Industry Partner Interview with G-Cluster

IGDA Finland has grown its ranks with new industry partners like Lexia and Amazon Web Services. One of the newcomers is also G-Cluster. We wanted to find out a little bit more about this cloud gaming platform provider and ask how they want to be a part of the Finnish game industry growth.

Here is our interview with President & Representative Director of G-Cluster, Erik Piehl.

What are the three most important facts that people should know about G-Cluster? 1. Cloud gaming enables users of virtually any connected screen to experience great games. G-cluster is the leading cloud gaming platform provider. 2. Our platform enables telecom and other service operators to provide a cloud gaming channel to their end users. 3. G-cluster is a turnkey provider of cloud gaming: we have technology, licensed content and operations.

What differentiates your product from competitors’? G-cluster is already deployed globally: in Europe with Orange and SFR, in Japan with NTT Plala and Broadmedia and in the U.S. with a not yet disclosed tier-1 partner.

What are your different target groups and how are they different from each other? Our primary target groups are children, the female audience and people who used to be gamers. Our content catalogue has various games targeting these groups, supported typically by different price points.

About 78 % of the 1.2 billion gamers around the world play mobile games (Applift & Newzoo market research: http://www.applift.com/the-global-mobile-games-market.html). How do you think the mobile games market is different from other games markets? The mobile game market is unique in many ways: through app stores it has democratized the publishing ability of developers and thus challenged the role of traditional publishers. Mobile games market has introduced new low price points (even free) that we did not see in the past. For content developers it present new challenges and opportunities in that the audience is much wider and respectively the expected attention span of a game a lot shorter than in other gaming markets.

The cloud gaming market is expected to reach 8 billion by the year 2017. How does G-Cluster feel about this growth? We are already part of the growth of the cloud gaming market. 8 billion by 2017 is a huge and great goal. We see the market changing and picking up interest currently in an unprecedented way.

What made you decide to become an IGDA Finland Industry Partner? We have deals in place with about 40 game publishers worldwide. Since a lot of our DNA is coming from Finland, we want to have closer relationships with Finnish game companies and G-cluster better known in its birth country.

What is going to be the role of G-Cluster in developing and growing the Finnish games industry? We want to contribute to the boom of Finnish game industry by providing a new global distribution channel for games created in Finland. G-cluster desires to have games specifically created for our platform exploiting its unique features such as the support for multiple screens, and thus we believe there are new exciting opportunities for creative game design with us.

For more information check out G-Cluster’s website www.g-cluster.com

Editor: Tuuli Peltonen