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China’s cloud gaming market expected to quadruple in size by 2022 amid 5G push, report says

  • China’s cloud gaming market is expected to be worth at least 4 billion yuan (US$565 million) by 2022, according to a report
  • However, the industry will have to overcome technical and policy barriers before it is able to achieve its full potential, research firm CNG says

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A woman using her mobile phone walks past a vehicle covered in a China Unicom 5G advertisement in Beijing, China September 17, 2019. Photo: Reuters
Josh Ye
As China rapidly deploys 5G services nationwide, its cloud gaming market is projected to quadruple in size by 2022, according to a report by research firm CNG.

In its 2020 Cloud Game Industry Survey Report, the Beijing-based firm said it expects the country’s cloud gaming market to be worth 1 billion yuan (US$141 million) in 2020 and at least 4 billion yuan by 2022.

“Based on what we can see from financial and material investments in various fields, the next three to five years will be a period of rapid growth for cloud gaming,” CNG said in the report.

However, the industry will have to overcome technical and policy barriers before it is able to achieve its full potential, the research company said.

Cloud gaming, where games are streamed over the internet rather than from a device’s internal memory or removable media such as cartridges or discs, is one of the hottest emerging areas in mobile entertainment.

The concept has been around for years, but the more recent growth of cloud data centres and the roll-out of 5G – with peak data rates up to 100 times faster than 4G – have opened up new possibilities by reducing network latency, one of the format’s biggest problems.
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