Panel: How we Deliver Experiences that Matter Through Streaming?

[Music] all right welcome to how we deliver experiences the matter through streaming I just want to take a minute to let you guys all introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your roles at your companies all right hi so my name is Pascal de Brooke head of customer service at hatch entertainment and we are a cloud-based game streaming service hey how's it going I'm Thor Gundersen I'm the co-founder CEO at mainframe industries we are a pan Nordic game studio founded by a group of X CCP remedy and next games veterans making what we hope to be is the next generation of online games on the cloud

hi I'm Steve the founder and CEO of a company called ant stream and we deliver some of the best games you've ever known retro games through a cloud streaming subscription service hello I'm Armand I'm in charge of business development at Lima sky the guys behind doodle jump hi there I'm Erica Brzezinski I'm the chief commercial officer at poly stream we are a command streaming technology and platform powering up people services at scale hi I'm Philippe Rowan and where the robot cache were a storefront on the blockchain allowing for the resale of games for the first time a retail online awesome cool so for this ok so to start off is streaming a fad or is it here long term I think is the question that people want to ask well I'm gonna start I think it's it's definitely here for the long term I think you just have to

look at every other media entertainment space where it's become dominant already in certain segments but I think it's going to take a lot longer than people expect TV it took 10 years to go from a standing start to dominating but I'm only then in a sort of under 35 segment and we'll see the same in games it's going to be a multi-year journey to be big if you jump man no I mean I mean I think you're absolutely right it's it's with music you've seen the sins with music and movies already you'll see parallel at the moment you could get CDs and mp3s but then the streaming of Spotify came online we're in a transition period we're in I guess an early adopter period for gaming right now but I think you're going to without a doubt see that's become mainstream when it becomes more convenient than or less painful and downloading again yes I'll make a super

old-school analogy which will date me horribly so currently game developers have to develop before VHS and Betamax there might be other formats out there speaking purely from a development perspective being able to target a single runtime when you develop for the cloud has massive cost and complexity efficiencies and I think that that is maybe one aspect of why streaming will become such a natural option as we go forward and as we see the infrastructure roll out to support the games of the future I guess my turn I'm along with all my colleagues with one little exception streaming is happening not denying it but I think it's gonna be really different than what's happening in linear media film and television I think there's gonna be this really split demographic of those who I want my game I'm downloading my game and it's not just a question of today's streaming is kind of funky and I don't have my 5g I'm you know down the pipe etc so yes it's here but it's not going to be here in my

opinion in the same way as film and TV okay just to go further from that why do you think it's streaming is particularly important in the games industry compared to other forms of media I mean I mean from my point of view the big advantage for streaming from a consumer point of view is accessibility and user experience actually it's people think of streaming about user experience about latency but it's not just about that it's if I'll use a book analogy you know I love having a paper-based book in my hands you know that's a that's a that's a great experience but actually a better experience for me is to be able to order my book online have it instantly have it instantly on my phone have it read to me when I'm in the car and that's what streaming does is it allows you to access the games wherever you are and instantly probably add to that as well the unlike TV and music where it's still TV and music but the features are super cool so shared playlists are a thing that you can do CDs box sets that

also play and start and stop on different devices or something that you can do at VHS but with games you'll be able to develop experiences and games that you could never have locally installed because you'll have the power of the cloud we don't know exactly what that is but force having a having a good crack pointing us in the right direction I think that's gonna be the key difference there will be experiences that you could not have if they weren't cloud-based yeah I would have to agree with that actually that I don't think it has actually been been stated yet like we don't have that cloud based gaming hit yet at this at this point however I mean the future is gonna show what that is going to be well what we can see is indeed that there is massive amounts of data being consumed by users right now it's constantly growing operators are having second thoughts about data caps I mean I'm lucky enough to live in Finland so we don't have any data caps so I can just stream the whole time and will not

