By Alex Lawrence

Cloud gaming has become the killer service for 5G.” This may look like a bold statement, but Olivier Avaro believes games are, well, a game-changer in the mobile world. “It’s great for industrial applications and so on, but if you want to sell 5G to the general public you can’t sell more Spotify or more Netflix; you want something new. So there has been a nice conjunction of the planets here.”

Avaro, the CEO of Blacknut, was chatting with 6GWorld recently. The company sits in a unique position to discuss the interplay between telecom networks and the gaming industry.

“We are like Netflix but for video games, in the sense that we acquire licenses for games. With Blacknut you pay a subscription fee to get access to content. We bring gaming experiences to end users that they would not otherwise have to play on their mobile devices because it takes too much power, too much processing in the CPU, storage – all this kind of thing.”

This sounds vaguely familiar – isn’t this what services like Google Stadia do as well? Not really. Avaro explains that subscribing to Stadia gives you essentially a cloud-based console which you can then buy games for. “It’s not a content offering, it’s an infrastructure offering – a rental model for a console that’s in the cloud,” he noted. By contrast, Blacknut provides direct access to games.

Cloud, 5G and Gaming: the Planets Align

“Cloud gaming has been here for quite a while in terms of technology, but still there hasn’t been a Netflix for games as there has been a Netflix or Spotify,” Avaro noted. “The main reason is the network infrastructure was not fully ready to support this kind of service.”

This is changing, however. While Blacknut is a relatively young company, it has partnered with mobile operators in a variety of countries where, frequently, it is bundled into their 5G offering.

“There is a triangle between the users, the carrier strategies, and the gaming industry,” Avaro observed. With the rollout of 5G they are currently interacting in a virtuous cycle, he believes.

“If you look at what 5G enabled… in a region where you already had broadband deployed, it’s really enabled them to provide the same kind of experience on the move; to have the cloud gaming experience anywhere. It’s not something you could do with 3G and 4G because of the instability of the network, because of the latency… 5G in these countries has been an extension of the indoor fibre experience everywhere.

“And if you look at countries that are not well equipped with broadband or consoles, you’ve basically opened up a completely new world because 5G allows you to transform your mobile device into a gaming console. And that is really a new enabler for 5G.

Cloud gaming is one thing, but what does a new focus on edge computing do for Blacknut? Unsurprisingly, Avaro is positive about it.

“Bringing the compute closer to the end user is going to remove the latency, improve the experience, and from a general family audience we will be able to serve the requirements of an audience that is a bit more advanced in terms of experience, targeting those serious gamers and eSports.”