It's the season for major hardware releases, with everything from new laptops and PCs to new graphics cards and processors.
And as we've seen with our recent reviews of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 and Intel Core i9-13900K, this next generation of gaming hardware is more powerful than we could have imagined before testing it. But there is one thing that is also undeniable: the best graphics cards are getting more and more expensive than the average consumer, even in the richest Western countries, can afford, let alone gamers in the global south, assuming that they are not simply ignored by major product launches. entirely.
In many ways, this is at the heart of the disappointment over the end of Google Stadia. For all its flaws, it allowed gamers who didn't have the best gaming PCs to play games like Cyberpunk 2077 and experience those games with the lucky few who managed to get their hands on one of the best cheap graphics cards of the past. some years.
With Stadia shutting down, one could conclude that cloud gaming has failed, but I think that would be a huge mistake. The success of cloud gaming has always been tied to the speed of a user's internet connection, and despite a frustrating delay, the rollout of 5G networks around the world will finally put gaming services on the map. cloud in a position to succeed.
Cloud gaming is about to become 5G's "killer app"
Each generation of cellular telecommunication network had a unique application or service that defined it, the so-called "killer application". First-generation mobile technology brought wireless voice communications to the masses, while second-generation networks of the late 1990s and early 2000s allowed us to send text messages. 3G networks fueled the social media revolution on smartphones, and 4G LTE networks enabled streaming media like Spotify and Netflix.
It remains to be seen what the killer app of 5G will be, but David Cook is all about cloud gaming. Cook is the CEO of Radian Arc (opens in a new tab), a cloud gaming infrastructure company that has partnered with AMD to lay the groundwork for making cloud gaming a practical reality around the world.
“We were going to these meetings with the telcos, and they had all made big investments in 5G,” Cook told me earlier this year, “and there were some really cool applications that they were talking about, like drones and self-driving cars. He was always smiling and saying, "Yeah, I don't see a lot of that out the window, although I think it's a major use case, but what we know is that everyone plays."
When cloud gaming services like PlayStation Now, Google Stadia, and Nvidia GeForce Now first launched several years ago, even the best home internet services with wired fiber-optic connections struggled to deliver the kind of experience that players expected. Network bottlenecks often caused game lag or a sudden drop in graphics quality, really crippling cloud gaming adoption. However, with 5G there is a much greater opportunity to take advantage of significantly less congested 5G frequencies and deliver a smoother gaming experience without sacrificing quality.
Improving access to AAA games around the world
There are literally billions of gamers in the world and the market will continue to grow for years to come. But not all gamers have the same opportunity to enjoy the best PC games as many of us take for granted. Many, if not most, gamers don't even have a PC or console to play games on, instead relying on their phones or dedicated gaming cafes where they can play modern AAA titles using better hardware than they could buy themselves.
This is reflected in the economics of video games themselves. Mobile games are by far 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 these games generate. But players all over the world don't play Candy Crush instead of Elden. Ring because they don't care about the deeper gaming experience a modern PC or console game can provide, it's really about access.
"In territories like Latin America, Southeast Asia, India and Africa, the use case is more mobile, but gamers would like to be able to access better graphics and gameplay on their mobile devices," Cook said. "And the same with game publishers, game publishers would like to have more creativity and more features in these games and be able to deliver them to a wider 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 the closest server he could get to...was in South Africa.
David Cook, CEO of Radian ArcAnd while the physical interface a gamer might use to play the game can range from a smartphone to a Chromebook or even an older gaming PC, the key is to offload the hard work of rendering a game somewhere else and simply output video to over a network instead of an HDMI or DisplayPort cable.
Streaming visual output from a server to a client device is something we've done for decades, but gaming has been held back by the low real-time input latency required to play a modern video game. 5G networks are the first telecommunications infrastructure capable of providing this type of network responsiveness and stability; just look at remote surgeries performed in recent years using 5G networks to see it.
The only thing missing is the physical servers to run the game you're playing remotely, but it won't be for long. Companies like Radian Arc are already moving GPU servers to telecommunications network hubs to lay the groundwork for a proliferation of cloud gaming services.
“What we're seeing is a huge difference in market needs in North America, Australia or Western Europe compared to what we're seeing in places like Southeast Asia. Recently, one of our partners in Central Africa was literally on the phone and the closest server he could get to, even for traditional mobile games, was in South Africa,” Cook said. "So by integrating these GPU servers into some of these little telecoms, we're suddenly opening up a whole new world of functionality, both for consumers and for publishers."
Move players to the cloud
With the demise of Google Stadia and the rather lukewarm adoption of cloud gaming services in recent years, convincing gamers to switch to cloud gaming is a real challenge. Many will arrive biased, preferring physical hardware they can hold, while others might have tried it in the past and be put off by the experience.
However, Cook believes there is a secret weapon in the cloud gaming arsenal: the telecom providers themselves.
"When we go into a telco," Cook said, "we go in and say we want to put POP (point of presence) inside their network so we can all get the benefits of low latency, scale, cost benefits etc., but we also sat down with them and put together a marketing plan to say, this is how you market these games to this user base, so team up with them on that.Part of that marketing plan includes a controller, and that controller can be very different So what you're going to see in a lot of these markets is an Android set-top box for the living room and we can run an app on this set-top box and create a game-like experience on a console.
"One thing that telecom is really good at is selling these kinds of packages," Cook said, "selling hardware plus a data plan, or hardware plus a data plan plus a game, which is a proposition of truly unique value".
This localized, distributed telecommunications network approach could be an unexpected asset for cloud gaming. Google Stadia was a sole cloud gaming provider, so its demise was a huge blow to the cloud gaming industry. If Google or Nvidia are the only providers of cloud gaming services, cloud gaming will still be held back by the level of commitment to the project from a small group of companies.
By overhauling the telecommunications most people already use, you may not get the kind of extended catalog that Google could take advantage of, but you will end up with more cloud gaming providers overall, which should accelerate adoption.
"So if you have the GPU inside the telecom network, you can really take advantage of the scale. The new AMD GPUs can run twelve games per GPU. Less power per user. All of these things should really make cloud gaming a Potentially lethal application for 5G deployment.