be billed extra but I think it will also have an effect on user acquisition like the instant play kind a feature is gonna gonna revolutionize in a sense the user acquisition funnel that we currently have where users are seeing an ad downloading the game and then noticing that hey it is it's not something that I actually wanted to play and with instant play that's gonna become yeah it's just to quickly check onto that I think in addition to instant play which is an obvious benefit of the cloud the frequency of engagement that you can realize by you know for example in our case we're creating a game that is delivering a sort of triple-a immersive experience that simply would be impossible on mobile or in current generation mobile if we start from the position of a larger screen like console or PC to be able to replicate that experience on mobile gives you many more touch points throughout the day and gives you completely different engagement loops that become possible because game is also available on mobile and I think that is in addition to instant

play that frequency of engagement and ultimately retention becomes a critical factor and a big game changer from cloud yeah to be on the flip side yes yes and yes technology wise we talked about it five years away but at the end of the day do I want to play all of my games and all of my platforms no I mean yeah get the casual guy match three I could play on any platform I'm not playing my RTS or my deep RPG on my phone I'm sorry old school so I think what people are not evaluating are not properly giving the priority which is it's gonna take not just a long time technology wise you're gonna have to create special content you're one of the few that's cool that's awesome but then you get all this great content we have in the past that's not gonna really work for that in my opinion which is why look we said the PC platform was dead remember that before valve back in the day for those of you have been around it's dead well long live PC right so that's that's my point that's a very good point thinking about the the limitations of streaming obviously we have a limited streaming

both song-like through the internet and through mobile data etc but do you think that's viable to the average consumer that doesn't have access to that because it's you know it's very accessible but obviously not a lot of people are gonna be using it on a global scale yeah I think we're actually here at the beginning of off of this era like we're seeing that mobile operators are investing very heavily right now in 5g infrastructure for instance we're talking about investing about 1 trillion US dollars by 2030 that's a massive amount of money obviously well rome wasn't built in one day I don't think 5g networks are gonna be building one day either I think it's it's it's more wait-and-see kind of thing right now but if we don't capitalize on what is going on right now then we will never get there actually like it's the same as like what if we would not invest in a space program and then also then the Russians are there with Sputnik so it happened before like let's not have that

happen again Danny we could totally continue to curate our music over a USB connection to our iPod you know that would be you know we control our own collection that way I mean is look you look at the old ways of doing things I mean videos seemed like an impossible application for mobile until 4G happened and that enabled a completely new swathe of companies and value creation I think it would Jack the point of 5g is absolutely going to do the same thing when that will happen certainly not around the corner I mean the best educated guess is our meaningful consumer penetration within the next three to five years so this is still a ways out but if you're preparing for that eventualities now is a good time to start certainly if you're creating original content for the medium interesting because I had a conversation with someone earlier who couldn't really distinguish the difference between 4G or 5g and obviously it's a lot more expensive and but there's no way to really explain it to a casual user so what would you kind of say to people who are cynical of this you know tech movement and you know how

it differs I've just one comment I had a discussion with with a guy that's in actually car making and he told me that everybody is investing into autonomous driving all the car makers and what they need is 5g so I think it's going to happen a lot quicker then everybody believes or things so is it gonna be three or five years I don't know but I think it's gonna become a lot quicker so you know you can't be cynical about it if I ya know that's perfectly reasonable so what problems do you think that streaming solves storage I think it depends on the content I mean you for you you're doing these big games that you wouldn't be able to deliver on a normal content on a normal device for us we have a thousand retro games and actually I have five different devices I don't want to be downloading those on all my different devices so as I said it

said it's about convenience and accessibility yeah we're not talking purely from consumer perspective or also from business owner perspective because I think from especially operators side I think there is a definite benefit towards game streaming there like I said they're putting this massive amounts of money into developing this infrastructure and when these operators were investing very heavily in 4G they actually never saw their return of investment back like it's like hey we're building this really great thing and people started using it and all of a sudden it's like Oh where's our value proposition here now what are we going to get back and 5g actually might be that that is why on our side at least attached entertainment we have these partnerships with mobile operators where we are actually seeing that we are the thing that they can sell to end-users like this is the gaming surface that you get on your mobile subscription and that allows them to actually recoup at least part of the investments that they have made into the infrastructure and I think I think there are similar things like that going on

