Cloud gaming to reach $13.5 billion in revenue by 2026

Cloud gaming accounts for around 1% of the total market cap today. By 2026, the contribution of cloud games to the industry will increase substantially.
Cloud Gaming Raises

DFC Intelligence has released its Cloud Gaming and Interactive Streaming: Analysis and Forecasts 2021-2026 report, which says cloud gaming and interactive streaming businesses will grow to $13.5 billion by 2026.

According to the report, the contribution of cloud gaming to the total market volume today is around 1%. Cloud gaming generated approximately $1.23 billion in revenue this year. The report predicts that this number will increase exponentially to $13.5 billion over the next five years.

About $10 billion of the $13.6 billion revenue will be generated by PC and console games. It is not surprising that the revenue is so high on the PC and Console side, which leads the gaming industry technologically. The remaining approximately $3.6 billion in cloud gaming revenue is shared among other platforms, primarily mobile games.

Most of the games these days adopt the subscription model. Thanks to service games (GaaS), companies continue to produce content after developing the game. The subscription model is frequently used to convert these contents into income. At this point, cloud games stand out with their features of publishing on platforms that require subscription and generating regular income. As in many examples today, users pay a monthly subscription fee to access cloud games.

Investments in cloud gaming are also increasing day by day. After companies such as Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Meta (Facebook), Netflix had recently stepped into the sector. It is possible to say that all these participants will contribute significantly to the development of cloud games with new investments and initiatives.

The report states the following on the subject:

“Currently, the bulk of revenue comes from subscription services however most of the growth will occur from products and services that are not tied to a specific subscription service.”

DFC stated that service games, user-generated content, video streaming, and interactive game systems (live stream games) would significantly contribute to growth. One of the categories expected to grow the most is non-competitive games. Apart from competitive games where every hardware and the slightest delay may be a problem, other game types can be played comfortably and pleasantly from cloud services.

DFC underlined that cloud gaming is not about the distribution of traditional high-end games:

“Cloud gaming is NOT about the distribution of traditional high-end games but instead about the opportunity to create new forms of monetizable games and interactive entertainment that can only exist using cloud delivery.”

By 2026, it is stated that cloud games, which currently have a 1% market share, will increase to around 5%, and today’s revenue will reach 13.6 billion dollars, nearly tenfold.

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