Internet giants are rushing into the market. Is cloud gaming really that popular?

Text丨Please note that Xiong Chumo, author丨Right Ear

The cloud gaming industry is impacting the game market at a speed visible to our naked eyes.

Recently, Microsoft, one of the three giants in the gaming industry, has officially landed the Xbox Cloud Game B beta version to some markets, supporting PC platforms and Android/iOS mobile devices. Although many host users are dissatisfied with Microsoft's shifting focus to cross-platform businesses such as cloud gaming, they can no longer stop the popularity of cloud gaming.

The same is true in China. Needless to say, the leading players in the gaming industry like Tencent and NetEase are not willing to lag behind. Even Internet giants outside the circle such as Huawei, Alibaba, ByteDance are not willing to lag behind, expanding their own cloud gaming-related businesses. Xiaomi, an internet celebrity in the consumer electronics industry, joined hands with China Mobile at this CJ to launch a different approach to the cloud service alliance "Cubic Meter Plan" for developers.

As an independent market segment, can cloud games rise strongly like mobile games back then, breaking the current situation of three-legged squadrons of mobile, PC and consoles, and creating a new "fourth pole"?

The future situation is really imaginative.

Attacking cloud games are taking away the attention of big manufacturers

In July 2014, Sony, one of the three giants in the game, launched a test of its own cloud gaming service PS Now. At that time, OnLive, the founder of cloud gaming platforms, was entering its end, and the overseas market was not particularly optimistic about the performance of this game format in the future game market.

But this situation changed three years later, and the cloud gaming track, supported by the 5G concept, ushered in a booming period for major manufacturers' products.

In early 2017, Nvidia, a giant in the graphics card industry, launched the GeForce Now cloud gaming service, which can be used on Mac, PC, or NVIDIA shield hosts launched by NVIDIA.

In 2018, Nintendo, one of the three giants in the game, began to launch cloud game versions of well-known masterpieces such as "Resident Evil 7" in the Switch Game Mall.

In November 2019, Google also officially launched the cloud gaming service Stadia. One of the major selling points of this service is that it can achieve seamless switching between PC and mobile phones.

The last of the three giants of gaming, Microsoft, which has been deploying cloud gaming technology since 2018, finally launched the game streaming service Project xCloud (that is, the subsequent Xbox cloud game) in 2020.

For the big companies that have been surpassed by the younger generation in technology and business models, the biggest competitive advantage at present is their wealthy family background.It is enough to support them in developing areas that small and medium-sized enterprises cannot access, and cloud gaming is one of them.

Simple the game, cloud gaming, is to set up a cloud server, run the game instead of the player's local hardware, and then transmit the rendered game screen back to the player's local hardware. During the game, the player's local hardware only needs to play videos (game screens) and upload operation instructions, which greatly reduces the requirements for computing power and performance.

For players, even if there is not enough memory and high-end graphics cards and processors, "low-configuration" players can still play the masterpiece of 3A (high development cost, high development time, and high game quality) with extremely strict configuration requirements. This is the most intuitive reflection of the charm of cloud gaming.

3A game work "Red Dead Redemption 2"

Considering that players' pursuit of gaming experience is increasing, but the current situation of "splitting" in the hardware market is difficult to improve for a while, the future development space of cloud gaming is self-evident.

However, since operating a cloud gaming platform relies on expensive cloud servers, many small and medium-sized enterprises are discouraged by it, making cloud gaming exclusive to major manufacturers.

According to the data of the "2021 China Cloud Game Market Trend Report" jointly released by analysis agency Newzoo in March 2021, the global cloud gaming market size was US$630 million in 2020, while the global cloud gaming market size is expected to reach US$5.135 billion in 2023, with a growth rate exceeding 700%. Newzoo's confidence in making this bold prediction comes from various big manufacturers.

In overseas markets, the three major game giants of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have discovered the extraordinary potential of cloud gaming very early (for example, Nintendo solved the problem of insufficient NS performance through cloud gaming, Sony's PS Now cloud gaming service has become a new user growth point, etc.). They are full of confidence in the performance of cloud gaming in the next era. In addition to these big players in the gaming industry, other giant companies such as Google, Amazon, and Nvidia also regard cloud gaming as a breakthrough for their own pan-entertainment business and are busy building their own cloud gaming camp.

The development of cloud games in the domestic market is also in full swing.

In November 2019, NetEase Cloud Game BETA test was launched, and the selling point was the mobile version of various mobile games.

In December 2020, Tencent launched the TV version of START cloud gaming service. In February this year, START cloud gaming service was independently launched, which can support dozens of games such as "NBA2K2".

