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2020 is coming to an end. This is a year of disasters and an extraordinary one. "Pandemic" and "cloud" are destined to become the most impressive keywords this year .
During the fight against the epidemic, demand for cloud applications broke out, and the number of users of online education, remote office, and telemedicine based on cloud platforms increased sharply. On the one hand, this has greatly increased the speed of social digital transformation; on the other hand, it has also allowed the cloud computing industry to usher in a new trend of rapid development.
In the overall rapid development of the cloud computing industry, not only education, office, medical and other fields have achieved rapid growth, but the online entertainment field has also obtained rare growth opportunities. In particular, cloud gaming, which has been progressing slowly before, was directly pressed this year by pressing the accelerator key, and domestic and foreign technology giants flocked to it, making cloud gaming, a cold stove that has already faded, continued to heat up rapidly.
The cloud gaming boom is back
Cloud gaming is not a new concept. It is untestable when the concept of cloud gaming was first proposed, but as the recognized earliest mature cloud gaming product, Onlive attracted major game companies such as EA, Ubisoft, Take-Two, and Warner when it was launched in 2009. The content support, even able to run the "hardware killer" "Crysis" at the time.
This kind of click-to-play technology with low hardware threshold is really alluring, but unfortunately it is difficult to popularize on a large scale. First, the average household bandwidth in the U.S. at that time was only 9.54Mbps, and bandwidth limitations made it difficult for users to receive sufficiently clear images; second, cloud games were implemented in a more primitive way, and each instance can only correspond to one user, which is equivalent to each user. There must be a corresponding computer in the cloud, which is extremely costly.
In the following 10 years, the two mountains of bandwidth and cost have always been the biggest obstacles to the development of cloud games . By 2019, the global cloud gaming industry is still in its infancy. Neither the domestic market nor the overseas market has formed a scale. In 2019, the total global cloud gaming market outside of China was only 500 million US dollars. According to iiMedia Consulting's data, in 2019, the number of cloud game users in China reached 133 million, but the market size was only about 2.24 billion yuan.
However, with the rapid popularization of new-generation communication technologies such as 5G, it is also in the past two years that the overall development of the cloud game industry has advanced rapidly, and the prospects for scale and commercialization have become brighter, and it is expected to become a super player in the game market. tuyere. According to Newzoo's latest forecast, the global cloud gaming market outside of China will reach US$4.8 billion in 2023, achieving a nearly ten-fold increase. IiMedia Consulting estimates that by 2023, the number of cloud game users in China will reach 658 million, and the market is expected to reach 98.6 billion.
The game industry has entered the stock market stage. According to data from Zhiyan Consulting, the number of users in the Chinese game market from January to September 2020 reached 660 million, an increase of 20 million from 2019. At a time when the mobile game dividend has been exhausted, game giants urgently need to find a new incremental market. The rise of cloud games just caters to this demand. Therefore, although the cloud gaming industry is still in its early stages of development, it continues to attract various domestic and foreign companies to invest in this track.
In general, there are nearly 160 cloud gaming companies around the world, including nearly 40 cloud service companies, nearly 40 game platform companies, and more than 40 software and hardware companies. Global leading technology giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are continuing to increase relevant investment.
In the domestic cloud game industry, more and more mainstream manufacturers have begun to deploy cloud games, and rely on associations and other forms to integrate the upstream and downstream industry chains. At the end of 2019, 28 leading companies such as Tencent, Huawei and Douyu Live became the first members of the "5G Cloud Game Industry Alliance". Since 2020, the "5G Cloud Game Industry Alliance" has continued to grow, and has promoted the accelerated development of domestic cloud games through a more open attitude.
The logic behind the influx of giants
The reason why various domestic and foreign giants are so keen on cloud games, apart from the growth opportunities, there are of course other deeper plans. With the blessing of 5G and other new-generation communication technologies, cloud gaming will not only have the opportunity to become a super outlet in the gaming industry, but it is also possible to instigate new changes in the ecosystem of related industries.
First, let the game get rid of the shackles of hardware. The most distinctive feature of cloud gaming itself is that it can break hardware limitations. The game itself runs in the cloud and can be presented and interacted on any terminal such as a host, PC, mobile phone, TV, etc. This will bring fundamental changes to the game industry, guide the development and innovation of games, and even realize comprehensive innovations in player experience and consumption methods.
Second, promote the further acceleration of the popularization of VR/AR. After a brief rise, the VR industry quickly fell into a low ebb. In the final analysis, it is because, with the current technology level, it is difficult for the headset to achieve a satisfactory experience for mainstream consumers under the limited size and weight of the headset. But if VR and cloud computing can achieve deeper integration, this contradiction can be greatly eased. It can be said that XR and cloud gaming are a natural pair. In fact, in recent years, Huawei has invested heavily in cloud gaming and XR, which is probably also based on this judgment.
Third, as the killer application of 5G commercialization. Including short videos, live broadcasts, etc., most of the current mobile Internet applications are born and developed under the conditions of 3G/4G communication technology, and these applications are not completely suitable for the 5G era. For some features of 5G, such as high bandwidth up to 10Gbps and low latency as low as 1ms, mobile Internet applications such as short video and live broadcast are not used. Only applications with more stringent requirements on bandwidth and latency, such as cloud games, can better utilize the superior characteristics of 5G communication technology in the future.
In short, cloud gaming will not only drive the growth and transformation of the gaming industry, but also a huge variable in the reshaping and value revaluation of network applications and cloud computing related fields.
The road to rise is barrier-free
The rapid popularization of next-generation communication technologies such as 5G, one of the two major obstacles restricting the development of cloud games, the "bandwidth problem", is expected to be greatly eased. Now cloud games are still in the initial stage of development, mainly due to "cost issues".
It is a major challenge for all cloud gaming companies to reduce costs while ensuring that the user experience is continuously improved. Like other cloud services, the current main costs of cloud games include servers, IDC, and bandwidth, and IDC and bandwidth costs are basically transparent.
This means that when IDC and bandwidth costs are relatively stable, more users can be covered with fewer devices and a better experience can be provided to win the favor of more players and accelerate the popularity of cloud games. The key is coding ability. In cloud games, each player has a different picture, which greatly increases the coding pressure of the GPU.
In the final analysis, the key to solving the cost of cloud gaming lies in the underlying chip. For example, Intel's newly announced data center graphics card "SG1" can realize low-latency, high-density Android cloud games and video streaming. Tencent made a test. On each SG1, 50 game instances such as "Glory of the King" can be run simultaneously. In other words, on the basis of SG1, a typical dual-card system supports more than 100 concurrent users of Android cloud games.
Compared with the original cloud game instance that requires a computer to support, the GPU coding efficiency has increased by hundreds of times, and the corresponding cost has been reduced by nearly a hundred times. Of course, this is still far from the end. I believe that with the continuous advancement of the underlying chips and architecture in the future, the cost of cloud games will soon be controlled to be as low as the current live broadcast.
And similar data center graphics cards, domestic manufacturers will soon be able to achieve self-developed and self-produced. Domestic chip customization companies such as Xindong Technology have developed more advanced data center GPU chips. With the continuous advancement of SMIC's "N+1" and "N+2" processes, the gap between chip manufacturing and the 10nm SuperFin process used by Intel SG1 in terms of advanced manufacturing processes is also continuing to narrow.
In short, the accelerated popularization of 5G and the continuous improvement of underlying GPU-related decoding capabilities have laid a certain foundation for the rapid growth of cloud games. In the next two to three years, the explosive growth of cloud gaming has been unstoppable, and this may open a new era of digital entertainment.
Text/Liu Kuang public number, ID: liukuang110