“Cloud gaming is a big business and even the leading platforms of today, like Sony, really believe in it,” said Sevan Kessissian during his presentation at Casual Connect USA.
Sevan Kessissian, senior VP of Strategy and Content for G-cluster, has been occupied with building cloud gaming in the last six years - fully half of his 11 year career in the games industry.
Kessissian Discovers the Cloud
His crusade to develop cloud gaming started when Kessissian saw a G-cluster cloud gaming demo, streaming data from thousand miles away that allowed an old laptop to run Resident Evil. “I knew right then that cloud gaming would change the games industry,” Kessissian predicted, “I was convinced this was the future of games.” He determined to join the G-cluster team, with a vision to evolve G-cluster from a cutting edge technology to a complete product, and to build a complete content and business ecosystem around it, and in doing so, turn cloud gaming from a intriguing tech demo to an evolution force.
An Uphill Battle
This was way back in 2008. People had no confidence in cloud gaming, and in many cases little knowledge of what it was or its practical application. The biggest challenge to the business at that time was proving to ISP’s and carriers that cloud gaming was not only a current reality, but was also a commercially viable business. “Most people simply didn’t believe, or perhaps want to believe, that it could work,” Kessissian said, “The ‘conventional wisdom’ professed that the hardware and software tech performance, cost, and internet bandwidth availability were barriers to building a healthy content ecosystem…and that just wasn’t true.” He admits that the ecosystem has benefits and weaknesses, like any game content ecosystem. “Different is not the same as unviable, however,” he explains, “Put the right content into the right ecosystem, with the right economics and value chain, and you can create something unique and valuable for everyone involved.”
Kessissian’s persistence and evangelism paid off. It took three years of hard work to convince carriers and game studios that cloud gaming was viable. Finally, in October 2010, G-cluster launched with French operator SFR, offering three million cloud-enabled boxes to games consumers in France. They loved it.
Games have a Multi-Device Future
Kessissian sees seamless multi-device gaming continuing to expand over the next few years in the games industry, and believes that cloud gaming technologies will be at the core of this experience. Consumers will be able to access content, profile, and purchase data and history from any connected device, seamlessly picking up, stopping, and then re-engaging with content as they move from location to location and device to device - much like we see today with streaming video and audio content.
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