Cloud gaming is gaining great traction and we see products such as Stadia, X-Cloud and more progressing towards a healthy library of games and performance. As an advocate of Microsoft’s effort, I must say that even with a 4G connection, my experience was adequate and 5G capabilities simply open the doors to even better stability and speed one would hope. It isn’t just Google and Microsoft that are spearheading cloud gaming, China has its own platforms that have taken notice of cloud gaming and there have been a number of rollouts over the past few months that indicate that the country will see much more in the way of cloud gaming in the following few years.
China Mobile launched Ubitus as a 5G cloud gaming platform bundled with various plans and on the other side of the board sits Douyu and Huya. Douyu is a highly popular streaming platform that might be regarded as the Twitch of China in some capacity. Huya is yet another popular streaming platform and both have some serious pull in terms of viewership. Huya actually operate globally too under Nimo TV. As of 12 October, a formal statement was made to declare the merger between Douyu and Huya, which would fall under a new LLC under control of Tencent. Tencent of course own many gaming related projects and the size of such platforms folding into one sits well under the conglomerate.
The deal is of no small scale either and is set as a $6 Billion Dollar merger, a colossal amount. Tencent plans to group its areas of gaming and social media in one basket in the coming months and the current state of online gaming will only propel along with this consolidated effort. Chinese authorities will probe the merger with attention towards anti-monopoly policies.
