Video games are one of the most popular forms of people entertainment around the world. The industry is already integrating music and video content. Even educational and professional solutions are becoming part of gaming platforms. At the same time, cloud-based gaming technology has emerged in the video game market that has the potential to revolutionize our gaming experience, just as OTT services have changed the way we watch movies, and music streaming services have changed the way we listen to music.
The PwC Russia media and entertainment team together with the GFN.RU service a partner of NVIDIA in the development of the GeForce NOW service in Russia and the CIS prepared the first study of the Russian cloud gaming market, in which they considered such issues as trends and dynamics of the global market development; specifics of the Russian market and its growth drivers; ecosystem of the Russian cloud gaming market; the portrait of the Russian cloud gaming audience; analysis of data transfer quality for cloud gaming and factors affecting it.
Roscongress Foundation analysts highlighted the main theses of this research, accompanying each of them with suitable fragments of video broadcasts of panel discussions held as part of business programs of the key events hosted by the Foundation.
The cloud gaming market is growing every year. The increasing popularity of cloud services is justified by easy access with minimal investment, a large potential audience, whose growth is also influenced by the constant rise in classic game kits prices, gaming computers components and the high cost of play stations.
The video game industry is growing steadily year after year, maintaining a CAGR of 6% over the forecast period to 2023. The market is expected to reach USD 174 billion in 2024. According to various estimates, the global cloud gaming market in 2019 exceeded USD 150 million, and by 2025 it will be from USD 3,000 to USD 6,000 million.
The key factors behind the rapid growth of the market are the high popularity of gaming, easy access to games with minimal investment and the deployment of 5G networks around the world. Cloud gaming services have access to a wide target audience, in particular:
• PC-users that are not technically ready to launch video games (according to experts, there are more than 1 billion such devices in the world);
• Smartphone users (especially after the deployment of 5G networks).
Important factors in the development of the cloud gaming market are the annual increase in the cost of components for gaming computers and the cost of stations such as Xbox and PlayStation, which make traditional gaming less affordable. The advantage of cloud services is to provide access to games using the latest graphics technologies, such as RTX (Real-Time Ray Tracing), which are available only on the latest generation graphics cards.
The cloud gaming market in Russia is also growing rapidly every year. A sufficiently large potential for the development of the cloud gaming market in Russia is associated with the spread of high-speed Internet, the speed and quality of which is among the top ten in the world.
According to estimates, among the Russian population, from 30 to 50 million people play video games on various platforms. Russian is one of the three most popular languages on the Steam gaming platform with 11% of the total, right after English and Chinese. The video game market in Russia is growing at an average annual rate of 5.1%, which is close to global indicators, and the market size in 2019 was USD 2.1 billion.
The potential for the development of the cloud gaming market in Russia is associated with the spread of high-speed Internet, the speed and quality of which is among the top ten in the world. As of 2019, 73.6% or more than 40 million of all households in Russia are connected to broadband Internet. Moreover, among all households with PCs, about 20 million computers are not technically ready to run games. All of them are potential consumers for the cloud gaming market.
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