Not only are players on the top of the phantom beast Palu, but cloud vendors are also collectively "crazy".
Phantom Beast Palu is an open-world survival and building game created by game manufacturer PocketPair.
Summarize the characteristics of the game in one sentence: on the Palu continent, there are endless jobs (a variety of gameplay), and there are endless Palu (collecting magical creatures), players can come to be a "black-hearted" cyber farmer, so that Palu can work for himself day and night, fighting, building, farming, transporting, etc.
Experiencing the joy of being a capitalist in the game suddenly poked the hearts of migrant workers, and some people jokingly said: play Palu at work, and squeeze Palu after work.
So since it was launched on January 19, the number of Steam** people in Phantom Beast Palu has repeatedly broken records.
More and more players rushed into the Palu continent, and the official servers were frequently overloaded, and from time to time they encountered unstable connections, flashbacks, freezes, and other phenomena. If you want to invite friends to play Palu together, many players who are anxious will simply start to build a dedicated server (private server) by themselves.
As a result, cloud servers have become a rigid need. The soldiers are fast, and domestic cloud manufacturers have also consciously rolled up.
Tencent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud were the first to go on the field, facing snipers, and Huawei Cloud, JD Cloud and other cloud service providers also followed up in time and launched game online cloud servers**, which made it a hot fight.
We believe that the madness of this cloud vendor war at the beginning of the year may be unprecedented, but it will not be over.
So it is necessary to talk about how a "18th line" non-well-known game company, an adventure game known as "Stitching Monster", made several major cloud manufacturers so high, and willingly rolled themselves into a "realistic version of Palu"?
With games, cloud vendors roll themselves up into "Palu".
If Palu could speak, it would also be amazed by the enthusiasm of the cloud vendors: I'm just a string of **, and you, my friends, are going to start working for players as soon as the morning dawns and become the real Palu.
At present, clicking on the official website pages of HUAWEI CLOUD, Tencent Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud, the game online cloud server (Phantom Beast Palu) occupies a particularly eye-catching position, for fear that players will not notice it.
The game has only been online for more than ten days, and several major manufacturers have been "rolling" round after round.
Volume I, Volume Services:
As the first phenomenal game in 2024, "Phantom Beast Palu" has attracted many novices to enter the pit. For these players with non-technical backgrounds, the cost of learning cloud-related IT technologies is very high, and the cloud server deployment process is complex and cumbersome, which is easy to dissuade. Without a one-click deployment and ready-to-use cloud solution, even if you want to play "Phantom Beast Palu", you will be powerless. In order not to discourage players, various cloud vendors have resorted to all kinds of solutions, and have now rolled up the service to "just have your hands" and "open in 10 seconds".
Tencent Cloud released a private server tutorial on how to build "Phantom Beast Palu" through the official ** and WeChat***; HUAWEI CLOUD has launched a one-click deployment for Phantom Beast Palu, simplifying the complex process of manually setting up a server environment, installing game servers, adjusting network ports, and arranging security configurations.
Alibaba Cloud followed up and announced that it would "take less than 60 seconds" to set up a Palu dedicated server, and at the same time, simplified game version upgrades, parameter settings, memory cleanup, etc. JD Cloud's "Palu One-click Service Opening" service also claims that it only takes 1 minute.
In this regard, Tencent Cloud said, "Help me up, I can still play", and the automatic deployment of the "Phantom Beast Palu" game server function launched not long ago claims to use the application template, fully automatic service opening in 10 seconds, and also provides players with a more detailed game panel.
In short, it took a few days for cloud vendors to roll out the intimate service of "feeding the rice to the mouth", making the game online cloud server extremely friendly to novices, and Palu had to shout "Volume King" when they saw it.
Volume II, Volume Quality.
In the Palu continent, jobs are limited, Palu is unlimited, an ultimate Palu "slave owner", of course, let every Palu have a job, 24 hours a day. Therefore, when players choose cloud servers, they pay special attention to the stability, full-time, and low latency capabilities of cloud services.
At present, several leading manufacturers have gone through years of experience in industrial practice, and have experience in dealing with traffic peaks such as popular games, e-commerce promotions, and Spring Festival Gala, and the continuous improvement of virtualization technology, network coverage capabilities, and algorithm optimization can support the stable and smooth operation of games.
Volume III, Volume **.
Since the quality of large manufacturers can stand the test, cost has become the ultimate weight for players' decision-making, and it has come to the most familiar stage of the battle for public cloud vendors. At present, several cloud vendors provide more flexible payment methods, supporting players to choose the corresponding ** according to their specific needs, and in order to compete for new users, ** is competing for low.
Taking a 4-core and 16G server as an example, Tencent Cloud's *** is 96 yuan for 3 months, Huawei Cloud's minimum is 79 yuan for 3 months, and Alibaba Cloud's *** was previously 96 yuan for 3 months, and has now been adjusted to 79 yuan for 3 months. However, Tencent Cloud's bandwidth is 12M, while HUAWEI CLOUD and Alibaba Cloud are 10M, and the number of players supported by each company is also different.
Overall, the ** of game online servers is constantly declining.