and at least from the from the business perspective that would be to take away so I think the obvious is you're gonna save on hardware you're gonna save on hassle you're gonna have all these good things but it might be in to some dangers what about your personal information what about your data what about control I was reading this article about the negative latency that Google is gonna do on stadia I'm freaking out you mean they're not they're controlling what I'm gonna gameplay next which means they know what I'm thinking so there's a huge issue there and Europeans are very about their private data so I don't I don't hear anybody addressing that when the one that when it's on the internet it's bad enough now it's in somebody's Google Cloud think about that I think furthering that as well there's also a worried that you know you're paying for these subscription services and you're paying to play these games and yeah once they've gone how do you continue that I suppose so I I'm in the online games business there's no way to play a game without a online connection so ownership of the game is one thing if you're playing a single-player game of course so that's as a factor when it

comes to privacy I would pause it that one of the biggest advantages for a game developer is the fact that you are streaming video frames essentially there is no client that's when it comes to hacking the client for example in dealing with all of the sort of problems you have in a a traditional client sort of environment that most of that goes away when you begin streaming frames so it's actually a sea change in terms of how games will work and how they'll actually lead to a more enjoyable experience particularly for our line games yeah and also say there's an advantage to the publishers as well I mean without down we have games on an stream that the publishers just wouldn't have allowed us to do as a download because they were too easy to copy and distribute we're streaming there is no piracy it gives the publisher control over their content so I guess a company that's that's big like moving into the streaming space right now is Google with with Google stadia and the launch wasn't perfect it

had some problems so do you think that that ship has kind of sailed or you know can Google pull this around and kind of make something good from that this product I think I can answer that having been on the inside of something about ten years ago to do with TV streaming so they've got a marketing problem they went up on stage and said this is gonna be the best thing since anything it's gonna have everything it's gonna be amazing you're gonna be blown away and then it wasn't it's just like and so they've they paid the flame price for that right well they should have done as well Google are good at doing it's like here's a free beater it's low-key check it out a few regions will test and learn and in about two years we'll see if there's a product but the problem they've got is that it's a PR problem at the moment you know they wouldn't be investing they won't have high jade they wouldn't be investing in studios they know it takes four or five years to create a triple-a game which means we're not actually gonna see anything really interesting for four and five years but

they do have a PR problem yeah I think people get nervous with Google as well perhaps because they have a history of dabbling in things and then dropping them when they don't work out but I think that's there's thinking enough into this to make it work I you know I personally believe there'll be a major player in the industry and the other thing is to think about what Google do Google are a data and an advertising company so I don't know what models they've got planned but I'm pretty sure advertising will feature it at some point just a wrap-up on what you said you know we took Google glass and what you talked about I think I think they're gonna be DOA on this one no they're not going away they're Google but when they go deep and big on something it works search engine think how they did that right you didn't hear about it right away work on the email all that stuff Google cloud all that fantastic every time yeah that one that or yeah that one is pretty bad but in Amazon and games let's talk about that right the same thing so you've got these people are getting in but they they fail to understand the fundamental

right people but maybe they don't put the right structure in place the fundamentals three to four years five years you want a Triple A you want Microsoft got it Sony gets it right that's what they're missing so they're not going away but this particular iteration like the glasses obviously Microsoft and Sony are both gearing up to launch new consoles this year how much of a part do you think she will play in the lifespan of these next consoles I think this is where you see the kind of early adopter in the transition so I would imagine that what it will be it'll be the two will run in parallel you'll be able to download your games or if you want to stream them instantly you'll do that and I believe you could do that on PlayStation now anyway actually I'm the feedback I have actually that's a fantastic service so yeah I think that's how that to play out and I guess whether this is the last generation of consoles depends how many people shift over and they'll measure the playing patterns and take it from there but my guess is these will be the last generation of consoles now I would I would pause it actually

