Tencent to bolster its Cloud gaming business

China's Internet powerhouse Tencent would deploy more resources to enhance its Cloud gaming business, a senior executive from the company has said.

Tencent, a global gaming titan, will increase investment to boost Cloud gaming, said Jack Da, Vice President of Tencent Cloud International at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), which kicked off on Monday here.

"We have seen some cutting edge front-runner technologies ... at the GDC this time," Da said.

According to Da, Tencent Cloud brought three "killer-class" products to the event, namely its global Cloud infrastructure, Game Multimedia Engine (GME) featuring 3D positional voice for gaming and other applications, and the Global Application Acceleration Platform that reduces latency and achieves industry-leading performance for real-time interactive games and application, Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday.

The conference has attracted more than 550 exhibiting companies to the five-day professional gaming industry event, among which are Sony, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Capcom, Bungie, Epic Games and Bethesda Softworks.

Latency refers to the time it takes for a computer to send data to a server. A low latency means a more fluent gaming experience.

Tencent's global Cloud infrastructure currently operates 53 availability zones in 25 countries and regions worldwide, offering high concurrency and inter-connectivity, which reduces the latency from the Chinese city of Shanghai to Silicon Valley to only 120 ms, Da added.

"Such an ability offers a superb gaming experience for hundreds of millions of users of Tencent games," Da said.

Tencent's GME technology provides an all-in-one solution to various optimized game scenarios, including multiplayer voice chat, 3D real-time voice for gaming, voice messaging, offline voice messages and voice-to-text conversion, he explained.

Da said the GDC 2019 is a good platform where game developers and companies can follow the most trending developments in the game industry, including state-of-the-art technology, gaming ecosystem, and playing methods.

"Of course, the event also gives Tencent an opportunity to showcase its latest results in game research and development," Da said, adding that the company hopes to seek cooperation with more upstream and downstream game developers and companies.

Forecasting the future development of China's gaming firms, Da said Chinese game developers are set to go global, and that many game companies, including publicly listed ones, are striving towards that end.

Over time, growth in the gaming market will come from mobile gaming, with premium content being a core driving force, he said.

Tencent said the Chinese online game market boasts over 500 million active players and is expected to grow to $42 billion, or 27 per cent of the global market, within the foreseeable future.

It is among the more than 30 Chinese game firms that have set up booths at the global game conference. Another Chinese Internet giant Baidu also attended the GDC to showcase its engine-based simulation technology to support its Apollo self-driving project.

--IANS

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