During the Beijing International Game Innovation Conference 2021, tech giant Alibaba launched its own cloud gaming platform Yuan Jing, providing cloud gaming services and support for some of the competition events during the conference.
Last year, cloud gaming saw exceptional growth, almost all leading tech companies in China tapped into the field. Alibaba’s cloud gaming department was also founded during last year, showing promising results.
According to department director Wang Mao, in 2021, the focus of cloud gaming has shifted toward a much larger scale, with a streamlined adaptation work flow. Alibaba’s cloud gaming services contain a 2-layer structure that is similar to Netflix servers. It has a massive computing center, supporting more than 2800 local server groups, covering 31 provinces in China. This system means cloud gaming users can have a local server within a range of 10km, to achieve a very low 5ms input and display latency.
Software wise, this system provides very flexible APIs, allowing game developers to adapt their games for cloud gaming very quickly. Alibaba has collaborated with several top-notch 3D RPGs, demonstrated the system’s impressive performance and multi-platform capabilities.
Wang Mao, Director of Alibaba’s Cloud Gaming Department
Alibaba’s cloud gaming services now have their own name, Yuan Jing, meaning a world with infinite possibilities. This product would be a complete package, providing hardware, software, operation support, and a better toolkit to help game developers maximize their product value in the cloud gaming era.
To further grow the cloud gaming scene, Alibaba and Yuan Jing will provide free computing power to smaller developers. Yuan Jing is hoping to be the leading force in developing cloud gaming infrastructure and setting technological standards.
Nvidia and Unity are both collaborators with Alibaba. Unity’s DOTS would allow developers to fully utilize multi-thread computing power with the C# Job System. Additionally, its Entity Component System would provide more effective memory management, and Burst Compiler will help developers to create more efficient machine codes. Nvidia would also be providing hardware that is optimized specifically for cloud gaming.
Yang Dong, Director of Unity Platform Technology