there was someone I would say a couple of speakers ago who was starting to talk about you know these different devices coming in into play I think when you think about the world in the future where it's a cloud first device and Intel talked a lot about cloud first devices coming in the future and Dell showed that thing off a CS I know that was like a sort of PC switch type thing but the logical conclusion is what do you actually need us we need a great screen you know the technology we have you need a good GPU but it's not expensive to have a good GPU attached to a screen you can have a $50 device that can play amazing games if you're plugged into the cloud so I would say I don't think devices are going away I think even if you look at stay you really want a chromecast out for a right to do that probably that's still a device I just think the form factors and the concepts will change as you sort of rebalance and go okay my library's in the cloud I'm powering things I can only

do in the cloud but I still want a thing and there is a wonderful simplicity for consumers to just go here's a thing plug the thing in the thing works it's kind of worked for a long time I don't I don't say it completely going away I think you're right there'll be devices but I just don't think we'll have 50 terabyte hard drive sat in them it'll be yeah just I think there is obviously a bright future for performance devices that can do local processing why would you do video streaming if you do command screaming streaming if the device supports it you're off X costs are lower by doing so etc it just makes good business sense so I think you'll see a hybrid future where there's a slot so you know there's a slow migration and possibly there's always sort of this mixed model but fundamentally from from the consumers perspective you shouldn't have to care what your end

device is it behind the scenes it's powered by a poly stream awesome but if it's a pure video streaming - for example a mobile device that wouldn't otherwise be able to render that that is you know a great argument for video streaming so it'll be kind of mixed I think going forward so let's go back to what you were saying you could even look at how Google right now when you get it I think you have to use a USB cable for some devices and it's like you don't for the chromecast super complicated and that's Google and that's today I think yeah again we're going there for streaming but there's something amazing and it's not even the hard core the midcourt likes that everything in a box because if you're hardcore you go on Steam right you download your PC each week your whatever your card your video card etc for me I'm more of a mid core actually I like okay everything in there is gonna work it went through the Sony or the Microsoft System I'm done it's gonna be a long time before somebody figures out how to get every single one of your handsets to work together with your TV screens and everything else cuz you've got 30 different brands it's a challenge just moving on from that something I've

just thought of I think PC gaming has come quite a long way that there's kind of been a resurgence and then eSports is kind of it's driving that the PC side again do you think that the rise in streaming and less need for hardware among general consumers is something that any of these hardware companies a manufacturing company should be aware of is that something that's going to impact them people buying less pcs because they can just stream it's gonna happen I think people are gonna buy stuff right it's just we've heard a lot about this and they're like people might have said oh people are not gonna buy high fives and expensive high fives anymore because I can just stream everything to my phone I've got a Spotify phone people are paying $600 for four so most devices they're paying a thousand bucks for the Sonos you know massive home set up the main two thousand bucks for a you know Bang & Olufsen one it people are gonna still buy stuff so I think it might look different in my you know have a slight different form

factors that have a different market they're going for it might just be like an amazing screen with a great controller but it's still gonna be 400 bucks and they're still going to be certainly the best buy for for Christmas right so I don't think stuff's going away I agree and disagree I think I think you're right but in the same ways right now I you know there's a lot of people still the final right but by far the masses would prefer Spotify in there and the subscription service or Apple music you know a subscription but you'll still want to consume it on the thing that's great true but I think the mass-market don't bias on us that's that's a smaller segment of the market that are more passionate about the music yeah I think look who's buying a digital cameras today right I mean yes you have a point but the flip side is you're right I think to a certain degree there's gonna be some equipment going

away from me but it's all about it's got to work really really well right if you're gonna do away with digital cameras that whatever phone you have got to be crazy you know 4k whatever same thing with gaming that's the part I have a diff more difficult time you guys are more visionary than I am I'm seeing like wow how am I getting the the low latency I'm again those graphics that experience yeah there'll be new stuff but that's the part where it is always gonna be stuff to buy on the gaming side I'm committed to that there's gonna be stuff for a long time yeah if I give one basic use case which is in mobile gaming so I don't know what the replacement cycles are these days but they've been lengthening over the past few years people are not renewing every two years as they used to just a handful of years ago so that might be because kind of the price performance is kind of at a point where you're able to do most of the things you want to do if you're doing a very high-end mobile game that's kind of taxing the CPU GPU on that device you'll drain your battery in less than two hours if you're streaming that game the battery consumption is that kin to

