ISLAMABAD: Global cloud gaming revenue is expected to reach $1.4 billion by the end of this year, up 125pc than last year, according to a new report issued by a European research company.
Fuelled by the stay-at-home situation brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, the market is on track to cross the $5bn mark in 2023 as technology and infrastructure continue to improve, said Amsterdam-based market research company Newzoo.
“Continuous developments and innovation across the sector mean the cloud gaming market’s revenues and potential will continue to skyrocket,” Guilherme Fernandes, market consultant at Newzoo, said.
“Part of 2021’s massive jump in revenues is due to increased cloud gaming activity from companies big and small, as we expected in last year’s report … simply put, cloud gaming is here to stay, and its importance and prominence will only grow,” he added.
Cloud gaming, also called gaming-on-demand, runs video games on remote servers and streams them directly to a user’s device.
Consumer appetite for cloud gaming rose rapidly in the past few months with the creation of new platforms such as Microsoft’s xCloud as part of Xbox game pass ultimate and Nvidia resolving the early licencing issues with its GeForce Now service, which now supports over 800 titles.
E-commerce giant Amazon and social networking platform Facebook also entered the market with their own cloud gaming services.
Due to the high frequency of new services, as well as the big feature improvements for existing ones, Newzoo predicts there will be 23.7 million paying cloud gaming users by the end of this year.
“2020 has been a year full of fantastic achievements for us, business-wise,” Andreas Hestbeck, chief executive of Poland-based RemoteMyApp, a cloud gaming solution and gaming content aggregator, said.
“Having so many people that were suddenly stuck at home was an opportunity of a lifetime for all companies offering entertainment services. RMA registered great spikes in interest,” he added.
Now that’s one good news.