For several months, AT&T has been pitching a compelling opportunity: What if the network let you try blockbuster games for free? The company began releasing full copies to customers, generally tying six-month subscriptions to Google Stadia. Batman: Arkham Knight And control on the internet. Next, he hinted at something more interesting: a try-before-you-buy gaming service where you try out a game directly from the search resultsif you find you like it, buy and download a full copy and pick it up where you left off.
No current cloud gaming service offers anything like that.
However, after speaking with the person who leads these AT&T initiatives, we learned that AT&T is not planning to create such a thing on its own. Of course, the company’s experiments do not necessarily point to the cloud gaming business.
“We’re not turning it into a business,” said Matthew Wallace, vice president of 5G product and innovation. “Our goal is not to provide a game application or game service; it is to provide the core network capabilities and make those capabilities accessible to game companies and customers.
I will ask the question in other ways just to be sure I understand it correctly. Want to provide that perspective before you buy that AT&T is missing? “We’re not interested in starting a game service for that,” Wallace says. Because the company has ties to Google and Microsoft, it isn’t investing in building its own cloud network to attract game publishers, nor does it have any other free games. Batman Or control line up; Wallace said AT&T is now looking for its next partner.
What does AT&T want out of the cloud game? A 25-year AT&T veteran, Wallace was willing to be loyal. His role was played in It’s only 2019, and it’s starting to be a test case for 5G – an example of a heavy but predictable network load that uses a particularly useful high-speed connection. “Gaming, especially cloud gaming, was one of the things that came to the fore,” he said.
So the job was to collaborate with game companies and find out how the network could best meet their needs. “Our focus is on what we can do in the network to ensure that the customer session has the right characteristics,” says Wallace. This increases not only radio performance, but also optimized paths for all data moving through the network, shortening the time it takes to travel “from the mobile core to the application space,” among other hops.
A little-understood fact about cloud gaming is that fast-download-speed connections aren’t fast enough. The most important delay – here, the time it takes for your keypress to make the remote server, move your game character, and make its way back to your screen. Wallace said AT&T realized that both speed and latency needed to be consistent for cloud gaming, and that consistency “really lags cellular networks.” That’s what the company is doing with these official tests.
And there, AT&T may have an idea for how to dramatically improve consistency, but it’s potentially debatable. Wallace said the company is testing quality-of-service adjustments to ensure resources are allocated to customers using cloud gaming applications. In other words, AT&T could prioritize cloud gaming usage over other types of data — which flies in the face of net neutrality principles. (Net neutrality is mostly dead in the US but lives on in California, and may be making a comeback nationally.)
Note that Wallace says AT&T has only tested this internally in the lab and in the field. “It’s not something we’re offering live yet,” he said. “We haven’t figured out how to go to market on these things, but you can envision a future where the game for the right service levels works for the customer — they don’t need to do anything different.”
I was torn. Cloud gaming should “just work” if it’s going to be successful, but AT&T seems confident it’s thinking about prioritizing payments in the “fair service levels” comment. If I had to choose, I would choose net neutrality.
