This article first appeared on Trend Investing on February 20, 2020; therefore all data is as of this date.
The coronavirus has resulted in hundreds of millions of Chinese being placed in lockdown or working from home. This has led to an enormous spike in online gaming. If this continues, or becomes a global pandemic, the gaming companies may be one of the few ways to benefit. The 5G rollout is also helping the cloud gaming sector.
One of the most popular ways of gaming nowadays is "multi-player" online gaming, where you compete against others online in a game. The latest way to facilitate this is via cloud gaming, wherein you just connect your device to access games held in the cloud.
What is cloud gaming, game streaming, and Games as a Service [GaaS]?
Using any connected device to play a game held on an online server ('cloud') is called 'cloud gaming', and the business to monetize it is known as 'Games as a Service' [GaaS]. Some also call it 'game streaming' (see below).
Wikipedia defines Games as a Service as:
In the video game industry, games as a service (GaaS) represents providing video games or game content on a continuing revenue model, similar to software as a service. Games as a service are ways to monetize video games either after their initial sale, or to support a free-to-play model. Games released under the GaaS model typically receive a long or indefinite stream of monetized new content over time to encourage players to continue paying to support the game. This often leads to games that work under a GaaS model to be called "living games" or "live games", since they continually change with these updates.
Note: Cloud gaming can be further broken down to 3 groups: Peer-to-peer gaming, game streaming, and progressive downloading.
Trend Investing
Thanks for reading the article. If you want to sign up for Trend Investing for my best investing ideas, latest trends, exclusive CEO interviews, chat room access to me, and to other sophisticated investors. You can benefit from the work I've done, especially in the electric vehicle and EV metals sector. You can learn more by reading "The Trend Investing Difference", "Subscriber Feedback On Trend Investing", or sign up here.
Latest Trend Investing articles:
