There's a load time arms race in the video game industry
Writing about the video game industry in the last year has meant taking wide detours through the world of metaverse platforms (ugh) mobile games (not my cup of tea but always neat) and cloud computing platforms (something I've been excited about since the days of Gaikai).
These segments of the industry have different business challenges and goals, but there's a common thread that developers have brought up in conversation: the universal need for faster and faster load times.
The battle over load times is a familiar one for game developers. As long as console and PC games have been prominent, devs have struggled to reign in 2D and 3D engines to get the most graphical performance out of limited hardware capabilities. Audiences in different genres have had different tolerance levels for long load times, but the trend has always tacked towards more speed as soon as possible.
That trend has accelerated with the rise of fast-loading social mediaapps. Developers are now fighting for players' attention on their phones, even if the user isn't playing a mobile game. Graphical rendering technology is very fast these days, but if your game has a load time beyond 10-15 seconds (maybe even faster), your players' attention might wander back to Twitter or TikTok.
Companies across the video game business are already reacting. There's more and more chatter among developers about how to get players into their games as fast as possible.
Where is this having the most impact? Let's take a look.
We recently highlighted Google's new Gamesnacks platform, which delivers simple HTML5-based games to users around the globe. The platform's biggest wins have been in regions where the population has a growing interest in playing games, but the hardware and
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