Cloud Gaming has picked up rapidly in the last couple of years. The launch of Google’s new Stadia service all but confirmed that. Other than Stadia, there are a bunch of other Cloud Gaming options on the market: NVIDIA’s GeForce Now, Sony’s PlayStation Now and Microsoft’s XCloud all compete in separate segments of the same market. Now, Chinese giant Tencent wants a piece of that pie too. The company has partnered with none other than NVIDIA to deliver a game streaming service to gamers in China, named START.
Many analysts are claiming that Cloud Gaming will become the most popular platform in the coming years. Offering PC-levels of performance at sub-console prices is a hard-to-refuse offer, after all. There are of course certain drawbacks and problems that developers have to deal with before Cloud Gaming becomes mainstream.
The primary being latency and input lags, as well as connection related issues. These are what made Stadia’s launch a bit of a nightmare for Google. However, things aren’t so grim elsewhere. NVIDIA’s GeForce Now and Sony’s PlayStation Now have been doing relatively well and Microsoft’s xCloud has also met with a positive reception.
Tencent’s START is specifically for the Chinese audience. Meaning there’ll probably be a form of the country’s censorship involved somewhere in between. Furthermore, this should allow Tencent to partner with local ISPs to offer a smooth and affordable Cloud Gaming service to the country’s masses.
Alongside Japan and Korea, China has the highest number of eSports players in the world. That in itself is enough reason for Tencent to push ahead with START in the country and make the platform accessible to the millions of gamers across China.
As one of the leading global platforms for game development, publishing and operations, Tencent Games is set to deliver amazing cloud gaming. Combining the Tencent platform with NVIDIA’s GPU technology will provide a world-class experience for gamers everywhere.
Jeff Fisher, Senior Vice President of Gaming, NVIDIA
NVIDIA’s leadership in building the world’s most powerful GPUs paired with their experience in cloud solutions will empower us to scale our START platform to millions of gamers. Today marks a new opportunity for our companies to further push the frontiers of gaming.
Steven Ma, Senior Vice President, Tencent