watching Netflix so suddenly a mobile gaming actually has a use case on all mobile phones becomes much more compelling that it is currently for trying to play for example Call of Duty on your iPhone yeah I think there's still a novelty and physical like you said like vinyl is come back in it in a big way and I'd like to you know I'm a bit of a retro gamer and I like the idea of getting out my retro console and playing it as it I'd like to play it but the reality is that how often am I gonna do that how often is anybody gonna do that when they can just you know stream it instantly and that was why we created an stream because monied ifferent devices and actually do I want 20 different consoles under my TV there are purists that do and there appears that build these incredible rooms that have every cartridge and things that you can imagine but again it's not accessible to most people and that was where the cloud we pick the cloud because it made it accessible we can deliver it to everybody yeah and I like that and then you know those old games that people can't afford to buy because they're like a thousand pounds on a cartridge you know they're accessible to everyone so

it's um different stuff that's not otherwise accessible yeah that's why it's great but a lot of these games are accessible what do you think needs to happen over the next year or so for streaming to be more accepted and easier among the general consumer well the obvious answer would be 5g networks I mean it would just help other than that I would also have to say that it's it's most likely going to be more powerful GPUs that would actually help us well battery life most likely as well there is a lot of technical aspects that we actually would still need to consider before we actually can go full mass with these kind of things but well it's the same story as what we were talking about before like give it time because we might not be there fully yet at this point yeah I'd say a year is a tough time horizon to say something like this because you really want scale right if

you're a publisher you want millions of people to be able to use your game and the services and the technology is just not there you know if you are a gamer you want millions of people playing the game so that you can play with your friends and there's a big community and all that stuff so I think the best thing that can happen this year is you know we get season things that we haven't seen before that can only be done in the cloud which gets people excited and it doesn't have to be games right it could be quasi game experiences or things that are interactive 3d that again you can't really do without streaming them and that's going to push the service providers the service providers are going to push the technology providers and you know it's going to push the the network providers it's a chain right but the chain always starts with a consumer or a player at the end that wants to interact with a game or something else and the more scale you have the more it's going to push everyone further up the chain to raise their game yeah I

just say I mean just a 5g network doesn't help I mean it needs to be rolled out I mean we're still running today into issues where we can't make a phone call because we don't have network connection right and if you as a consumer don't have the flawless experience latency whatever then it's just not so that means stuff and I think in the first place yeah to me in a year it's like you said nothing but the way it's gonna work is make a triple a game that's amazing and exclusive to streaming that's when it's gonna happen for me you make a game I can only play on streaming and it's triple-a to the Sony model do the whatever model do the Nintendo model I'm on it you got me all right before I open up to an audience Q&A do you guys want to add anything else okay just one last point on that last question the other thing is I think as an industry or people do exactly what we have to pitch it right if we pitch it today or something you can play anywhere users gonna get frustrated because it's just not true if you're out in the middle of nowhere you're not going to be able to stream your games if you position it as something that's the second screen activity in your home and you're honest

with the users they need a good Network I think they'll embrace it any questions audience questions anybody there's yep one behind you yeah I guess I've this is a question for you Thor but so I guess you know with the instant play it reduces a lot of friction but but also when you mean that that loss of friction cuts the other way to where you may only have a couple of seconds of your players attention before they get bored and do something else and click away again and you know you're working on you know big triple-a experience native in the cloud how are you thinking about how to sort of suckle as players in into a very deep and involving experience you know sort of when you only have a few seconds to work with so I generally don't subscribe to the model that if you make them pay 60 bucks you've given them some sort of a buyer's remorse so it keeps them for

