Chinese gaming conglomerate Tencent Holdings Limited is pairing up with Intel Corporation to bring a new video game streaming service to the market. The service is named Tencent Instant Play and will allow players to stream games to smartphones and PCs.
First spotted by industry analyst Daniel Ahmad, the streaming service will be detailed at next month’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. According to the information found in Ahmad’s Twitter posts, Tencent Instant Play will be shown off to audiences on March 20 at a presentation from the two technology companies. Reportedly, the service will operate in a similar style to other leading streaming services such as Microsoft’s xCloud and Google’s Project Stream.
Despite the leaked information, Intel’s CTO of Gaming, VR, and eSports Kim Pallister would not confirm the existence of the service when reached out to for comment by Variety. The official statement only suggests that Intel is excited to be working with Tencent on future projects but details of those projects would not be shared until GDC in March.
Meanwhile, Gamasutra reports that Tencent’s CEO Ma Huateng has recently suggested that the tech giant would be increasing its funding for cloud-based gaming services. The comments come after it was revealed that Tencent had seen strong growth in its mobile and PC games sectors, which had a positive impact on the company’s fourth quarter results from the 2017 financial year.
The emergence of Tencent Instant Play makes sense given the growing market for cloud-based gaming. While streaming to smartphones has been the goal of company’s such as Microsoft for some time now, the limits of streaming have also been expanding to include cross-platform accessibility for certain games. The Switch has recently seen Resident Evil 7 and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey available to be streamed to the console while recent rumors suggest that Microsoft is planning on launching its xCloud service on the Nintendo handheld.