They are: Tencent Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, screenshot time of the official website 202 2024 Travel Guide
The popularity of popular games is often uncertain, and it is not uncommon for players to come and go like a tide. As a non-big manufacturer, non-triple-A game, why does "Phantom Beast Palu" make cloud manufacturers collectively "roll"?
Cloud Marketplace, a real-life version of the "Palu Continent".
The Palu are squeezed by their jobs and run away crying in the game, while in reality, public cloud vendors have also turned themselves into NPCs. The public cloud market is already a realistic version of the "Palu Continent", and there is no other way than to roll it day and night.
After a period of cloud migration, B-end customers such as governments and enterprises have begun to control cloud investment and consciously carry out privatization and hybrid multi-cloud deployment. Therefore, the public cloud market is still the mainstream of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), accounting for about 70%, and it is also the most mature.
The IaaS model sells and rents computing resources, lacks premium space and value-added services, and is often easy to fall into the battle in order to compete for customers. At the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Partner Conference last year, Alibaba Cloud announced the launch of the largest price reduction in history, and Tencent Cloud followed suit.
The originally promising large model is a rare window for public cloud vendors, but the AI native applications based on the large model have not exploded as expected, and everyone has not seen the "killer AI application". Most of the applications that have been run through are some text creation, customer service Q&A, ** generation, etc., and the cloud volume is not large.
This is equivalent to the cloud vendor repairing the infrastructure road, but as a result, there are only large trucks trained on the basic model and a few low-displacement cars running, and there is no sufficient traffic flow and heavy-duty vehicles. In the short term, the business scale of large models and AIGC applications may not meet the expectations of cloud vendors.
It's so difficult for both old and new businesses, and there are more "Palu" to get a piece of the pie first.
According to IDC's latest "China Public Cloud Service Market (Q3 2023) Tracker" report, in the third quarter of 2023, China's public cloud (IaaS + PaaS) market size was 5356.6 billion yuan, an increase of 72 percent over the same period last year100 million yuan.
In the context of market expansion, the market share of Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud is declining. Alibaba Cloud's market share increased from 32 percent in the same period last year5% to 267%, Tencent Cloud's market share also increased from 9 last year9% reduced to 95%。In addition, the growth of carrier clouds is significant.
The profits of the old road are too low, the new road is too difficult to monetize, and there are a bunch of opponents eyeing each other, so it is no wonder that cloud vendors have a sense of anxiety about rolling up.
At this time, the game is like a "silly white sweet, more money" player, becoming the "hope of the whole village" in the public cloud market.
Old players, new territory
The public cloud marketplace serves many people, among which the first players to start to be active in the cloud are game applications.
Compared with text-based applications, games consume more resources, and the higher and smoother the configuration, the greater the cloud consumption and bandwidth generated. Take "Phantom Beast Palu" as an example, the recommended configuration of the game company PocketPair is 4 cores and 16G, unlimited traffic, coupled with the huge volume of C-end users, which brings greater immediate benefits to cloud manufacturers.
What's more, with the gradual implementation of large models and AIGC technology in the game industry, the energy that bursts out has also allowed cloud vendors to smell huge opportunities.
One is new users. At present, there is a boom in creating new games based on large models at home and abroad, and the game company of "Phantom Beast Palu" attaches great importance to AI technology. These game startups and new players are all new users of public cloud services, representing a huge business increment.
Take "Phantom Beast Palu" as an example, there are ** reports that there is only 1 network engineer in the whole company, so there is an option to "join a multiplayer game (dedicated server)" on the game login screen to encourage players to build a private server. There is reason to believe that the technological innovation in the field of games and the entrepreneurial boom will emerge more explosive models.
The second is a new experience. Once the digital experience is upgraded, there is no retreat, just as we are used to 4K quality, we can no longer stand 480p pictures. In recent years, the popularization of gigabit broadband and 5G has made high-quality mobile games, low-latency cloud games, VR glasses-free 3D and other experiences accepted by the public. Along this path, the requirements for cloud services will become higher and higher. In addition to basic resources, a series of services such as migration, distribution, O&M, network, and even AI algorithms are required.
New users and new experience needs are like "living water", making it possible for the cloud market pattern to be re-ranked.
For earlier cloud vendors, such as Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud, they have a close relationship with game vendors and game service providers from the beginning, and have rich service and operation experience. In the current situation of market share impact, it is undoubtedly skillful and profitable to seize and amplify the original advantages of the game business, win more new players, and tightly fix them in your own ecosystem.
Rising star cloud vendors, such as HUAWEI CLOUD and JD Cloud, will naturally not let go of the fertile ground of games. On the basis of supporting their own group business, government and enterprise industry customers, they are also actively moving into the "literary and artistic" fields such as games and film and television rendering. With advanced technology, with the help of the needs of industry digitalization and intelligence, it can provide a foundation for new business formats such as cloud gaming, eastern and western rendering, and digital intelligent people, and is slowly cultivating the brand awareness of gamers.
In short, to strengthen the attraction of game manufacturers and players, cloud vendors have gone crazy, and the cloud market pattern is also chaotic. The construction of new supply and demand relationships will also bring more changes to the cloud market.