云游戏：科技巨头的又一场巷战

约翰在哪？在外星太空船上，你带领的武装小队正在有条不紊地搜寻一个人，这个问题一直萦绕在你的脑海中。他是自己人，一位看来和大家走散了的战斗英雄。这一幕发生在2558年，人类遭到了外星军队的袭击，而你最不愿意看到的情况就是自己麾下训练有素的战士投敌。

你小心翼翼地穿过飞船狭窄的通道。周围很暗，令人感到压抑，只有太空船的舱壁上泛着一层诡异的蓝光。倘若没有武器上闪烁的钴蓝色光辉，你看到的就将只是队友们的深色背影。突然几个陌生的影子进入你的视线，你悄悄地用食指扣住扳机。一道宝蓝色光线从瞄准镜中指向前方。

但他们发现了你！颜色各异的致命激光束从外星人的武器中发射而出，打在飞船的舱壁上又折射出去。你迅速横跨一步，如果周围的空间能够再大一点儿的话，你就可以找到很好的瞄准位置。但为时已晚，在你还击前，一束精准的激光把你送到了彩虹色的坟墓中。

游戏结束。（再来一局吗？）

感谢微软长盛不衰的游戏IP《光环》，近20年来，类似的游戏场景得以出现在千家万户的客厅中，玩家可以在微软越来越受欢迎的主机Xbox上玩到这款游戏。上述丰富游戏内容是《财富》杂志最近赴华盛顿州雷德蒙德的微软总部访问时所见，但它并不需要性能强悍的消费电子硬件就能够达到现代第一人称射击游戏应有的速度和绚丽程度——此类游戏一直以运算量大而著称。只需要一部智能手机，具体来说是和传统Xbox游戏机手柄配对的智能手机。

智能手机的性能已经这么优秀了吗？不尽然。但它们空前的普及程度已经显著改变了人们消费传媒的方式。皮尤研究中心2019年估计，全世界拥有手机的人口超过50亿，其中逾一半是可以上网的智能手机。在索尼的随声听问世后就可以随身携带的音乐如今纷纷流媒体化。电影和电视一度只限于较大的屏幕，现在则通过无线网络进了人们的衣兜。

如今视频游戏也准备迈出这一步。如果不是游戏玩家，你或许不会意识到能够带来质变的流媒体会有多么重要。今天的游戏行业规模庞大。市场研究机构Newzoo预计，今年全球游戏行业的规模将达到1520亿美元，比去年全球影院和家庭电影市场970亿美元的规模大57%，是191亿美元的全球录制音乐市场的8倍。和这些行业一样，视频游戏制作公司已经抓住了流媒体看似无限的潜力，而且它们之间已经开始了竞赛，要看的是谁先找到门道。

被广大公司高管所熟悉的“云计算”则是支撑流媒体的秘密武器。把“计算”任务转移到遥远而且规模惊人的服务器中心，再通过不间断的互联网连接和我们的个人设备连在一起，就可以让我们所有人按自身需求用上超级计算机级别的数字处理能力。这样的能力水平，再加上Newzoo预计到2022年全球游戏行业年销售额有望达到1960亿美元，让微软这家游戏行业里的中坚力量，碰巧也是云服务领域中的龙头对于所谓的云游戏非常感兴趣。

也正是出于这样的原因，在三星盖乐世手机上运行的《光环5》仍然可以提供让人眼前一亮的视觉效果。我们在雷德蒙德看到的游戏演示的实际运行地点是微软设在160英里（约258公里）以外的华盛顿州昆西数据中心。该数据中心是微软计划设立的13处设施之一，而这些设施将按微软野心勃勃的Project Xcloud提供游戏流媒体服务，该项目将于今年秋天启动公开测试。

游戏领域的上一次重大突破出现在10年前，当时智能手机的出现带来了原始但异常火爆的手机游戏，比如《糖果传奇》和《愤怒的小鸟》。Newzoo的分析师汤姆·维吉曼说：“云游戏基本上是同一种东西。你可以接触到所有这些受众，而且他们不需要有高档游戏PC或者昂贵的主机。”