In November 2020, the YOWA cloud gaming platform, a subsidiary of live broadcast company Huya, ended a 4-month internal test of user and was officially launched. It will be officially connected to Huya Live in one month. The new live broadcast interactive functions will be played together and synchronized.Wire.

In addition to opening a cloud gaming platform, many companies have also focused on providing cloud services to companies that want to access cloud gaming. For example, Huawei and Alibaba have already announced their cooperation with them (of course, Tencent and NetEase are still leading the cooperation).

At this year's CJ exhibition, Xiaomi also joined hands with Migu Games, a subsidiary of China Mobile, to form a cloud service alliance for game developers.

Like Huya, Xiaomi is also a conspicuous category in the game track. However, Xiaomi actually had operations to penetrate into the gaming field for a long time.

In 2015, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun expressed his optimism about the profitability of the game business at the company meeting, saying that "the mobile game market in the future may be easy to reach 300 million to 400 million, or even 1 billion in a month." Xiaomi Interactive Entertainment, which is supported by Xiaomi, also released three products, "Xiaomi Gunfight", "Xiaomi Super God" and "Xiaomi Racing" after 2015. Unfortunately, due to lack of operational experience and other reasons, all three products have suffered factual failures.

Obviously, the successive failures of self-developed game products have also hurt Xiaomi's desire to continue making games. However, it doesn’t make money by making games by itself, but the game industry is still good overall. So Xiaomi continues to expand its business as a channel merchant, hoping to "overtake" from this road and gain a foothold in the game market. This time Xiaomi chose to be a cloud game service provider. On the contrary, it is to benefit the majority of developers who want to go to the cloud, but in fact it is to further promote its own channels and extend it to the field of cloud games, the "future game".

However, although cloud gaming has obvious advantages, it can also help major manufacturers to screen out a number of emerging competitors in the game industry, but in the final analysis, it is still a young market. And the so-called youth means immature and imperfection. Faced with a gold mine that has never been developed, the risks faced by the big companies that were the first to enter the market may be greater than the benefits.

The concept takes off, but the experience is still a flaw.

Cloud gaming is not a new concept, but it has been relatively "unpopular" before this wave of "coming back". The reason is very simple - because it cannot be played.

Although cloud games do not have much requirements for players' hardware equipment, they have very strict requirements on the network. If the network speed is not enough or the network is unstable, the picture will be blurred and delayed.

In the 4G era, one of the major reasons why cloud gaming has not become popular is that it is trapped in the Internet. For cloud games at that time, the path of action games and fiercely confronting game categories was basically equivalent to being labeled as "this road is blocked". Even for SLG or turn-based games that do not require feedback, few players can accept frequent lag game experiences.

In addition,Network issues put higher requirements on the computing capabilities of manufacturers involved in cloud gaming platforms on cloud servers. The cloud server with good configuration performance has also become the top priority for game manufacturers in this field. Unfortunately, not every manufacturer can afford the server that can render game images at perfect speed. Many early practitioners of cloud games eventually left the market because they could not afford the server costs, including OnLive, the founder of the cloud gaming platform.

Traveling through the current mainstream cloud gaming products, it is not difficult to find that players still complain about the lag of cloud gaming. In this regard, game anchor, part-time independent game developer Mai Kou, please note that although the speed of 5G network is indeed very fast, considering the stability of the network and the fact that there is still a lot of room for improvement in cloud gaming audio and video encoding technology, 5G network can only improve the lag of cloud gaming, and cannot be completely eradicated.

And, according to Maikou, since the current epidemic continues, the graphics card factories overseas have not resumed work and production on a large scale. Graphics cards are not only a pain in the hearts of players, but also make cloud game manufacturers helpless. The main graphics cards used by many cloud gaming platforms are still 1080ti. Although they can still cope with most of the 3A games on the market before, as more and more game products begin to add DLSS, ray tracing and other technologies, the graphics cards held by cloud gaming platforms are also difficult to support.If you continue, the slogan of cloud gaming "Low-configured 3A" will probably be greatly reduced.

"Although the concept 'takes off', the actual experience of cloud games is still a certain distance away from the promotional slogans put forward by manufacturers. The technology and ecological environment that this industry relies on still needs to be settled for a while. If these big manufacturers only regard cloud games as a new revenue growth point, it may be too early." Maikou said.

Without native games, it is difficult to make a breakthrough

"The era of cloud games has not yet arrived." In the view of Yucai, a mobile game manufacturer in Chengdu, the current enthusiasm of major manufacturers for cloud games is actually somewhat out of reality.

