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DTW (Digital Transformation World)

Could it be game on for telcos?

Gaming as a service has the potential to be a successful route to monetization for telcos, according to PlayGiga's Santi Magazù, who spoke at Digital Transformation World this week.

Arti Mehta
16 May 2019
Could it be game on for telcos?

Could it be game on for telcos?

Gaming has the potential to be a successful route to monetization for telcos. So, how can they tap into this burgeoning industry, the market value of which rose to nearly $135 billion at the end of 2018?

At Digital Transformation World this week, Santi Magazù, VP of Spanish gaming technology startup PlayGiga, identified ‘gaming as a service’ as a solution to the many customer problems that game players face, such as:

  • The great expense of games and consoles (which quickly become obsolete)

  • The issue of what to buy when faced with the vast choice of games available

  • Parental control on what and how long children can play

  • The massive amount of disk space games take up

  • Mobility issues of being restricted to specific areas to play


“This is a different market – this is the mass market. It’s not the hardcore gamers,” Magazù said “Hardcore gamers are happy to buy a console or a gaming PC. This is a different segment.”

The budding solutions


Magazù suggests communications service providers (CSPs) should deliver gaming as a service for this market.
“Instead of purchasing a PlayStation or a PC, and then purchasing the games, you just pay a monthly subscription,” he said. “And with that, you have unlimited access to a big catalog of games.”

He adds, “An interesting feature is that you can do that on a television, so it’s sort of a living room experience. Or [you can play] from any PC or Mac, from your room or [with 5G] anywhere. With cloud gaming, [controlling access to games] is very easy. Because you have an app on your smartphone, and you can decide which game, how long, and what type of a game your kids can play.”

Telcos can choose their own brand – Magazù gave the example of Telecom Italia which built its own gaming brand called TIMgames, launched at the end of 2017. Or they could use the brand of any vendors they work with.

In terms of hardware and software infrastructure, beyond the lengthy process of developing these themselves, they can partner with vendors’ deploy the necessary infrastructure.

Magazù proposes two strategies for the product catalog: “You could bundle this into another service. So for instance, if you are offering fiber and pay TV, you could add for free 20 to 25 games to make the customer more loyal, and upsell them to the higher tariff. Or if you’re launching a 5G tariff, you could include some games just to give a use case for 5G. Or you could have a subscription model where they pay for the service. It could be a basic catalog, or a premium catalog with different price points. This really depends on the market.”

Magazù suggests three specific areas of the technology that CSPs should focus on:

1. Latency

“You really need to have a very low latency because unlike video, which is one-way streaming, this is bidirectional. You need to send back the commands to shoot, turn left, turn right, so any additional delay can kill the experience

2. Cost

The delivery cost has to be competitive. PlayGiga virtualized the GPU, so several players could exist on the same physical infrastructure, minimizing the CapEx

3. Effort

“And then for the game publishers, you need to make sure they don't need to do anything. Game publishers hate having to adapt their games.” It should be easy to upload existing versions onto the gaming as a service platform.