对此感兴趣的不光是雷德蒙德微软总部的那些人。一直大举扩张云业务的谷歌已经宣布，将在今年年底前按承诺推出Stadia云游戏平台。与此同时，同城对手、在云服务领域遥遥领先的龙头企业亚马逊正在评估怎样把Twitch，也就是人们观看游戏直播的首选平台带到更高的水平上。在大企业身后，一批身份复杂的较小挑战者也在开发，或者据说正在研究它们自己的游戏流媒体订阅服务，这其中既有苹果公司、英伟达、沃尔玛和威瑞森等《财富》美国500强公司，也有美国艺电、Valve这样的游戏开发商，还有Blade和Parsec等初创企业。

但这些公司都没有三巨头的云计算实力，三巨头则能够借助其基础设施来为自己的最知名的软件和服务赋能。亚马逊、谷歌或微软能否成功打造下一代游戏主机并不重要。无论如何，它们都将从中受益。

Where is John? That’s the question hanging over you as your team of armored soldiers methodically searches this foreign vessel for a comrade—and war hero—seemingly gone rogue. It’s the year 2558; humans are under attack by alien forces. The last thing you need right now is to have one of your trained killers switch sides.

You cautiously step through the cramped corridors of the spaceship. It’s dark—distressingly so—but for an eerie blue light emanating from the ship’s walls. Your teammates would be in complete silhouette but for the cobalt glints on their weapons. You see shadows you don’t recognize and quietly extend your finger toward your rifle’s trigger. A sapphire streak ripples across its scope.

But they hear you! The aliens’ weapons burst with a kaleidoscope of lethal laser fire that ricochets off the ship’s panels. You sidestep in an effort to get a clear shot—if only you had a little more room—but it’s too late. Before you can return fire, a well-placed beam sends you to a rainbow-colored grave.

Game over. (Start again?)

For nearly two decades, scenes like this one have unfolded in living rooms across the globe, thanks to Microsoft’s long-running video game franchise Halo, playable on the tech giant’s ever-popular Xbox home console. But the rich gameplay described above, which Fortune witnessed during a recent visit to the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., needed no brawny consumer electronics to run with the speed and splendor expected of a modern first-person shooter, as such computationally intensive games are known. It required only a smartphone—in this case, paired with a conventional Xbox controller.

Have smartphones become that good? Not quite. But their tremendous proliferation—more than 5 billion people across the globe own mobile phones, according to 2019 Pew estimates, and more than half of those devices are Internet-connected smartphones—has dramatically changed the way media is consumed. Music, portable since the days of Sony’s Walkman, is now streamed on the go. Movies and television, once limited to larger fixed screens, are now delivered to people’s pockets over the air.

Now video games are preparing to take their turn. If you’re not a gamer, you may not realize just how monumental a metamorphosis streaming promises to be. Today’s video game industry is a behemoth expected to generate $152 billion worldwide this year, according to market researcher Newzoo. That’s 57% more than the $97 billion generated by the global theatrical and home-movie market last year, and eight times the $19.1 billion generated by the global recorded music market. Like those industries, video game makers are grappling with the seemingly boundless potential of streaming, and the race is on to see who gets it right first.

The secret sauce powering all of this media streaming is a technology concept every executive is now familiar with: cloud computing. The off-loading of “compute” to staggeringly large server farms in remote locations, linked to our personal devices with persistent Internet connections, affords each of us on-demand access to supercomputer-level number-crunching power. This capability—plus forecasts that the global gaming industry could reach $196 billion in annual sales by 2022, per Newzoo—is why Microsoft, a gaming-industry stalwart that also happens to be a leading provider of cloud services, is so intrigued by so-called cloud gaming.

It’s also why Halo 5 on a Samsung Galaxy smartphone can still manage such impressive visual pyrotechnics. The demonstration on view in Redmond is really running on the “racks” in a Microsoft data center in Quincy, Wash., 160 miles away. The Quincy facility is one of 13 the company plans to use to host its ambitious Project Xcloud game-streaming service when it begins a public trial this fall.

The last big breakthrough in gaming came a decade ago, when the birth of the smartphone gave rise to rudimentary but wildly popular mobile-first titles like Candy Crush and Angry Birds. “Ultimately the appeal of cloud gaming is the same thing,” says Newzoo analyst Tom Wijman. “You can reach all of this audience without them needing to have a high-end gaming PC or expensive console.”

