Samsung is reported to formally launch cloud gaming within the Samsung Game Launcher on Galaxy phones at its developer conference this week on October 5. according to the Korea Economic Daily.
The new cloud service, which has been in slowly expanding beta for a few months, is aimed at mobile gaming, unlike most other cloud gaming, which generally offers games for PC and consoles. It seems Samsung’s approach is more or less designed to recoup game install ad revenue lost as various ad targeting restrictions have been implemented in recent years.
That’s not just cynicism: take it from Samsung’s Jong Hyuk Woo, Who said VentureBeat in August that “90% of people who have expressed interest in a game publisher’s content, through an ad, never actually enter the game. We believe cloud streaming can do something for mobile game publishers by completely collapsing the user acquisition funnel, eliminating downloading, installing, and visiting the App Store. “You can dramatically reduce that, that funnel and the inefficiencies within that model.”
The context for all this is that Samsung is having a financially miserable year as smartphone sales slow, and it’s looking to increase revenue streams from the hardware it already has in people’s hands. So ads and paid game streaming are.
(Samsung already runs the Gaming Hub game streaming app for its smart TVs, but that adds a ton of other streaming services, like Amazon Luna and Nvidia GeForce Now, together: Game Launcher is for phones, and this appears to be a new Standalone cloud gaming service within Game Launcher. This is fine and these names won’t confuse anyone and this ecosystem makes a lot of sense.)
We’ll know more this week when the Samsung Developer Conference begins, just another event in a fall packed with tech events. Keep it locked here and you’ll see everything, or just sign up for our handy calendar.