two hours I think you should be able to capture your players whatever your core loop is I can only speak to our case we're creating an MMO we have a background in that space and social onboarding social you know connections are a critical kind of moment that we try to engineer into our game as quickly as we can but yeah I mean yeah you know your game should be able to withstand five minutes of gameplay yeah that's just good game design sorry question here on on business model because I'm hearing a lot about tech and a lot about content you know some time will solve both of those as well as market but what are we thinking in terms of business model because if you look at the evolution in the game industry you know we go from package to subscription and and now it seems like two micro transactions when you get phone which you know becomes pervasive and PC and console etc but what about what does cloud mean for monetization sounds like a lot of thought around it is it's back

to subscription again or back to package again around it if you look at Google littering both with stadia so you know what do you guys think in the future of monetization is so I'm getting out to this from the old world again because once you go into streaming at scale and once you're OTT and that friction is gone it's not just either or your world becomes like a Rubik's Cube of okay this is ad funded this is pay-as-you-go then there's a bit of in-app then I've got some sponsorship stuff and then you start to build in the social layers and then actually the monetization there's no one answer and that it gets it gets complicated right but it also means that there's a huge opportunity for lots of different niches and you know is it is it that you're monetizing purely through the advertising or the underlying data for the for the usage it's all it's all to play for but there's it's not there's not gonna be a straightforward answer but it does mean that you can do these

things because if you're just doing a 60 buck packaged game and there's too much jeopardy you spent 20 million developing it you can't innovate if you can go to market and it's frictionless and you can go over the top you can take a risk especially if you have an established model like if you are EA or if you are someone else you can take a risk right you can do it maybe with a different brand you can do it in a different region and take things from there yeah I mean I'll just add a point on the subscription because obviously that's what we do I think you know we've seen a big shift or subscriptions my concern is you get subscription fatigue if there's too many of them so I think it's really important that we don't find everybody thinks well actually now I can deliver clout clout or games directly myself by streaming and I'm just gonna slap a subscription model on the front because if everybody is doing that we're all gonna lose you need to have just a few key platforms that are offering kind of

all-inclusive content yeah I would say whatever your thoughts on Google's launched in the last few months I do like their business model the fact that you can have a subscription that over time will be something like you know a game pass or a PlayStation now coupled with the fact that you can buy a la carte any game that's you know available on the platform you know it's it's effectively you're getting effectively the same experience because it's also the PC and console content at the moment that will change over time so as we start to see more original content show up you know that it'll be kind of an interesting space I don't think it's all a subscription at all it's going to be much more multifaceted than that yeah I was surprised that Google did because their model seems really bad for the consumer right it's like I'm charging you ten dollars and I'm gonna make you pay full price for the games and right now I've got access to one game is it it's that's about it so I think what's happening you're seeing Google dealing with the publishers even though the game

a lot of money the publishers I said you're not gonna get to stream my game for free and give me 20 cents on the dollar no you're gonna give me the whole thing so I think it's gonna have to evolve right now Google is learning though you know the hard way yeah the publishers don't want to lose out and the consumer so there's no reason as a consumer for me to do that game I'll just go buy on the PC that's the problem right now yeah so they claim they also claim you had ten other features so I'm all I'm all in but yeah you right now they have one game

anymore any more questions yeah a single one left and we can go to the pub question that is the future of streaming services in cross-platform or they focus on the specific platforms and devices so games need to be designed for their best control types of that platform whether that's touch controller or keyboard so do people actually wanna play there these console games on their mobile with a controller or really terrible touch input and will developers even bother adapting their games for all those platforms so this is something we come across a lot because we have a lot of games which weren't even design you know with design for touch screens even came out and we have to make the controls

work on those and we do have some games actually are better on touch take something our operation wolves I can tap screen I can swipe for grenades it's better than it was in the arcade there others that don't translate so well I I think actually comes back to your point about devices I think if you look what Razer are doing with their kind of mobile joysticks I think I add a controller to a mobile phone and you've actually got a great experience III think it's totally depends on whether you're talking about catalog content or a new content and indeed I'm sure that there will be a raft of games that are made simply for one screen so it's the value of doing it still holds even though you're only targeting mobile and for example or even if you're only targeting keyboard a mouse but you know if you can pull off something that has multiple user experience is great but that's more complicated

I almost made a game for Gizmodo back in the day [Applause] [Music]