The folks in Redmond are not alone in their interest. Google, which has fervently expanded its cloud division, announced a cloud-¬gaming platform called Stadia that it promises to launch by year’s end. Meanwhile, crosstown rival Amazon, the leading cloud-services company by a country mile, is evaluating how to take its viewing platform Twitch, a top destination for people who watch other people play games, to even greater heights. Behind the big boys, a motley crew of lesser challengers—from Fortune 500 peers like Apple, Nvidia, Walmart, and Verizon to gamemakers like Electronic Arts and Valve to startups like Blade and Parsec—are developing or said to be investigating game-streaming subscription services of their own.

But none of them have cloud-computing muscle like the Big Three, which otherwise use their infrastructure to power the software and services they’re best known for. Whether Amazon, Google, or Microsoft succeeds in crafting the next great console in the sky is almost immaterial. In any case, they’ll all stand to benefit.

萨蒂亚·纳德拉对否定论者已经习以为常。多年来，华尔街分析师一直在问，为什么以Windows操作系统和Office办公软件著称的微软会在视频游戏等看来如此微不足道的东西上浪费资金。2014年7月纳德拉成为微软CEO后，这种质疑声变得更大。仍然对前任的移动设备决策失误耿耿于怀的纳德拉承诺，将让微软不再受消费领域干扰，并且朝着利润丰厚的企业服务迈进。有些人甚至敦促微软彻底退出游戏业务。长期以来一直在观察微软的Wedbush Securities的董事总经理丹尼尔·艾夫斯说：“在四五年前，我们还有其他人都建议他们剥离那块儿业务。”但这种情况已经发生了改变——去年，微软的游戏收入首次超过100亿美元，其中包括Xbox游戏机、Windows游戏和第三方游戏销售分成。

艾夫斯笑着说，当我问纳德拉为什么微软不放弃游戏业务，他回答说：“许多人都在说微软应该做各种各样的事情。如果我听了外面的人所有的话，那这家公司就几乎不会进行创新了。”

说句公道话，这几年纳德拉一直迟迟不愿将游戏业务列入微软整体战略的核心。尽管取得了成功，但游戏只占微软年收入的十分之一左右。云计算的成长是微软市值今年突破1万亿美元的主要原因；包括Azure云计算服务在内，该公司“智慧云”业务一个季度的收入就相当于游戏业务一年的收入（再见，《光环》！）。

但如果能够让游戏业务的未来和微软强大的云引擎搭上关系呢？好吧，现在说到点子上了。艾夫斯说，2014年纳德拉首次披露将斥巨资25亿美元收购异常火爆的建造类游戏《我的世界》时“人们稍感不解”，但现在可以清楚地看到纳德拉正在“基于他的游戏是整体业务一部分的理念而播下种子”。微软不光是要保留游戏业务。就像它对Windows和Office的做法一样，微软将利用其云计算基础设施来显著提升游戏业务的规模并改善所有跟微软合作的视频游戏发行商的命运，使之远远超过之前可能的水平。

如今，游戏在微软的“核心”地位已经不容置疑。2017年年底，纳德拉将游戏业务负责人菲尔·斯宾塞提拔到了微软管理团队中，以强调这一点。同时，微软管理层对云技术推动的游戏持乐观态度。负责微软云平台产品管理的朱莉娅·怀特估计，向视频游戏发行商提供Azure服务的价值为700亿美元，差不多相当于拼车服务上市公司Uber。怀特说，今天的大多数网络游戏都是在游戏发行商经营的私人数据中心里开发和运营的。其他行业的技术趋势表明这种情况持续不了多久。她指出：“虽然游戏开发行业的情况截然不同，但他们面临的考验和磨难跟开始采用云技术的商业银行或零售公司一样。”

云龙头的战利品——今年1月，微软让游戏主机领域的长期对手索尼（以PlayStation游戏机著称）成了自己的Azure客户，而且双方承诺将在未来的某些游戏项目上合作，此举震惊了游戏界。这就好像通用汽车和福特宣布联手挑战特斯拉一样——毫无疑问，这样的迹象表明竞争格局将迅速而急剧地变化。

这同样表明，纳德拉设想的微软要比当初有更大的覆盖范围。当我问他，将自己定位成企业软件公司的微软为什么要这么努力地打造消费娱乐业务时，他回答说：“这项业务规模更大，对吧？它比其他业务都大。我为什么不去做游戏呢？它契合我们的业务。它能够和通用平台连接在一起。我们认为自己的能力很独特。”但问题在于，这个领域所有参与者都在这么想。

