New Omdia research has for the first time benchmarked the leading cloud platforms in the games industry. Newly published on Omdia’s Games Tech Intelligence Service, the Market Radar: Cloud Platforms for Games 2023 finds that the market for cloud and related services in the games industry will be worth over $12bn in 2023. The new report analyzes in detail the capabilities of the seven leading players in this rapidly growing market. Omdia has assessed each platform’s capacity to address a range of key games industry use cases.

Game development workflows are moving more than ever to the cloud, with game server infrastructure also playing an increasingly critical role. Additionally, cloud platforms are emerging as key providers of a range of game development tools. Understanding the cloud vendors and their capabilities is therefore fundamental for developers, and also for tech vendors whose products have to compete, or integrate, or both, with cloud platforms.

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This new Omdia analysis, the first of its kind to focus specifically on the games industry, finds that the leading cloud platforms for games are AWS and Microsoft Azure, thanks to their advanced capabilities across the areas analyzed. “AWS is the longtime market leader and distinguished by its excellent infrastructure, tools, and outstanding partner ecosystem,” commented Liam Deane, Principal Analyst covering Games Tech at Omdia, “but Azure also stands out both for its similarly impressive global infrastructure and its exceptionally rich set of bespoke tools and solutions for game developers.”

The research also underlines the increasingly competitive market for cloud services in the games vertical. Both Google and Tencent, for instance, leverage their deep expertise in games to provide an excellent range of solutions for game development and operations, and each of the remaining vendors also has distinct strengths able to appeal to particular segments of the market. “More than ever, buyers in the games industry must carefully consider all their options when it comes to selecting a cloud platform, while tech vendors need to be aware of how their products interact with the growing range of cloud platforms targeting the games industry,” Deane noted.

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