Two Chinese tech giants are said to be currently working hand in hand to develop an emerging technology in mobile entertainment which is cloud gaming.

The collaboration was announced at a live-streamed event at the Huawei Developer Conference 2020 on Friday, 27th March.

According to the official statement, Huawei and Tencent are both partnering to set up a game development lab which is meant to explore the use of high technologies such as cloud gaming, artificial intelligence and both Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR & AR) in the mobile gaming industry.

The attempt is to be fine-tuned using the Huawei’s Kunpeng Processor which will be used to develop the Tencent’s GameMatrix cloud gaming platform into an “industry-leading, high-quality and low-cost mobile cloud gaming solution”, Tencent wrote in a post on WeChat.

Aside that, other functionalities to be performed by the lab includes finding ways to optimize game engine features, rendering and power consumption, and even jointly developing new chip features and debugging tools and apply technologies such as AI, VR and AR in order to create new gameplay formats.

If you don’t forget, Tencent runs the show in video games business based on revenue but when it comes to Huawei, we all know they only make hardware and telecom components. But diving to mobile gaming platform means the company has a lot of plan as for software in coming years.

Huawei also launched the EMUI 10.1 alongside the P40 series which also comes with the HMS and a new AI assistant it called “Hey Celia” which shows the company’s ambition to further dive more into software development. All this can be linked to Huawei trying to free itself from the hurdles of being cut-off from using the Google’s Android platform.

“For Tencent, the cooperation on the one hand shows its support of the home-grown Kunpeng industrial ecosystem and on the other hand, gives players using Huawei smartphones access to its cloud games,” said Wen Hao, an analyst form Tianfeng Securities.

And with the tech giant utilizing it’s Kunpeng ecosystem alongside the biggest video game company in the world will help to “reduce the negative impact of overseas sales of its smartphones which have been hurt by the US ban”, Wen added.

“The partnership shows Tencent already has access to devices to preload hardware for their cloud games,” Zheng Jintiao, co-founder of media outlet Gamer Boom, said. “Huawei also has to cooperate with more content providers to attract potential customers to its smartphones equipped with its own operating systems,” he added.

Cloud gaming is becoming the next focus of big tech companies such as Google with it’s Stadia platform which allows users to stream games directly from the internet rather than buying expensive consoles the same goes with mobile cloud gaming just this time around, everything is happening on the smartphone.

So rather than having the game software components on an internal storage of a physical hardware such as a smartphone storage or media cartridges, this games runs on super-powerful computers in the cloud.

The device sends the commands of game players – run, jump, shoot – over the internet to those servers, while they send video back to the screens. As a result, players do not have to download games and are theoretically not limited by their devices’ processing power.

Though this isn’t a 100% new idea as it’s been around for quite a while. The advent of the 5G technology will definitely have a big positive impact on the spread of this technology in coming years. With the number of cloud computing growing exponentially, the cloud is definitely going to be the next computer rather than physical hardware.

With the size of the global cloud gaming platform predicted to peak a high $56.57 billion by the year 2027 right from US$12.5 Billion in 2018, this means the industry is really worth the investment and every penny.

Tencent opened its cloud gaming platform it called START last year which is already available for public testing and collaborated with Intel to launch a cloud gaming service called the Tencent Instant Play. In June, Huawei also teamed up with NetEase, China’s second-biggest gaming company, to offer a cloud gaming service.

Just like these two tech giants, other companies around the world keep racing to implement this new technology with companies such as Google working endlessly on the Stadia platform or the Microsoft’s Project xCloud, Nvidia’s GeForce Now and Sony’s PlayStation Now but the future seems bright for cloud computing it’s just a matter of time before we see it everywhere.