Satya Nadella has grown used to the naysayers. For years, Wall Street analysts questioned why Microsoft, the company famous for its Windows operating system and Office business suite, would waste money on something so seemingly trivial as video games. The calls grew louder when Nadella took the company’s helm in July 2014. Still smarting from his predecessor’s missteps in mobile devices, Nadella promised to steer Microsoft away from consumer distractions and toward its highly lucrative business services. Some even urged Microsoft to exit the gaming business altogether. “Four to five years ago, we and others were calling for them to divest that piece of the business,” says Daniel Ives, managing director of Wedbush Securities and a longtime Microsoft observer. That tune has changed: Last year, Microsoft’s gaming revenue—which includes Xbox, Windows games, and a cut of third-party gaming sales—topped $10 billion for the first time.

When I ask Nadella why the company didn’t drop gaming, he chuckles. “There were a lot of things that a lot of people said Microsoft should be doing,” he says. “If I listened to everything that everybody else on the outside asks me to do, there would be very little innovation in this company.”

To be fair, in years past, Nadella had been hesitant to call gaming business core to Microsoft’s overall strategy. Despite its success, gaming represents about a tenth of Microsoft’s annual revenue. Cloud-computing growth is a big reason that the company’s market capitalization topped $1 trillion this year; its “intelligent cloud” unit, which includes its Azure cloud-computing service, generates as much revenue in a quarter as the gaming group generates in a year. (Hasta la vista, Halo!)

But what if you could hitch gaming’s fortunes to Microsoft’s potent cloud engine? Well, now you’re talking. Nadella’s blockbuster $2.5 billion acquisition of the enormously popular world-building game Minecraft in 2014 was a “bit of a head-scratcher” when it was first announced, says analyst Ives, but it’s now clear that the CEO was “planting the seed of how he viewed gaming as part of the broader business.” Microsoft wouldn’t just retain video games. Much as the company managed with Windows and Office, it would use the flywheel of its cloud-computing infrastructure to dramatically boost the scale of its gaming business—and the fortunes of every video game publisher it works with—far beyond what was previously possible.

Today, gaming is unquestionably “core”; in late 2017, Nadella elevated gaming lead Phil Spencer to the company’s executive leadership team to underscore the point. And executives are bullish on the prospects of cloud-driven gameplay. Julia White, who leads product management for Microsoft’s cloud platform, estimates that the business of selling Azure services to video game publishers is worth $70 billion—about as much as publicly traded transportation darling Uber. Most of today’s Internet-connected video games are developed in, and operated from, private data centers run by game publishers, she says. Technology trends in other industries suggest that won’t last. “Even though game developers are in a very different business,” she says, “they face the same trials and tribulations of a commercial bank or a retail company going to the cloud.”

To the cloudmaster go the spoils: In January, the Xbox maker shocked the gaming world by landing longtime console adversary Sony (of PlayStation fame) as an Azure customer with a promise to collaborate on future unspecified gaming projects. It was as if General Motors and Ford had announced a partnership to take on Tesla—an unmistakable sign that the competitive landscape would rapidly and dramatically change.

It was also an indication that Nadella’s mission for Microsoft would be more expansive than it originally appeared. When I ask him why Microsoft is working so hard to build a consumer entertainment service when it has positioned itself as an enterprise software company, he replies, “It’s a bigger business, right? It’s bigger than any other segment. Why would I not do gaming? It fits with what we do. It has connective tissue to the common platform. We have a point of view that what we can do is unique.”The problem: so does every other player in this game.

