NVIDIA Corp revealed a few days ago that Activision Blizzard's game lineup will officially withdraw from its cloud game service GeForce Now. This makes it difficult for players to play masterpieces such as "call of Duty: modern Warfare", "hearthstone Legend", "Watch Pioneer" and "Diablo 3" on NVIDIA Corp's platform.

Just a week ago, these game masterpieces were still on NVIDIA Corp's game list, and Activision Blizzard's temporary "break" gave NVIDIA Corp's cloud game business a "blow" as soon as it was launched.

In theory, NVIDIA Corp's model is a "win-win": users can take their existing game libraries anywhere, and game publishers can get the same revenue at the same time.

However, NVIDIA Corp's idea still needs to be tested by practice, and at the present stage, it will still be under pressure from the inherent game pattern. NVIDIA Corp, who has been playing a basic service role in the game industry, has jumped to the stage to operate. More uncertainties still need to be examined.

NVIDIA Corp still moved Activision Blizzard's "Cheese".

Unlike Alphabet Inc-CL C's Stadia, NVIDIA Corp does not plan to use his game lineup to create a console-like experience. NVIDIA Corp will be bound to a Steam, Epic or Battle.net account so that players can play the games they buy on this third-party platform.

In other words, NVIDIA Corp will not have his own game library, and players still need to buy games on the original game platform to play. His monthly payment of $4.99 is to make the environment in which they play games easier and more casual. As long as the network environment is smooth, you can get rid of the high hardware threshold to play games.

In this mode, NVIDIA Corp outputs his value in machine learning, high-performance computing, video streaming rendering and cloud game streaming services. To put it simply, NVIDIA Corp moved a piece of hardware graphics card revenue to the cloud, turning players into monthly payments to rent high-performance cloud graphics cards and other technical services.

Although in terms of superficial business interests, NVIDIA Corp will not have a direct conflict with companies like V Society and Activision Blizzard-V Society and Activision Blizzard continue to sell their own games, NVIDIA Corp only provides basic cloud game services. and the relatively loose and mobile game environment will also bring new gamers to companies like Activision Blizzard.

However, once this business model takes shape, NVIDIA Corp's cloud service platform will become the first entrance to these new traffic, while game platforms such as V Society and Activision Blizzard will become secondary entrances, receiving "second-hand traffic".

With the continuous expansion of the game out of the circle, the new traffic should not be underestimated, only in maintaining the role of core gamers, it is easy to become a "game store" in the entire game industry.

Activision Battle. net has its own Battle. net platform, which is also one of the core businesses of Activision Blizzard. Its inability to directly obtain user traffic is bound to shake the development of the company's important business. Judging from some previous actions of Activision Blizzard, I don't want to make a major adjustment to Battle.net business in the short term. Moreover, through the recent development of mobile games, Activision Blizzard still attaches great importance to the new traffic and the public vision of the game.

But Activision Blizzard doesn't want to get new traffic in a relatively drastic way. At least protect the existing core business. Even today, when the proportion of third-party game platform sales is becoming more and more obvious, Activision Blizzard still takes a conservative attitude, insisting on releasing games on its own Battle.net platform and isolating it from third-party platforms, even though its old rival EA has let its Origin platform open its account with Steam.

The "invisible restriction" of the inherent game console framework

In addition to Activision Blizzard, Capcom,EA,Konami,Remedy,Rockstar and Square, INC. Enix and other companies also withdraw from many games. Compared with Activision Battle.net business, other companies have few hidden worries, and the withdrawal of Capcom,EA,Konami and other companies is directly related to the current game console framework.

At present, the major game console manufacturers Microsoft Corp and Sony Group Corp both use the chips of NVIDIA Corp's direct competitor AMD, resulting in the two major companies will give priority to the use of AMD technology in cloud games. Alphabet Inc-CL C's Stadia is also based on the chip provided by AMD. This makes many third-party game content providers worry about the current mainframe game framework and suspend their support for the NVIDIA Corp platform.

Therefore, NVIDIA Corp at this stage lobbied game companies to join their own platform in the process, in fact, still can not avoid the competition with the old rival AMD. Moreover, Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc-CL C, two cloud game platforms supported by AMD technology, are actively expanding their own territory. On the same day Activision Blizzard and NVIDIA Corp parted ways, Microsoft Corp and Samsung reached an intention to work together to develop cloud-based game streaming services, and xCloud is likely to launch Samsung devices in the future.

Compared with AMD still doing invisible basic support work, NVIDIA Corp chose to jump onto the stage to attack the specific business, and made a big bet to operate.

NVIDIA Corp bought Israeli chipmaker MellanoxTechnologies for $6.8 billion on December 19, 2019. The latter is a provider of end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand Smart + connected solutions and services for server, storage, and hyperconverged infrastructure.

When NVIDIA Corp acquired Mellanox, he took a fancy to the latter's ability in data center technology and so on. After the completion of the acquisition, NVIDIA Corp's strength in high-performance computing and cloud computing will be further enhanced, and it is clear that NVIDIA Corp is not satisfied with the invisible role.

Although it is easy to get users by jumping to the front of the stage, the obstacles they face are several times that of the previous state. On the contrary, in some areas where there is no established console game framework, NVIDIA Corp's business is going quite smoothly.

NVIDIA Corp and Tencent jointly launched the START cloud game service on December 18, 2019. It is not clear how NVIDIA Corp will participate in the platform. In the statement, NVIDIA Corp only mentioned the provision of GPU technical support, except for most of it was led by Tencent. The two companies also revealed the establishment of a "Game Joint Innovation Lab", which will "jointly explore new applications of AI in the game, game engine optimization, including efficient game lighting baking solutions based on NVIDIA Corp GPU platform and OptiX, to improve game production efficiency. "

As a leading company in the social and gaming field in the Chinese market, Tencent's ability to control users is oriented to the entire social system, not Activision Blizzard confined to the game circle, and will not be afraid of NVIDIA Corp's construction of the traffic system. Moreover, the Chinese game market with mobile games as the main body will not let NVIDIA Corp encounter the "invisible sniper" of AMD.

Conclusion

Cloud games have become the future development trend of the game industry, which has basically become a consensus. NVIDIA Corp, who has technical advantages in the field of GPU, has a certain competitive advantage to build a cloud game platform.

Moreover, in the construction of the business model, NVIDIA Corp did not rush to build a game content library that he is not good at, using his own technological advantages to position it in basic machine learning, high-performance computing, video streaming rendering and cloud game streaming services, to play a relatively comprehensive role for game production companies.

Theoretically, it can help Activision Blizzard expand user traffic, but it was rejected by Activision Blizzard because the expanded traffic will be "filtered" by NVIDIA Corp, while the withdrawal of other game companies is limited by the current mainframe game framework dominated by AMD. In other words, NVIDIA Corp and AMD, the old rivals who love and kill each other, will also launch various positions in the field of cloud games.

The most important thing for NVIDIA Corp at this stage is not to reach cooperation with how many game development companies, but to reach strategic alliances with Internet companies such as Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc-CL C, Amazon.Com Inc, Tencent and so on.