Intense Competition Among Gaming Cloud Platforms

New research from Omdia has found increasingly intense competition among cloud platforms in the games industry. The report found that AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are the leading cloud platforms for games, with Google Cloud now ranked among the market leaders for the first time. Increasing competition is also reflected in the expanded range of vendors covered in the report, which this year features new additions in i3D.net and servers.com.

The cloud continues to play a key and growing role in the games market, with both game servers and cloud-based development workflows remaining critical use cases. Meanwhile, cloud platforms have become key providers of a range of game development tools and solutions and are also positioning themselves as key players in the rollout of generative AI in games. Market leaders AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are not only the most widely used clouds by games companies, but also consistently offer outstanding infrastructure and the most complete suites of tools, services, and integrations.

Particularly notable is the inclusion of Google Cloud among the market leaders for the first time. “Google Cloud’s offering for the games industry continues to grow more impressive year on year, and Omdia’s data clearly shows that game developers are rewarding it with more of their business”, commented Liam Deane, Principal Analyst covering games technology at Omdia.

The research also underlines the increasingly diverse range of cloud services available in the games vertical. “The newly-features vendors, i3D.net and servers.com, are both excellent examples of the growing ability of specialized, non-hyper scaler vendors to provide compelling and differentiated offerings to the games market”, Deane noted. Overall, Omdia estimates that the market for cloud and related services in games will be worth some $15.6 billion in 2024, making this one of the largest and most critical areas of games technology.