The company wants to find out where Stadia went wrong.
A few weeks ago, a surprise announcement was made that Stadia was going to be shut down. By throwing in the towel, it seemed like Microsoft, which has made cloud gaming a perk but not its primary focus for Xbox, has the best chance at popular adoption. Most people don't seem to know that Amazon's Luna doesn't seem to be a big hit.
This week, the future of game streaming got a lot more interesting, as the company that proved that movie streaming was the future announced that it is considering a cloud gaming service of its own. Its work is done.
For hundreds of millions of customers, we can capably run a content streaming business. The jump from the handful of mobile games it currently offers to a full-on cloud gaming service will be a long, tough, danger filled road.
The risk is worth it because cloud gaming would open up the company's gaming strategy in a big way. By this point, you have probably heard that pitch a few times, but it doesn't seem to be a priority for the company. According to comments from the company's gaming boss, Mike Verdu, it seems as if it will be leaning more towards the XBOX version of cloud gaming. He said that delivering games to your TV is value add. We don't want you to subscribe as a console replacement. It's a completely different model.
Stadia was a separate service that offered both full-price games and a subscription that only gave you access to select titles. According to Rebecca Ann Heineman, the model contributed to the failure of the platform. She said that everyone she knows thought for one monthly price, you could play all the games you wanted for free. Stadia was hurt by reality not meeting the expectations. She said that the company could get it right if it kept cloud games.
It feels like it is easy to get wrong with cloud gaming.
Cloud gaming infrastructure is something that will need to be invested in.
Building a strong technical infrastructure for cloud gaming is one of the hurdles that will have to be overcome. Joost van Dreunen said in an interview that streaming games is different from streaming movies and TV shows. According to van Dreunen, it isn't ideal for streaming gaming to be based on Amazon web services. Huge studios like Roblox and Riot Games have built out their own technological backbone to reduce the amount of time it takes to play a game.
The US broadband infrastructure is not good enough for cloud gaming, with many experiencing slow download speeds or frustrating data caps. When your internet suddenly slows down and you can't watch a movie, you can use the fast.com speed-checking tool. Microsoft, which has a vested interest in better broadband access for its cloud gaming offerings, maintains a dashboard that shows just how bad digital inequity can be. In one county in Washington state, 97 percent of the population doesn't use the internet at high speeds. The FCC has a definition of broadband speeds as 25 megabits per second. It is difficult to make a compelling case for cloud gaming if it is difficult to know if your internet can handle a game in the first place.
It will be a problem for Apple's App Store.
Apple's App Store will be a major issue, as internet infrastructure won't be the only problem. Apple doesn't allow companies to offer a library of games that you can browse through and play at the same time in a single app. I don't think Apple will change these rules anytime soon because they make so much money off games. Competitors have a progressive web app. It's possible that it will negotiate a deal with Apple so that it can offer cloud gaming.
The notoriously challenging problem of making good video games will be a challenge forNetflix, which already has a leg up over other companies. Microsoft has been making its own games for more than two decades and has acquired an empire of major studios to make titles. There is a little acquisition going on with the company. Microsoft and Nvidia have built strong relationships with game makers over the years, which has helped them bolster their cloud gaming libraries.
It wasn't until a year after the service launched that the in-house Stadia studios were shut down. New World and Lost Ark are two titles that Amazon has had success with. New World and Lost Ark can't be found on Luna.
Getting game development right is a priority for the company. It has acquired gaming developers, established an internal studio, and just announced a studio headed up by a former executive producer. Verdu seems to be willing to expand its studios. We would like to build institutional competence with internal games. He said that they want teams to go through multiple cycles and get good at working together. Giving them the space inside an organization is the only way to do that.
According to Ward the company could have an advantage. He said that if the cloud-streamed gaming service takes off, it will be because a massive streaming video hit is accompanied by an excellent, complimentary game that's only available on netflix.
It won't have to depend on its own games. Many of the currently available mobile titles are from other developers. It seems like it will keep licensing games from outside partners, just as it does with its own movies and shows.
We don't know how many games are cloud only.
If there was a competition to figure it out, it was them.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions about how this potential cloud gaming service might shake out. "If the hope is that 'Netflix Games' will become a significant profit center within, say, five years, there's a huge gulf between what the company has on tap today and what it must have in place to make that happen," Ward said. He pointed to the fact that there is still a small catalog of games for the service. We will have to wait and see how much of a role its gaming studios will play in finding new revenue streams for the company.
You can argue that it's proven that it will put in the work to figure out the ins and outs of making its own content. "If they have the time and patience to find their audience for cloud gaming, they could build out something pretty big," BrandonSheffield said in an email.
It was pointed out by van Dreunen that the pivot from mailing DVDs to an almost entirely digital business was done well by the competitors. Van Dreunen said that if there was a competitor to figure it out, it would be them.
There is a series produced by The Verge with the internet service provider.
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