What you need to know
- Tencent Games is a Chinese corporation investing heavily in gaming.
- Today, Tencent and NVIDIA announced a partnership to bring cloud game streaming to China.
- Just like NVIDIA GeForce NOW, Tencent's START allows you to play "AAA" anywhere.
- Issues of censorship and other restrictions are still a concern given Tencent's association with the Chinese government.
Today, Chinese giant Tencent Games and NVIDIA announced that they were partnering to bring PC gaming in the cloud to China. The press release Windows Central received said that NVIDIA's "technology will power Tencent's START cloud gaming service, which began testing earlier this year." START gives gamers access to "AAA" games on underpowered devices at any time and anywhere, just like Google Stadia or Microsoft's Project xCloud.
Jeff Fisher, Senior Vice President of Gaming at NVIDIA, said the following about the collaboration.
As one of the leading global platforms for game development, publishing, and operations, Tencent is set to deliver amazing cloud gaming. Combining the Tencent platform with NVIDIA's GPU technology will provide a world-class experience for gamers everywhere.
Steven Ma, Senior Vice President at Tencent, added the following.
NVIDIA's leadership in building the world's most powerful GPUs paired with their experience in cloud solutions will empower us to scale our START platform to millions of gamers. Today marks a new opportunity for our companies to further push the frontiers of gaming.
NVIDIA has been testing out GeForce NOW in North America and Europe for many months now. GeForce NOW is also a cloud game streaming service that links up to your existing Steam library and allows you to play your games on even an underpowered laptop. Tencent and NVIDIA also announced a joint innovation lab for gaming. They will work together to explore new applications for game engine optimizations, better lighting techniques, and more.
While the collaboration should bring access to high-quality AAA games to more gamers, issues of censorship remain. Recently, in order to appease China, Blizzard Entertainment banned a prominent Hearthstone player for supporting the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. It's unclear what the future holds for the gaming industry as it gets entangled with Tencent given the company's close association with the Chinese government. Let's hope for the best.
