Game Streaming is Heating Up 🔥🔥
On Nvidia releasing their game streaming product, Recent financial results and what the Superbowl Ads of 2020 can tell us about the future. Also, many quick links 🔗
An important development in the world of game streaming took place last week with NVIDIA pulling their GeforceNow service out of limited release and into worldwide deployment. The service offers two tiers, a free version that limits use to one-hour play sessions while the €5.49/month ‘Founders’ version offers payers priority access when queueing, an option for raytracing technology and infinite hours of play in a session. Players have full access to the games they already purchased on multiple storefronts, Steam, the Epic Games Store, Origin, Battle.net, and Uplay all are supported at launch. The experience is in no way limited, after you ‘install’ a game on Nvidia’s cloud computer you can tweak any quality setting as if the game would be running from your machine with no noticeable lag —at least not now, when the servers are not under much stress.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though. The UX is closer to a v0.1 than it is from a v1.0, the ‘installation’ part is confusing at first and it’s not clear whether the data will be installed on your PC or in the cloud. In order to play a game, you need to first find it Nvidia’s collection then add it to your personal library, then sign in to the store you purchased it from —games present in multiple stores are also displayed twice in GeforceNow— then you need to re-log on to that storefront every time you want to play a game. A lot of ‘thens’ means a lot of friction.
The idea of leveraging existing game libraries and not making players purchase a game again is a breath of fresh air after last year’s plethora of new stores launching left and right and it also addresses one of the great fears of early users of game streaming services. When you scan the Q&A section of all these services you’ll inevitably get to a heavily-upvoted question of ‘Do we get a refund when you close the service?’, a worry that Nvidia addressed in an elegant way by giving up a potential cut of the profits in the beginning as it proves itself in front of users. I’m not ruling out the addition of a proprietary store later on if/when the platform ends up being popular.
Despite all its faults, my overall impression of GeforceNow is a positive one. The value network of this first iteration overlaps a lot with the desires of gamers with almost no latency, customizable quality and the large games library that will only expand over time as more stores are added. It’s obvious that Nvidia will have a much easier time in polishing the UX of GeforceNow than Stadia trying to gather exclusive and must-play content to their platform.
The end of the fourth quarter for many companies meant a lot of companies presented their performance over the past 12 months so let’s take a quick look at the highlights.
Alphabet missed analysts’ expectations in terms of overall revenue in the past quarter but beat the earnings-per-share forecasts due to lower tax rates than initially expected. The significant news was made by the company releasing financial details for the Cloud business —$8.9B over the past year, up 53% from the year before— and Youtube —$15.1B, up almost 36% over 2018—for the first time ever. In contrast, all US television networks combined make around $70B/year from advertising. While their search business is still the main earner at $89.1B yearly revenue, the yearly growth there is a mere 15%. This all but confirmed what many of us were assuming already, that the Youtube business unit is profitable on its own whilst, at the same time, publicly acknowledging that creators pay Youtube a lot more than Youtube pays creators. This signals the need for change in the company’s strategy going forward as consumers’ purchasing habits are less and less influenced by the search engine and moving towards social media and even video games.
Some interesting trivia information about the Apple-Google/Android competition also became obvious after last week’s events, namely that for each Apple device there are around 1.75 Android-enabled ones but in terms of storefront revenue, the AppStore dwarfs the PlayStore $155B to $80B.
As if it were a kindergarten contest between billion-dollar-making companies, the individual performance of Instagram was also ‘leaked’—no doubt by company representatives through backchannels—, the company bringing in $20B in ad revenue over the past year and accounting for more than a quarter of Facebook’s total profits. Not a bad gamble after it was purchased for $715M eight years ago. When looking at the expenses that Instagram and Youtube imply on their respective mother companies, it’s easy to see how the former would be more profitable due to the nature of the media each platform is known for.
After gaining 10M subscribers on the first day, Disney+ now counts 26M customers in the US, a number beyond everyone’s wildest dreams at this point and almost half of Netflix’s 61M. It took them just three months to gain as many subscribers as Netflix did in its first five years, showing the power of good proprietary content once again. Let’s see the adoption rate of the service once it launches in more countries in the months to come.
Even though the SuperBowl is not a thing outside the US of A the ‘Superbowl commercial’ has become an important product in the advertising strategy of many companies mainly because a universal message can be appreciated around the world without the need for deep knowledge of the sport. Here’s my quick rundown of the best such ads from this year’s event:
Jeep and Bill Murray won. Regardless of Bill’s fee 🏆
Amazon went for funny, Google went for emotion, both of them tried to apply a smokescreen over data privacy concerns while promoting Assistant-enabled devices
Traditional alcohol-producing companies continue to lean into health trends with multiple ads putting carb and calory count of products front and center while the biggest soda manufacturer goes chooses to promote their energy drink. Change really starts at the consumer end of things when it comes to these items.
Drinking and not driving makes a lot of sense so Budweiser and Uber shared the bill for a single ad this year but while the partnership made sense the creative concept fell a bit flat. Maybe ‘flat’ was the target audience to begin with??
The Oscar for ‘Best Picture’ went to a movie that apparently nobody watched 👁️👁️
It slipped my mind to mention this last week but the Australian Open had a Fortnite championship on the courts last week, getting eSports ever closer to traditional ones🎾
I’ve mentioned it in a previous newsletter but now it’s real. Samsung’s foldable clamshell phone is launching tomorrow 🤳🤳
Lately, it looks like Rivian’s being spread thing making vehicles for its early investors, first with Ford, now with Amazon. The design of what will eventually become 100,000 delivery vans was shared last week and it looks 100% customized for Jeff’s store 🚚
Toyota, now the most valuable car company in the world by a factor of 2, has announced a new venture for developing EV batteries with Pansonic, Tesla’s age-old partner. With Toyota’s operational knowledge making it possible to produce at scale, this effort is worth keeping an eye on (eye) 👀🔋🔋
Even amateur bowlers can get behind Jesus👅🎳:
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