Cloud Platforms Drive $12.9 Billion Games Market Ecosystem

Cloud platforms are at the core of a $12.9 billion technology ecosystem underpinning much of the games industry, according to Omdia. This ecosystem spans everything from game servers and backend tooling to analytics and LiveOps, the essential technologies that enable the modern games market.

Increasingly, cloud platforms are becoming critical enablers of emerging AI applications poised to transform the games tech landscape. The research reveals an increasingly competitive marketplace for cloud platforms in the games industry. AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure again emerge as market leaders, and are joined this year by Tencent Cloud. These four platforms each have distinct strengths and weaknesses, but have in common the ability to offer robust capabilities across a wide range of games industry use cases.

They are by no means the only relevant players in the market. Regional dynamics significantly influence the competitive landscape, with Alibaba Cloud notably emerging as a strong challenger in the Asian market. Beyond the hyperscalers, game studios are increasingly recognizing the power of hybrid strategies leveraging specialized bare metal providers such as i3D.net and servers.com. Omdia forecasts that the market for cloud-enabled operational solutions for games will grow to some $20.9 billion by 2029 (almost 7% of the entire value of the games market), with AI set to be a key growth driver.

A notable aspect of this year’s report is the addition of a new AI & machine learning category to the vendor assessment. “Support for AI use cases is now becoming a critical factor for buyers,” said Liam Deane, Principal Analyst covering games tech at Omdia. “This is something that all of the major cloud platforms have recognized, meaning that game companies already have an excellent range of solutions to choose from.”