By Cho Mu-hyun
A global game industry expert said Thursday that Korea is the ideal place to boost cloud gaming, citing the country’s widely available Internet access and the keen interest in new technology that developers show here.
“Korea is the world of broadband, so I am amazed with the 20 megabytes per second of your phones here. It’s a wonderful experiment for the world and the future of connectivity when the rest of the world has maybe ten percent of that,” Phil Eisler, general manager of Nvidia’s cloud gaming and 3D division, said in an interview with The Korea Times.
He also said Korea is the “logical place to begin cloud gaming” because of its active game community with developers showing strong interest in Nvidia’s technology.
“Eventually, cloud gaming will be the best way to play games. I think mobile gaming will become the point of competitive differentiation. If you want to sell phones to gamers, and your phone doesn’t come with a gaming option, that is going to put you at a competitive disadvantage.”
KT and SK Telecom have met with graphic processor developer Nvidia in their bid to catch LG Uplus in developing and launching a cloud computing game platform. He said that his company has held “discussions with all of the telcos.”
“Their plans are all unique and at different stages and will make it known when they are ready,” he said. “I am meeting more telecommunications companies (while I am here). They all seem very interested in cloud game streaming.”
LG Uplus announced Wednesday that C-games, its cloud game service was launched the same day as a key strategy to increase competitiveness and differentiate itself from rivals.
Nvidia is a crucial and likely candidate for telecommunications companies to start in cloud games because the American company is one of the leading global firms in developing graphic processors units (GPU), especially its famous GeForce series. The company provides a GeForce GRID for LG Uplus, a virtual GPU developed for cloud computing to enhance energy efficient streaming.
All telecommunications companies need the vaunted GPU to provide high-quality graphics games on a mobile platform.
He said that the recently launched cloud game platform was a “wakeup call to other telcos to get things moving.” Eisler pointed out that there were a billion gamers in the world out of 5 billion connected people, making them an important factor for mobile carriers to increase competiveness.
LG Uplus has gained a substantial foothold in the LTE market by being the first to start network building will likely maintain the upper hand as it is again the first to start in this area. C-games is currently only available to LG Uplus subscribers for smartphones, which will likely prevent KT and SK Telecom from catching up in game related services anytime soon.
“We will continue to focus on developing a mobile network right now, but cloud computing is definitely on our agenda,” said an SK Planet representative.
“We are meeting various associated businesses and plan to release a cloud gaming platform this year.” SK Planet is SK Telecom’s content developing subsidiary, and the two are in close talks over launching a cloud gaming service.
KT signed a memorandum of understanding Wednesday with game distributor Exent and launched a game application dubbed olleh GameTanium, but has not yet stated its intention to start cloud computing based game services.