Financial news app Zhutong learned that the latest report released by the International Data Corporation (IDC) on the "China Game Cloud Market Tracking in the First Half of 2024" shows that the size of China's game cloud market in the first half of 2024 reached 0.91 billion US dollars, a year-on-year growth of 5.9%. Among them, the solution market achieved a double-digit growth year-on-year, and the scope of high-end cloud services, cloud-native products and services, real-time interactive services, etc., continue to expand, laying the foundation for the market's sustained and healthy growth.

Scale and Forecast of the Game Cloud Market

In the first three quarters of 2024, the issuance of game licenses continued the trend of "normalized issuance" in 2023, and market confidence continued to recover. As one of the core "indicators" of the current regulatory attitude, from January to October 2024, a total of 1072 domestic game licenses were approved and issued by the regulator, an increase of over 30% year-on-year, while the issuance of import licenses increased by over 50% year-on-year, providing a good environment for continuous project iteration and steady market growth.

After years of experimentation, trial and error, and experience accumulation, as well as the flow of high-level technical personnel, deploying new game projects on public cloud architecture has gradually become an industry consensus. As the main customers of game cloud services, game publishers are fully utilizing the more advanced technical architecture, richer high-end products, and more convenient service invocation methods of public clouds to improve the speed of new game launches and updates, enhance operational efficiency, and effectively avoid management issues brought by traditional hybrid architectures.

Therefore, assuming no major public relations risks, no significant changes in existing regulatory policies and environment, and no major setbacks in industry customer usage habits, the conclusion that "downstream demand will drive continued growth in the game cloud market" is expected to persist over multiple cycles. By 2028, the size of China's game cloud market is expected to reach 2.44 billion US dollars.

Game Cloud Usage Tracking

vCPU cores of cloud servers (including but not limited to cloud server instances, cloud container instances, edge cloud instances), game cloud CDN bandwidth, and cloud game instances, to a certain extent, reflect the usage of cloud computing products and services by customers across the industry (including internal/related customers). They are also core indicators tracked by IDC in the game cloud usage market, especially against the backdrop of continued price fluctuations in cloud computing products and services, as well as fluctuations in usage by internal/related customers.

Research shows that in addition to emerging game companies fully utilizing public cloud computing services, traditional publishers are also continuously migrating game servers, and even some platform services, to public cloud architectures, which has also driven the usage of cloud servers to maintain a growth trend over the past three years (excluding a single period in the first half of 2022).

Competitive Landscape

As a fully competitive market, the gaming cloud involves not only internet-based cloud computing service providers (Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, AWS, Baidu AI Cloud, etc.), third-party independent service providers (Huawei Cloud, UCloud, Kingsoft Cloud, etc.), telecommunications operators (China Telecom Cloud, China Mobile Cloud), but also innovative technology service providers in vertical industries or scenarios (WeLeader Era, Haima Cloud, etc.).

Among them, internet-based cloud service providers, with a deeper understanding of user scenarios/needs, broader resource distribution, stable resource supply, have dominated multiple sub-markets and consolidated niche markets in the gaming cloud; against the backdrop of gaming going global, cloud manufacturers with telecommunications backgrounds closely follow national and regional development trends, leverage new international export routes in Hainan and convenient policies in Hainan Free Trade Port, to provide more convenience for industry customers going global. In the first half of 2024, the gaming cloud infrastructure market reached $0.72 billion, with Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Huawei Cloud, AWS, and Kingsoft Cloud having a combined market share of 83.7%; the solutions market reached $0.19 billion, with Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, AWS, Huawei Cloud, and WeLeader Era having a combined market share of 83.1%.

IDC China's Industry Cloud Service Research Manager Wei Yunfeng stated that the gaming industry clients are no longer concerned with topics such as 'whether they can move to the cloud, what methods to adopt for cloud migration, and the differences between different cloud providers,' but rather see cloud service providers as a necessary option for launching new games and as an important means to acquire new technologies. Behind the continuous expansion of the overall gaming cloud market growth rate is not only the continuous expansion of cloud server instance scale, storage space, and game download bandwidth; the rapid growth in the usage of advanced cloud services, the continuous increase in the proportion of cloud-native products and services, and the closer integration of public cloud architectures with production pipelines, also bring broader cooperation opportunities for industry customers and service providers.