Samsung will reportedly bring its game streaming service out of beta this week
By Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge, host of the Decoder podcast, and co-host of The Vergecast.
Samsung is reportedly set to formally launch cloud gaming inside the Samsung Game Launcher on Galaxy phones at its developer conference this week on October 5th, according to the Korea Economic Daily.
The new cloud service, which has been in slowly expanding beta for a few months now, is targeted at mobile games, unlike most other cloud gaming plays, which generally offer PC and console games. It seems like Samsung’s approach is more or less designed to recover the game-install-ad revenue lost as various ad targeting restrictions have gone into place over the past few years.
That’s not just cynicism — take it from Samsung’s Jong Hyuk Woo, who told VentureBeat in August that “90% of the people who have expressed interest in a game publisher’s content, via an ad, don’t actually ever get into the game. We believe that cloud streaming can do something for mobile game publishers by completely collapsing that user acquisition funnel, getting rid of the download and installing and the visit to the App Store. It can dramatically reduce that, that funnel and the inefficiencies within that model.”
The context for all that is that Samsung is having a miserable year financially as smartphone sales slow, and it’s on the hunt to increase the revenue streams coming off the hardware it already has in people’s hands. So, ads and paid game streaming it is.
(Samsung already runs the Gaming Hub game-streaming app for its smart TVs, but that aggregates a bunch of other streaming services, like Amazon Luna and Nvidia GeForce Now, together — Game Launcher is for phones, and this appears to be a new standalone cloud gaming service within
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