It’s major PC release season, with everything from new laptops and PCs to new graphics cards and processors.
As we have seen in our recent work NVIDIA GeForceRTX 4090 And the Intel Core i9-13900 K Reviews, This new crop of gaming hardware is more powerful than we could have imagined before we got our hands on it and tested it. But one thing is also undeniable: The best graphics cards They are becoming increasingly more expensive than the average consumer in wealthier Western nations, not to mention the global South players – assuming they aren’t simply ignored by major product launches entirely.
In many ways, this is the crux of the disappointment at the end of Google Stadia. Despite all his flaws, he allowed priced players out of The best gaming PC To play games like Cyberpunk 2077, and experience these games along with the lucky few who managed to grab one of the Best Cheap Graphics Cards During the past two years.
With Stadia closed, one might conclude that cloud gaming itself has failed, but I think that would be a huge mistake. The success of cloud gaming has always been linked to the speed of a user’s internet connection, and despite the frustrating delays, the spread of 5G networks around the world will put cloud gaming services in a position to succeed.
Cloud gaming is poised to be a 5th generation ‘killer app’
Each generation of cellular networks had a single application or service that came to define it, the so-called “killer application”. First-generation mobile technology brought wireless voice communications to the masses, while second-generation networks in the late 1990s and early 2000s gave us SMS text messaging. 3G networks fueled the social media revolution on smartphone devices, and 4G LTE networks power streaming media like Spotify and Netflix.
It will remain to be seen what the killer 5G will be, but David Cook is all in the clouds. Cook is the CEO of Radian Arc (Opens in a new tab)a cloud gaming infrastructure company that is partnering with AMD to lay the foundation for making cloud gaming a reality around the world.
Cook told me earlier this year, “We’ve been sitting in these meetings with telecom operators, and they’ve all made huge investments in 5G, and there’s been some really interesting applications they’re going to talk about, like drones and autonomous apps. I was always smiling. And I say, “Yeah, I don’t see a lot of those out the window although I think it’s an important use case, but what we do know is that everyone is playing.”
When cloud gaming services like PlayStation Now, Google Stadia, and Nvidia GeForce Now were first launched several years ago, even The best home internet services With wired fiber optic connections, it struggled to deliver the kind of experience gamers had hoped for. Network bottlenecks often cause games to lag or graphics quality to suddenly drop, which has already caused cloud gaming adoption to stop. with 5G network However, there is a much greater chance of taking advantage of the less crowded 5G frequencies and providing a smoother gaming experience without sacrificing quality.
Improved access to AAA games globally
There are billions of players around the world, and the market will grow in the coming years. But not all gamers have the same opportunity to enjoy the best PC games in the way that many of us take for granted. Many, if not most, gamers don’t even have a computer or console to play on, and instead need to rely on their phones or dedicated gaming cafes where they can play modern AAA titles with better hardware than they can buy themselves.
This is reflected in the economics of video games themselves. Mobile gaming is the largest segment of the global video game market – it’s not even close – whether you’re talking about the number of players or the revenue that these games bring. But players all over the world don’t play Candy Crush on Elden Ring because they don’t care about the deeper gameplay experience that a modern PC or console game can provide, it’s really accessible.
“In regions like Latin America, Southeast Asia, India, and Africa, the use case is more portable, but gamers still love being able to access better graphics and gaming on their mobile devices,” Cook said. “Similarly with game publishers, game publishers like to have more creativity and more functionality in those games and be able to make that happen across a larger range of mobile devices.”
Laying the groundwork for the next cloud gaming revolution
Recently, one of our partners in Central Africa was literally on the phone, and it was the closest server they could get to…in South Africa
And while the physical interface a player might use to play could be anything from a smartphone to a Chromebook or even an old gaming computer, the key is to offload the actual hard work of rendering a game elsewhere and simply output the video to a network instead of an HDMI or DisplayPort cable .
Transferring the visual output of the server to the client machine is something we’ve been doing for decades, but play has been put off by the real time, low input latency required to play a modern video game. 5G networks are the first telecom infrastructure that can provide this kind of responsiveness and network stability – all you have to do is look at the remote surgeries performed in recent years with 5G networks to find out.
All that’s missing now are the actual servers to run the game you’re playing remotely, but they won’t be missing for long. Already, companies like Radian Arc are moving GPU servers to telecom network centers to lay the groundwork for the proliferation of cloud gaming services.
“What we’re seeing is a huge difference in market needs in North America, Australia or Western Europe from what we’re seeing in places like Southeast Asia. Recently, one of our partners in Central Africa was literally on the phone, and it was the closest server they could get to, even for gaming. traditional portable, in South Africa,” Cook said. “So when you insert these GPU servers inside some of these little connections, we suddenly open up a new world of functionality, on both sides with consumers and publishers.”
Bring players to the cloud
With the demise of Google Stadia and the somewhat lukewarm adoption of cloud gaming services in the past few years, convincing gamers to move to cloud gaming has become a real challenge. Many will come with prejudice, preferring physical devices they can carry, while others may have tried it in the past and been put off by the experience.
Cook believes there is a secret weapon in the cloud gaming arsenal: the communications providers themselves.
“When we walk into a carrier, we go in and say we want to put a POP (Point of Presence) protocol inside your network so we can all take advantage of the low latency, bandwidth, cost benefits, etc…, but we also sit with them and come up with,” Cook said. Already into a marketing plan to say, here’s how to market these games to this user base – kind of collaborating with them on that. Part of that marketing plan includes a console, and the console can be completely different. So, what you’ll see in a lot of these markets is Android set-top box for the living room and we can run an app on this set-top box and create a similar experience similar to a game console.
“One of the things that Telecom is really good at is selling these kinds of packages, selling hardware plus data plan, or hardware plus data plan, plus game plan, which is a really unique value proposition,” Cook said.
This distributed LAN approach may be an unexpected asset for cloud gaming. Google Stadia was a single cloud gaming provider, so its demise was a huge blow to the cloud gaming industry. If Google or Nvidia are the only cloud gaming service providers, then cloud gaming will always stop due to the level of commitment to the project that a small handful of companies have.
By browsing through the connections most people already use, you might not get the kind of comprehensive catalog that Google can take advantage of, but you end up with more cloud game providers overall, which helps speed its adoption.
“If you have a GPU inside the network, you can really take advantage of the size. The new AMD GPUs can run twelve games per GPU. They are very power efficient, about 30% less power on a per-user basis. All of these things should Cloud gaming makes a potentially deadly 5G launch app.”