GamesBeat: There’s a challenge for the cable network through streaming. Not only are people taking a lot of data downstream now, but they’re also uploading a lot through streaming of gameplay back to the network. That’s where cable is pretty weak. I’m getting a DOCSIS 3.1 modem today from the cable company that will give me 400Mbps downstream, but only 9Mbps upstream. That’s not enough for video streaming back to the network.
Cable seems to have a big problem there, and I think 5G is a solution to that. As long as the latency and upstream capacity is as good as what they advertise, that’s a better solution than cable right now.
Mahapatra: Absolutely. None of them have accelerated past 24 or 25, and that doesn’t cut it. The proliferation of the network, of 5G cells and everything else, should help with that. It depends on the way it gets rolled out, with the towers and all the things that are available right now. It’s a matter of time as to how fast the network will proliferate, but that will definitely help.
GamesBeat: There’s that whole question of, you’re not playing in the home anymore. You’re also playing in the backseat of your car, or somewhere else without direct access to 5G.
Mahapatra: That’s what I was saying about location — anywhere, any device, with the same fidelity. That’s the main play. That’s the big challenge for all the players who want to support the infrastructure for all of this. That and the amount of time people have, just like Netflix has said. Sleep is the main competition. I don’t know what phrase will come up, but — people have moved away from their consoles. You still don’t have the same fidelity in a small device, but if people are guaranteed that with their mobile devices, it’s a whole new world in terms of immersive experiences outside the home.
GamesBeat: What sort of opportunities do you think your company could seize related to both 5G and gaming here?
Mahapatra: We’re part of a startup group. This group focuses primarily on business solutions, IT, and professional services for all the industry verticals that we go to market, big and small. In all of our verticals, whether it’s high tech, retail, or CPG, one of our cornerstones is called a business 4.0 thought leadership framework. This is based on four key pillars.
One is exponential value delivery for our customers. That means helping our customers drive exponential value in terms of their new business models, new customer generation, and so on. Mass personalization, which means helping our customers personalize their production services. Embracing risk, which is the way they’ll be able to quickly disrupt themselves and get into business models. And then finally leveraging ecosystems. How can they forge ecosystems which are multi-ecosystem plays?
All of our technology consulting solutions are geared toward this. We leverage agile, cloud, AI, all the elements there. Quickly translating this to the gaming area, there are two areas. One of the leading players in the gaming industry is a massive customer of ours. Their whole gaming experience, the analytics part, the user behavior modeling across all their users, and being GDPR compliant, having a very tight focus on security and user privacy, that all goes hand in hand for us.
How do we provide better insights to our customers, who are gaming companies, and who are also customers adopting gamified processes? That’s translating to retail. That’s translating to CPG. It’s translating in particular to travel, transportation, and hospitality. All the airlines, all the hotels, all the luxury cruise lines, all of those companies. Those are big market opportunities for 5G, and gaming companies as well.
Many people think gaming companies are only going to cater to end consumers, to gamers. But with 5G, there’s a potential where you will see multi-ecosystem partnerships in order to maximize and open up new revenue models. Gaming companies will also partner or be acquired by enterprise software companies to transform the user experience for end customers in other verticals. They could be insurance, banking, financial services, all of those businesses.
We look at this as a kind of inflection or triangulation activity, where 5G, gaming, and then you ping another part in the triangle, all the industry verticals and the end consumers. Those are the areas where I think we have a lot of opportunity, a lot of transformation. When people first said they wanted to do gamification, all that they meant was reimagining processing to make them more user-friendly, to give incentives, to do things that initially were happening with the first wave of Facebook launching all those web-based gaming exercises. Now there’s a whole new game.
For that, with all the technology, all the networks, what are the things you can do for retailers, for each of the verticals I mentioned? Including health care as well, to do things like demystify some problems. That’s the combination point that hasn’t been unraveled, that hasn’t been explored a lot. It’s a great market opportunity, I feel.
GamesBeat: It’s going to be an interesting year. Google’s rivals may also launch cloud gaming services too. We can expect Microsoft and Amazon and other companies participating.
Mahapatra: It’s a valid point. If you connect the dots, Microsoft with Azure and the whole platform play, because they already have enterprise business — it’s an evolution, really. Apple is also a very logical player there. Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, each of them has unique differentiators. Amazon has a lot of marketing and user-centric applications. All the CMOs run on their platform. The CX side of the business has a lot of investment in Amazon already. Azure has a lot of enterprise business. They’ve been surging very rapidly. Then you have Apple, with Apple News and Apple’s whole integrated ecosystem.
These three players, because of their investments in the cloud already, will have a significantly faster way to bring a new set of innovative offerings in this area. As we discussed in the first part, the last mile will be important for all of these players, because these players have not invested in last mile. That wasn’t their focus. That’s where it remains to be seen what kind of partnerships get formed in this ecosystem. There will be more news, and not in M&A only, but formal ecosystem aligned partnerships. Alliances will be forged in this area, big time, which weren’t done in the past.
That goes back to what I was saying earlier about our business 4.0 platform. The ecosystem partnerships, how can we integrate with that access, with integrated technology architecture, with reference architectures? Those are the areas where we’ll bring value to our customers. That’s another thing that will come.
GamesBeat: Do you have any other topics we haven’t touched on yet?
Mahapatra: A final point that’s integral to all of this is cybersecurity. Gaming, directly or indirectly, and I’m pretty heavy into analytics as well — just like what MoviePass tried to do in the beginning with location and other things, gaming will lead to a lot of information. Not only about habits and usage and preferences and all those things, but it will also lead to a lot of information on alternate personalities and real personalities, gathered consistently, over a long period of time, hours and hours of interaction.
Privacy of user data and other elements will be super critical. Cybersecurity is going to be critical in this space. Earlier we had demographic data and certain statistical entry points around credit cards, all the factual data. But this is even more and deeper data about personalities, like what’s happening with personality insights at all the AI players. Personality insights based on gaming is one area where business will tap into AI and ML quite a lot. But the governance, control, and how you do that is cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is another big play in this area.
Typically the gaming companies — I won’t say they don’t invest, but they’ll rely on ecosystems to take care of it. The large cloud players obviously have embedded cybersecurity in their platforms, but the moment they connect and the handoffs happen with IOT, there’s the possibility of breaches. That’s an area to introspect further and see how safeguards can be put in place properly.