Mobile cloud company Now.gg today launched a platform-as-a-service game streaming capability for game developers to make it easy for players to run high-quality games on their lower-powered smartphones without hurting the performance.

The platform does this by running compute and storage in the cloud and streaming the graphics over the internet to the phone – similar to options such as Google Stadia and GeForce Now for the PC and console game markets – except that Now.gg has no regional or device limitations.

“Now.gg empowers mobile game developers to acquire an entire spectrum of new users that would otherwise have been constrained by device and app store specs,” said Rosen Sharma, chief executive of Now.gg. “The mobile cloud democratizes access to mobile gaming by removing all friction and device requirements from experiencing a new game.”

By using the cloud to offload most of the heavy lifting, gamers with older devices can be added to the mobile audience and can still enjoy modern and upcoming games. According to a report from IDC, almost 60% of the smartphones in the global market are low- to midrange and cannot handle performance-intensive games.

Using Now.gg games are instantly sharable with the click of a link and can be played immediately even within third-party apps such as Discord and Snapchat without leaving the platform. Users simply click on the link and get their game on, with no more waiting for a giant app to download and install.

Game developers can also allow users to spend money in their games easily with digital wallets, including points and cryptocurrencies. That means players don’t need to rely on credit cards for payments.

Now.gg’s servers are powered by the nowCloud OS, a proprietary distributed Android stack on Arm-based servers. This operating system allows developers to enable their own existing Android apps for the cloud and build cloud-native games that can then be streamed to clients at scale, which allows Now.gg to adapt to the characteristics of the network on the fly according to the needs of the players.

“Now.gg has built a platform that leverages the global scale of AWS to provide a valuable business model to game developers worldwide,” said Johan Broman, gaming solutions architect leader for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Amazon Web Services Inc. “We see this as one of the most exciting use cases of our Arm servers on Amazon EC2. By leveraging the mobile cloud from Now.gg, and AWS Graviton2 instances, game developers can run mobile games natively, encode the rendered graphics and stream the games directly to a mobile device.”

The company shares a parent company with Game.tv, the largest artificial intelligence-powered mobile esports platform, and BlueStacks, the largest Android gaming platform for PCs and Macs.

Now.gg’s mobile cloud for developers is available beginning today.

Photo: Pixabay