"As a new platform that distinguishes itself from the three major market segments (host, PC, and mobile), cloud games should have their own hardware devices and their own native games like VR games, and thus extend a broader imagination space." Yupin said.

However, at present, game manufacturers at home and abroad still have a shallow understanding of cloud games. Most manufacturers only regard cloud games as a solution to the hardware problems of the three major market segments, rather than independent game platforms.

As players are familiar with, each platform has its own unique features, allowing them to continue across the era, such as personalized hardware on the PC side, specific interactive experiences on the host side and exclusive works, and portability on the mobile side.

What are the characteristics of cloud gaming? It breaks the hardware restrictions on players and game products. Starting from this feature, please pay attention to simply outlining the possible form of cloud game native games - "Because it is not restricted by player hardware, developers can stuff the game with rich details, diversified gameplay and a large number of NPCs as much as possible. The rich game content will completely break through all existing game forms, which is unimaginable by the platform now subject to memory restrictions, just like players who played pixel games like "Space Invaders" back then could not imagine that we were playing the current 3A masterpiece."

Native games have a huge impact on the platform. "Rhythm Lightsaber" and "Half-Life: Alex" once caused the sales of tepid VR devices to soar. "Fitness Ring Adventure" made NS game consoles completely emerge at home and abroad. In addition to the excellent quality of the game itself, there is another thing that their game content is closely related to the platform equipment. If you want to play these games, players have to become the audience of the platforms backed by these games.

(VR exclusive game "Half-Life: Alex")

Unfortunately, in the cloud game market, the main pursuit of this new industry is still monetization. Therefore, almost all manufacturers are deliberately ignoring the originalThe development of Shengyun Games is busy "products to the cloud" - it will soon quickly transplant other existing platform products to the cloud game platform, and then quickly harvest players' leeks in the form of membership or on-time billing. For example, Mihayou, who tried the waters with "Genshin Impact".

"This is the value of pre-providing the concept of cloud gaming in advance." Yupin pointed out that if you have always relied on cross-platform transplants, it is likely that game developers will eventually become addicted to it and lose interest in native products that develop cloud gaming platforms separately. In other words, it has killed the native game developers in the upstream of cloud games, and completely reduced the cloud games to an additional distribution channel for other platform games.

If there is no native game, then facing the mechanism of free download of PC and mobile games, the mechanism of paying for props, and the buyout mechanism of console games, the payment mode of cloud gaming platforms for a few dollars per hour is really a bit expensive, and the charging prices of some platforms are even higher than the charging prices of some Internet cafes. For example, Caiji Cloud Games has a fee of 3 yuan per hour, and there are monthly cards of 36 yuan, weekly cards of 9.9 yuan, and large member monthly cards of 99 yuan - this price has exceeded the monthly cards of most games on the market.

In the current market, although the number of players who want to play 3A with a "low-fit" idea is increasing rapidly, for the entire player group, these players are still only "niche". For most players who only know how to play some popular online games on the PC, picture quality is not a necessary factor, but a non-stuttering game experience is very important, which makes them likely not to choose cloud games with a risk of lag.

Even among those players who want to play 3A with a "low-end" configuration, cloud gaming is not a "hot commodity".

After all, at a time when domestic game consoles are becoming popular in China, although "low-configured" players cannot afford graphics cards, they still have money to buy game consoles. Not only does the console play games with almost no lag, but for those games that are tired of playing, players can also "recover" by selling CDs. Overall, whether from the perspective of game experience or from the perspective of economical benefits, game consoles have higher priority than cloud gaming platforms.

What's more, many 3A games are originally exclusive works on the console platform. Many domestic cloud game platforms cannot obtain the authorization of these games. They previously ignored copyright issues and frequently uploaded pirated 3A masterpieces, which caused a lot of trouble - such as uploading well-known game works such as "Human Falls in Dreams" without copyright, which led to the "siege" of many copyright owners, including Xindong.com. The reputation of the platform plummeted, and eventually had to remove game products on a large scale.

"The audience of PC and mobile game ends is almost all players. In recent years, as Weisuo Renren and other three companies have issued domestic machines in China, the user circle has been continuously expanding. If cloud games continue to be limited to moving games on other platformsIn terms of the drama, its audience will not only be very narrow, but may also be snatched away by other platforms. "Yucai said.

The blessing of 5G network only breaks the shackles that were bound to cloud gaming in the past. But as a platform that has been missing the game market for many years, cloud games are still in a state of being in a mess. They still need to continue to polish network stability, cloud server quality, audio and video encoding technology, etc. for a period of time before they can retain gamers who think that cloud games can really give them a silky experience.