While Google’s quitting Cloud Gaming, Verizon & others press start
With Stadia going away in January you’d think that the number of cloud gaming providers would diminish. It appears that Verizon has decided to partner with Razer to create a 5G gaming handheld that is a gaming console, although with a 5G streaming backend.
Verizon’s offering will join competitors Microsoft, Amazon, Google (for a bit possibly,) NVIDIA GeForce Now, PlayStation Now, AntStream, SteamDeck? That Dusty Broom in the Corner, and a host of ones I’m not even sure they’re real or not. It looks like Logitech is entering the game as well.
While I’d normally say it’s a terrible time to enter cloud gaming as Google testified, a carrier doing this has some interesting options for hooking customers such as playing exclusive titles before they’re released elsewhere or offering up discounts for phone customers on certain games. Perhaps trying to copy Wendy’s success getting into a field their business had little no association with. Do not know.
I believe the primary end result will just be more articles such as “Dawn War coming to X platform on D day, two weeks before Y platform.” That and potentially a whole host of gamers on Verizon discovering that cloud gaming just doesn’t cut it for serious fast twitch gamers. But I could be wrong.
[Verizon | Android Police | Kotaku]