‘When we started the 5G labs and started bringing in independent game developers,’ said Verizon Lab’s director, ‘no one was ready for it’
Gaming is often touted as the “killer” consumer use case for 5G and for cloud computing, but is that really the case? According to Christian Guirnalda, director of the 5G labs and innovation centers at Verizon, it’s a little more complicated than that. In the below interview, he details how 5G for gaming is more about enabling and supporting an entire ecosystem of players, applications and technologies, rather than one single use case.
Q: Does Verizon consider gaming the killer consumer use case for 5G?
Guirnalda: I always get asked this question. What is the one thing that 5G is going to be? I always talk about 5G as a new kind of system of systems and the network effects of the network back in the day — the more people used the phone, the more valuable it became to everyone.
I think that those network effect principals hold true when we think about gaming and its ecosystem of end consumers, esports players and game publishers and developers [but the principals] have evolved. Now, it’s not this linear breakout; there are different pockets and clusters of sub-ecosystems that take advantage of [network] technology. I think gaming is a perfect example of how that manifests, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Is gaming a key […] opportunity of 5G? Absolutely. The subtitle underneath that is that there is a lot that goes into that. It’s not just the one thing that you see on a consumer device; it’s about how all of those sub-industries in gaming start to coalesce, each enhancing their own value proposition within the market but also helping all those ships rise together.
But is gaming the thing [for 5G]? There’s lots of things.
Q: More specifically, you’ve talked previously about how gaming, as a use case, intersects with others. Can you expand on this?
Guirnalda: You’ve got these different clusters of industries that are connecting in way that haven’t before and extend even beyond where they originally started. You think of game publishers or the engines extending into traditional theater motion pictures and TV. On the other end, you’ve got the intersection between gaming and concerts [or] how we teach students in school with these modalities.
How these different industries take advantage of 5G network capabilities gives the whole ecosystems a boost and drives those network effects faster. It’s all those pieces together, not the one thing. I think it’s the network effects of these systems coming together to create new opportunity overall.
Q: Tell me more about how and why Verizon got involved in the gaming market.
Guirnalda: It was sort of a progression of the 5G ecosystem overall. When we started the 5G labs and started bringing in independent game developers or building our own games with 5G, no one was ready for it yet. It was early days of proving out the technology supported these new capabilities.
We focused on building out partner ecosystem of the EA’s and the Wild Rifts of the world, and on the platforms-side of things, partners like Niantic. Then there are the communities around gaming — the esports and Twitches of the world. If you’re not thinking about the whole of the gaming ecosystem, you’re probably missing a piece about the culture.
There is also the mobile component of 5G gaming. All these folks are starting to think about how the broadband coverage that would have been in my home is now in my pocket. So what is the mobile version of Madden or Twitch? How do I build for that as a publisher? Those things are key for how you think about mobility in the future of gaming. You’ve seen it in different markets adopt this mobility at different paces. But now, I think Verizon is ready to accelerate the ecosystem forward for mobile gaming, which is an amazing value to Verizon’s customers.
It is also about how Verizon thinks 5G helps with the pure broadband market. Fixed wireless access to your house is bringing new optionality because everything that makes the mobile network smart, including edge computing, now comes to your home. That really is a different way for us to not only go and forge forward with how mobility changes the gaming world, but also how we can level up gaming at home, too. It doesn’t have to be the way it was before.
For us, it’s building capability and new opportunity early and bringing that intentionally to the full gaming ecosystem and making sure out end users can take advantage those new experiences be it a twitch stream a concert in a gaming platform or a new game itself, whether they’re at home using 5G Home or using a 5G Verizon device on the go.
Q: You mentioned this concept of gaming culture and the need to understand and appeal to it. How do you define a gamer?
Guirnalda: The way Verizon has approached the gaming ecosystem has redefined that definition. First, the five-year-ago view of the gamer seems somewhat inaccessible. It was a more tight knit, closed community and our ability to have these things be turnkey was harder. There was friction around not knowing the technology, or system or the lingo. There were cultural barriers.
Simultaneous, you had casual and social games be the alternative. They weren’t the ones streaming on Twitch. There used to be those two, separate cohorts and there’s a spectrum of gamers from the professional esports players, those who have their one game they play at home and then those folks that just want to play a casual game.
That spectrum exists for a while, but now our ability to think about how those don’t have to be so different anymore allows for those causal games can become more like those high-end games with types of features that don’t have to be so separate, which then brings some of those casual gamers into an ecosystem that they thought was inaccessible. It’s important to understand that [these two cohorts are] starting to naturally converge.
The second, and more important thing, is about this concept of tribes, and the tribes of old shouldn’t look like the tribes of tomorrow. We’re trying to knock the stigmas of who can be part of that community proactively with what we’re doing with students and female esports broadcasters and gamers.
From casual all the way to esports players, that definition starts to meld a little bit because the barriers to participate, technology and access wise, are lowering. As that happen, how do we make sure that those new, beautiful and diverse tribes that we want to see get there faster?
Q: What else can you tell me about how 5G and other technologies like edge computing are impacting gaming?
Guirnalda: We’ve solving for the fundamental issues of how can the network help support the new throughput requirements of the next modality of content. You’ve already got video content streaming and now it’s about getting interactive content streaming. Fundamentally, it just levels up the reliability and scalability for folks to stream immersive content formats […] not just inside homes, which we think is a huge opportunity, but now as it shifts to mobile.
This adds opportunity for the game publisher to think about enhancing the mobile gaming experience with new architecture considerations. The last generation of connectivity couldn’t even support the game itself, so they’re asking now what I can do?
Second, the edge computing part of it is also important. Now because I’m running those new interactive features, I’m going to need really low latency to build in things like real time player collaboration in shared physical space. We’re working with Niantic, for example, who is leader in augmented reality (AR). With edge computing, the ability to develop multi-person, live and augmented games starts to come to fruition.
Verizon has built stuff like that already with the NFL at the Super Bowl last year, where we had a 5G edge-enabled experience for fans in the stadium to toss footballs together in AR to a truck in the middle of the Super Bowl field.
