- Understanding the cloud vendors and their capabilities is therefore fundamental for developers, Omdia says.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are the leading games industry cloud platforms due to their advanced capabilities across the areas analysed by research firm Omdia.
The new report analyses 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.
“AWS is the longtime market leader and distinguished by its excellent infrastructure, tools, and outstanding partner ecosystem,” Liam Deane, principal analyst for games tech at Omdia, said and added that Azure also stands out both for its similarly impressive global infrastructure and its exceptionally rich set of bespoke tools and solutions for game developers.
Competitive market
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.
Deane said that 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.
Both Google and Tencent, for instance, he said 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,” he added.
The market for cloud and related services in the games industry will be worth over $12 billion in 2023 and the market for cloud services in the games vertical is increasingly competitive.
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