now.gg, the mobile cloud company, launched a mobile cloud platform for game developers that will drastically change the reach, potential and business model for game developers by solving accessibility, shareability and monetisation of their games. It has been adopted by game developers like Perfect World, PerBlue and Lilith Games. now.gg’s mobile cloud aims to revolutionise the way mobile game developers reach new users around the world.
Game developers can deliver the same graphics and high-performance interactive play regardless of device, OS or regional constraints through the now.gg mobile cloud. Their gaming communities can play games on any mobile device or OS, share games instantly on social channels they already use and make in-game purchases through payment channels they already have.
“now.gg empowers mobile game developers to acquire an entire spectrum of new users that would otherwise have been constrained by device and app store specs. The mobile cloud democratises access to mobile gaming by removing all friction and device requirements from experiencing a new game. This unleashes an unprecedented new era of possibilities for game developers to acquire the next billion mobile gamers. The next generation of mobile gaming is here,” said now.gg CEO Rosen Sharma.
Today, almost 40 per cent of mobile phones cannot keep up with power gaming and 60 per cent of the smartphones in the global market are low or mid-range and cannot handle compute, storage and performance intensive games. By removing the friction previously associated with mobile gaming, it is now possible to bring the next billion users to gaming.
In addition to bringing the next wave of gamers to mobile, now.gg makes games instantly shareable through the click of a link. Instead of waiting for cumbersome downloads and installs, gamers can immediately share, click and access games. They can even play on third-party apps like Discord and Snapchat without leaving the platform. With 1.3 million new users joining social media every day, game developers can reach the next billion mobile gamers as they receive and share their favourite games through their social channels.
Game developers can monetise their new users with the mobile cloud without relying on credit cards. 45 per cent of all online purchases are made via digital wallets and this amount is expected to rise to 51 per cent by 2024. now.gg gives gamers the freedom to pay through digital payment channels they already have on the cloud, like digital wallets, cryptocurrency or game top-ups. This will enable gamer developers to attract many more new users and also increase their margins.
Through the cloud deployment of Arm-based server processors now.gg delivers an exciting new gameplay experience to users and developers that was not possible until now. By serving Arm-native Android or IOS games from AWS Graviton2-powered instances, publishers avoid architecture incompatibility issues, resulting in a seamless end-to-end developer experience. Such instances deliver 40 per cent better performance per dollar compared to comparable current generation x86 instances, which can both reduce developer hosting costs and allow them to serve more customers per instance.
now.gg is powered by its proprietary distributed Android stack on Arm-based servers, called nowCloud OS nowCloud OS allows game developers to easily enable their existing Android apps for the cloud and build cloud native in the future. This lets now.gg adapt to the characteristics of the endpoint, bandwidth, and latency constraints and optimise the cost performance of the cloud. Game developers across the world simply need to host their game on the now.gg cloud and publish the link on their websites to bring global access to their games.
“now.gg has built a platform that leverages the global scale of AWS to provide a valuable business model to game developers worldwide. We see this as one of the most exciting use cases of our ARM servers on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).By leveraging the mobile cloud from now.gg, and AWS Graviton2 instances, game developers can run mobile games natively, encode the rendered graphics and stream the games directly to a mobile device. This allows game developers to provide a consistent gaming experience for all mobile devices and a much more enjoyable and seamless process for the gamers,” said AWS EMEA gaming solutions Johan Broman.
“Data centers running servers powered by Arm-based processors are helping to eliminate compatibility issues for mobile cloud developers, ensuring smartphone applications are readily available in the cloud. Through our collaboration with now.gg, we are solving for this new era of cloud-hosted gaming to enable a rich game play experience, while driving more efficient revenue streams for developers and cloud providers,” said Arm senior director of marketing, infrastructure line business Eddie Ramirez.
“One of the biggest challenges game developers face is appealing to their existing community, expanding their reach, and providing an excellent experience. now.gg revolutionises gaming by uniquely solving for user acquisition, game shareability and monetization. Regardless of device or location, gamers can now instantly access any game with a frictionless gaming experience, which is an entirely new and exciting concept. In our pilot with the technology, we saw a significant uptick in both acquisition and retention,” said Perfect World producer Bai Xue.
