Gaming companies are emerging as the significant revenue opportunity for Cloud providers such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Tencent, among others.
Investment in cloud platform as the most critical area of games technology are benefitting cloud service providers such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Tencent, i3D.net, Oracle, Alibaba and Servers.com to shore up sales.
The Omdia Market Radar: Cloud Platforms for Games – 2024 says AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are the leading cloud platforms for games.
The global video game market is huge for Cloud providers. The size of the video game market is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 13.4 percent from 2023 to 2030 to reach $583.69 billion by 2030.
The market for cloud and related services in games will be worth $15.6 billion in 2024, Omdia estimates in its latest report.
Canalys expects global cloud infrastructure services spending to increase by 20 percent in 2024 from $290.4 billion in 2023.
Omdia report
Omdia says Google Cloud is ranked among the market leaders for the first time. Increasing competition is also reflected in the expanded the range of vendors covered in the report, which this year features new additions in i3D.net and servers.com.
“Google Cloud’s offering for the games industry continues to grow more impressive year on year, and Omdia’s data clearly shows that game developers are rewarding it with more of their business,” said Liam Deane, Principal Analyst covering games technology at Omdia.
There is diverse range of cloud services available in the games vertical. i3D.net and servers.com are both excellent examples of the growing ability of specialized, non-hyperscaler vendors to provide compelling offerings to the games market.
AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has shared a number of case studies showing how the #1 Cloud service provider is assisting gaming companies to boost performance.
Epic Games is an entertainment company and 3D engine technology provider behind Fortnite, one of the world’s largest games with over 350 million players. Epic Games has deployed AWS services such as Amazon EC2 to scale capacity and support remote creators.
Blexr, a lead generation company, uses AWS services to deliver better customer experiences faster at half the compute cost. Blexr connects customers with offers from online gaming brands. Blexr containerized its infrastructure on AWS and took advantage of scalable AWS services to improve agility, increase conversion rates by 30 percent, and accelerate new market launches from 9 months to 3 weeks.
Notorious Studios, a video game startup, deployed a serverless game analytics pipeline on AWS to help accelerate the design process and improve the player experience of its first title game, Legacy: Steel & Sorcery.
Mystic Moose and Sequence has built a Web3 gaming world that integrates blockchain with cloud technology on AWS.
Games 24 Seven, India’s leading online gaming company, has utilized AWS Cloud Security for data protection and early threat detection.
HUDstats switched from ChatGPT maker OpenAI to Amazon Bedrock to advance esports storytelling using generative AI including Advanced Video Analysis (AVA) artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) solution.
DreamCasino has optimized its architecture alongside AWS Partner Axiom IO to reduce costs by 30 percent using AWS.
Dream11, the world’s largest fantasy sports platform, has optimized compute costs significantly, boosted performance by 40 percent and cut latency by 98 percent by migrating to AWS Graviton–based processors and implementing Amazon OpenSearch Service.
“We chose Amazon OpenSearch Service for the perks of OpenSearch with the robustness of automatic updates, managed scaling, and AWS community support,” Mehul Batra, Software Engineer at Dream11, said.
Les Ambassadeurs Club uses AWS Wickr to protect confidential communications and deliver personalized service to 20,000 members.
Omnichannel casino game developer Playson has achieved an increase in bets of up to 200 percent per second and can deliver games globally 10 times faster since going all in on AWS.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft says Azure for game development helps accelerate game development with Azure PlayFab managed services, build own game services from scratch, or access developer tools and support with the ID@Azure program for indie creators.
Hello Games is using Microsoft Azure for offering No Man’s Sky to more gamers.
Iain Brown, server and multiplayer lead for Hello Games, said: “No Man’s Sky is a space exploration and survival game set in a procedurally-generated universe. There are around 18 quintillion different planets in the game that people can go explore.”
Fall Guys, one of the gaming customers of Microsoft Azure, sold more than 11 million copies on Steam alone and ranked as the most downloaded PlayStation Plus title ever. “Azure provided all the reassurance we needed to scale elastically and quickly,” Adam Fletcher, Chief Technology Officer, Fall Guys, said.
The Coalition developers utilized Incredibuild’s process-level virtualization technology to scale Azure performance. They were ultimately able to deploy 700 cores, significantly reducing shader and code compilation times.
Minecraft Realms has migrated from AWS to Microsoft Azure. The migration of Minecraft Realms from one cloud platform to another was a massive undertaking that the team would not have considered pursuing if not for Azure’s robust toolset. The process was completely invisible to most players.
Google Cloud
Google Cloud for Games helps gaming companies to create exceptional player experiences by unifying performance and insights.
Google Cloud says generative AI in games is quickly becoming an important tool for tapping into a new level of innovation – with leading companies leaning on it to boost creator productivity, improve audience engagement, and roll out new content quickly.
Some of the customers of Google Cloud for Games include Activision Blizzard, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Colopl, Com2Us, Embracer Group, King, NetMarble, Niantic, Nintendo, Sega, Square Nix, Ubisoft, among others.
This YouTube video shows how Spanner is handling large number of players using Google Cloud for Games.
Ubisoft is one of the latest gaming platforms to use Google Cloud for Games.
“This collaboration makes it possible to combine Google Cloud’s expertise in deploying Kubernetes at scale with our deep knowledge of game development pipelines and technologies,” said Carl Dionne, Development Director, Online Technology Group, Ubisoft.
Competition is growing among Cloud providers to grab more customers from gaming companies.
Baburajan Kizhakedath
