It has been a week since miHoyo officially launched the cloud game version of Genshin Impact - Cloud · Genshin Impact on August 16. To participate in the beta testing, players need to acquire a qualification at a specific time.
On the first day of the beta test, miHoyo issued 8,000 of these test qualifications. Later, the daily issued qualifications were upscaled from 8,000 to 15,000 due to high demand. miHoyo had to expand its servers to fit the massively increased amount of testing players.
However, this number still falls short, and many players set multiple alarms to remind themselves to participate on time in order to compete for eligibility for the beta testing.
The underwhelming market performance of Stadia might indicate this market still needs time to mature, but Chinese developers and publishers are moving fast to commercialize their own cloud games and platforms.
Prior to this new beta testing, players can already cloud stream the mobile version of Genshin Impact on NetEase, the developer of Knives Out, Identity V, and TapTap, the largest mobile game community in China.
However, the official miHoYo Cloud · Genshin Impact this time is based on the PC version, graphics would be theoretically much better.
According to players' feedback, the actual app size of Cloud · Genshin Impact is about 33MB, and save data is cross-platform compatible. The game is set with two options of 30 and 60 FPS and data stream rate is normally 0.5-1MBps, which is quite significant, but also the nature of cloud gaming.
As an open-world game with end game content and mobile game interoperability, Genshin Impact requires relatively high-end mobile hardware and takes up a lot of storage space, and Cloud · Genshin Impact solves these problems to a certain extent.
At present, cloud gaming services in China are normally charged at an hourly rate, and Cloud · Genshin Impact is no different.
However, Cloud · Genshin Impact does provide some free trial time for its players. According to miHoYo's test announcement, a new player who has acquired a testing qualification will automatically get 5 hours of free game time, and an additional 15 minutes as a daily login bonus, capped at 600 minutes in total.
After the free trials are over, players can exchange more game time by purchasing a "Play Card" or "Mi Cloud Coins".
The price of one Play Card is RMB ￥60 and accounted for a 30-day unlimited subscription. Players can also choose to be charged by the hourly rate of 600 Mi Coins or RMB ￥2 in real-world money, roughly translate to USD $1 for 3 hours. While a Play Card is activated, the remaining free hours and Mi Cloud Coins will not be used.
(Mi Cloud Coin Recharge Brackets – RMB ￥6 for 1800 coins means 3 hours of game time, RMB ￥25 for 7500 coins means 12.5 hours of game time, and so on)
According to the data analysis done by China iiMedia Foresight Industry Research Institute, China's cloud gaming market size is RMB ￥2.24 billion in 2019 and almost tripled to￥6.80 billion in 2020. The compound annual growth rate is expected to exceed 100% in the next three years, and the cloud game market size is expected to reach RMB ￥98.64 billion by 2023, with a year-on-year growth of 129.6%, approaching 100 billion yuan market size.
(China Cloud Gaming Industry Market Size Statistics and Growth Forecast, 2018-2023)
Chinese mobile gamers are accustomed to the "free game + in-app purchase" business model, and the industry is still exploring how Chinese players would pay for cloud gaming services. Cloud · Genshin Impact shows that there is a solid demand for this service from Chinese players.
(Part of the materials are from the official miHoYo community - miYouShe)