microsoft is buying up game studios left and right, while Amazon offers gamers its Lumberyard game engine for free, as long as they post the games created solely to Luna. Stadia is tempting developers with streamlined game rollout across multiple platforms (with no need for a console) and flexible game streaming in either free or paid modes.
Interestingly, in the mad dash for gaming content, the technology powering cloud gaming is far from game developers’ top-of-mind. What is driving them? First off, the ease of use of gaming development framework toolboxes. How quickly and with how little effort can developers create or port their game content to their newly-chosen cloud platform? How seamless (or clunky) is the deployment experience?
Then there’s the issue of device accessibility. Games developed on Google Stadia, for example, can be played across compatible laptops, desktops, phones, tablets, and even SmartTVs. The other big players are each touting more or less comparable reaches. Yet savvy developers will closely scrutinize these promises – since their revenues will ultimately depend on how many users can access and play their games.
Finally, developers are watching the cloud gaming market to evaluate the success of platform marketing efforts, business models, and user-facing feature sets. How many paying players, and of what demographics are providers managing to onboard? How many games are already committed to the platform, and how is the uptake?
Learn More: Microsoft and Sony Collaborate to Transform Cloud-Based Solutions for AI & Gaming Experience
What Does It Mean for Developers?
As cloud gaming goes ballistic yet remains dominated by the only three providers with the massive infrastructure needed to facilitate it, the question game developers need to be asking is: are we going to be better off in the new cloud gaming reality?Â
Yet glass-half-empty game developers may see Amazon Lumberyard, Azure Gaming, and Google Stadia as gold-plated prisons – a whole new model of vendor lock-in for their content. Whether the content arms race will ultimately require game developers to choose one walled garden over another remains to be seen. Â
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