Google Stadia may be gone, but 5G provides the future of cloud gaming

Tis the season for major computer hardware releases, with everything from new laptops and PCs to new graphics cards and processors.

And as we saw with our recent reviews of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 and Intel Core i9-13900K, this new crop of gaming hardware is more powerful than we could have imagined before we got our hands on it and put it to the test. But there’s one thing that’s also undeniable: the best graphics cards are increasingly more expensive than the average consumer in even the wealthiest Western nations can afford, much less gamers in the Global South—assuming they don’t are simply ignored by major product launches entirely.

In many ways, this is at the heart of the disappointment surrounding the end of Google Stadia. Despite all its flaws, it really allowed gamers who were prized by the best gaming PCs to play games like Cyberpunk 2077 and experience those games along with the lucky few who managed to grab one of even the best cheap graphics cards in the past few years.

With Stadia shutting down, one could conclude that cloud gaming itself has failed, but I think that would be a serious mistake. The success of cloud gaming has always been tied to the speed of a user’s internet connection, and despite the frustrating delay, the deployment of 5G networks around the world will finally put cloud gaming services in a position to succeed.

Cloud gaming is set to be the ‘killer app’ of 5G

Each generation of cellular telecommunications network has had one application or service that defines it, the so-called “killer application”. First-generation mobile technology brought wireless voice communications to the masses, while second-generation networks of the late 1990s and early 2000s gave us SMS messaging. 3G networks powered the social media revolution on smartphone devices, and 4G LTE networks enabled media streaming like Spotify and Netflix.

What 5G’s killer application will be remains to be seen, but David Cook is all in on cloud gaming. Cook is the CEO of Radian Arc (opens in new tab)a cloud gaming infrastructure company that has partnered with AMD to lay the groundwork for making cloud gaming a practical reality around the world.

“We’d be sitting in these meetings with the telcos, and they’d all made huge investments in 5G,” Cook told me earlier this year, “And there were some very interesting applications that they’d talk about, like drones and self-driving cars. cars. I would always smile and say, “Yeah, I don’t see many of those out the window, although I believe it’s an important use case, but what we do know is that everyone plays games.”

When cloud gaming services like PlayStation Now, Google Stadia, and Nvidia GeForce Now first launched a few years ago, even the best home Internet services with cable fiber connections struggled to deliver the experience gamers were hoping for. Network bottlenecks would often cause games to lag or a sudden drop in graphics quality, which really slowed down the adoption of cloud gaming. With 5G, however, there’s a much greater opportunity to take advantage of the significantly less congested 5G frequencies and deliver a smoother gaming experience without sacrificing quality.

Improving AAA access to games worldwide

There are literally billions of gamers worldwide and the market will only grow in the coming years. But not all gamers have the same opportunity to enjoy the best PC games as many of us take for granted. Many, if not most, gamers don’t even have a PC or console to play on, instead relying on their phones or dedicated gaming cafes where they can play modern AAA titles using better hardware than they could to buy themselves.

This is reflected in the economics of video games themselves. Mobile games are by far the largest segment of the global video game market – it’s not even close – whether you’re talking about the number of gamers or the revenue those games bring in. But gamers around the world aren’t playing Candy Crush instead of Elden Ring because they don’t care about the deeper gaming experience that a modern PC or console game can provide, it really comes down to access.

“In territories like Latin America, Southeast Asia, India and Africa, the use case is more mobile, but gamers would still love the ability to access better graphics and games on their mobile devices,” Cook said. “And the same as game publishers, game publishers would like to have more creativity and more functionality in these games and be able to extend that to a wider range of mobile devices.”

Laying the groundwork for the coming cloud gaming revolution

Recently one of our partners in Central Africa was literally on the phone and the closest server they could reach… was in South Africa

And while the physical interface a gamer can use to play can be anything from a smartphone to a Chromebook or even an older gaming PC, the key is to offload the actual hard work of rendering a game somewhere else and just output the video over a network connection, not an HDMI or DisplayPort cable.

Passing visual server output to a client device is something we’ve been doing for literally decades, but gaming has been hampered by the low real-time input latency required to play a modern video game. 5G networks are the first telecommunications infrastructure that can provide this type of network responsiveness and stability – all you have to do is look at the remote operations carried out in recent years using 5G networks to see that.

All that’s missing now are the physical servers to actually run the game you’re playing remotely, but it won’t be missing for long. Already, companies like Radian Arc are moving GPU servers into telecom network centers to lay the groundwork for cloud gaming distribution.

“What we’re seeing is quite a difference in market needs in North America, Australia or Western Europe from what we’re seeing in places like Southeast Asia. Recently, one of our partners in Central Africa was literally on the phone and the closest server they could reach, even for traditional mobile games, was in South Africa,” Cook said. “So by getting these GPU servers into some of these smaller telcos, we’re suddenly opening up a whole new world of functionality, both for consumers and publishers.”

Driving gamers to the cloud

With the demise of Google Stadia and the rather lukewarm reception of cloud gaming services over the past few years, convincing gamers to switch to cloud gaming has been a real challenge. Many will come in prejudiced, preferring physical hardware they can hold, while others may have tried it in the past and been put off by the experience.

However, Cook believes there is a secret weapon in the cloud gaming arsenal: the telecom providers themselves.

“When we go into telecom,” Cook said, “we go in and say we want to put a POP (point of presence) on your network so we can all have the benefits of low latency, scale, cost benefits, etc. . ., but we also sit down with them and actually come up with a marketing plan to say this is how you market these games to this user base – kind of team up with them on that. Part of that marketing plan involves a controller, and that controller can be quite different. So what you’re going to see in a lot of these markets is an Android set-top box for the living room, and we can run an app on that set-top box and create a similar gaming console-like experience.

“One thing that telcos are really good at is selling bundles like that,” Cook said, “selling hardware plus a data plan or hardware plus a data plan plus a gaming plan, which is a really unique value proposition.”

This approach of a distributed, localized telecommunications network could be an unexpected advantage for cloud gaming. Google Stadia was the only cloud gaming provider, so its demise was a significant blow to the cloud gaming industry. If Google or Nvidia are the only providers of cloud gaming services, then cloud gaming will always be hampered by the level of commitment to the project that a small handful of companies have.

By going through the telcos most people already use, you might not get the kind of extensive catalog that Google could, but you’ll end up with more cloud gaming providers in general, which should help accelerate its adoption .

“So if you have GPUs in the telco, you can really take advantage of the scale. AMD’s new GPUs can run twelve games per GPU. They are very energy efficient, about 30% less energy per user. All of these things should really make cloud gaming the potential killer application for 5G deployment.”