Twitch粉丝3.9万的埃尔维斯或许也属于这个圈子。28岁的网红主播理查德·泰勒·布莱文斯，也就是粉丝熟知的“忍者”，已经登录Twitch。他要和好友打几盘“吃鸡”游戏《堡垒之夜》。随着他操纵的人物拿着武器在游戏的虚拟环境中奔跑跳跃，布莱文斯大声指挥着，就像NFL的四分卫。他的粉丝则抓住所有局势平淡的机会来发言。弹幕和“忍者”的话一起在对话框里快速滚动着。有些粉丝会对布莱文斯的每一次操作都做出反应（“慢了，忍者”）；其他人实际上并没有看直播，而是在自顾自地聊天（《海底总动员》为什么是一部“相当好”的皮克斯电影）。

换句话说，这只是Twitch上普通的一天。制作公司StreamElements统计，去年粉丝——绝大多数为男性，而且大多都在34岁及以下——在Twitch上观看游戏直播的时间达到令人咂舌的93.6亿小时。2011年Twitch从流媒体视频网站Justin.tv中剥离出来，该网站是用户制作内容领域里的领跑者。据报道，2014年亚马逊对该网站报价9.7亿美元，在竞价中击败了YouTube的母公司谷歌。Wedbush Securities的分析师迈克尔·帕赫特估算，去年Twitch实现收入4亿美元。

Twitch用的是Amazon Web Services（AWS），也就是亚马逊的云计算业务，而且已经迅速成为亚马逊整体视频游戏战略的基石。AWS已经在向视频游戏发行商出售计算资源和开发工具。有消息称，AWS还将推出面向流媒体视频游戏的服务，而不仅仅是播放游戏视频（该公司拒绝发表评论，但最近为“尚未宣布的3A游戏”招聘技术性人员已经显露了它的意图。和美国职业棒球小联盟一样，3A代表游戏预算和制作的最高水平）。

For 39,000 viewers tuned into Twitch, Elvis might as well have entered the building. Richard Tyler Blevins, the 28-year-old celebrity “streamer” known to fans by his moniker Ninja, has logged on to the service to play a few public rounds of the popular “battle royale” game Fortnite with his buddy. As his avatar runs and leaps through the game’s virtual environment, weapon in hand, Blevins barks commands like an NFL quarterback at the snap—and his Twitch viewers hang on every mundanity. Their comments rush by in the chat window accompanying Ninja’s feed. Some viewers respond to every move Blevins’s character makes (“get that delay ninja”); others practically ignore the show to talk among themselves. (One thread of conversation among many: Why Finding Nemo was a “pretty good” Pixar movie.)

In other words, just another day on Twitch. Viewers—overwhelmingly male and mostly 34 or younger—watched a breathtaking 9.36 billion hours of gameplay on the platform last year, according to estimates by production company StreamElements. Twitch launched in 2011 as a spinoff of streaming video site ¬Justin.tv, a pioneer in user-¬generated content. In 2014, Amazon reportedly spent $970 million to acquire the site, besting YouTube-owner Google in a bidding war. Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter estimates that Twitch brought in $400 million in revenue last year.

Twitch, which is housed in Amazon Web Services, the online retailer’s cloud-computing unit, has rapidly become a cornerstone of the company’s broader video gaming strategy. AWS, as Amazon Web Services is known, is already selling computing resources and developer tools to video game publishers. It’s also rumored to be working on a service that would allow it to stream video games themselves rather than merely video of people playing them. (The company declined to comment, though recent job listings for technical roles for “an unannounced AAA games business” suggest its intentions. Like minor league baseball, “AAA” denotes the highest level of play in terms of budget and production.)

游戏行业的两大里程碑确立了以云为基础的未来。第一个里程碑是Epic Games的《堡垒之夜》大获成功，去年估计销售额为24亿美元，而且目前披露的注册玩家数量为2.5亿。《堡垒之夜》表明，“跨平台”游戏，也就是在微软、索尼、苹果及其他公司相互竞争的设备上都可以玩的游戏积累的受众群体要远远超过以前那个时代，或者说某款游戏只限于某个生态系统的时代。市场研究机构SuperData的游戏部门负责人霍斯特·范德鲁恩说：“《堡垒之夜》的关键之处在于它告诉所有的平台，它们必须降低其覆盖领域的门槛。”

第二个里程碑？是Twitch。它表明看别人玩游戏并为其喝彩给人带来的快乐程度和他们自己玩游戏一样——可以将此称为“小兄弟”现象。这种互动证明参与和玩游戏并不是同一件事情。它扩展了某款游戏的潜在受众群体。微软旗下开发了《光环》的游戏工作室343 Industries的负责人伯妮·罗斯说：“看游戏直播正在超越玩游戏本身，今天许多年轻人会说他们是在真正看了直播后才去玩的游戏。”

就微软来说，它从未看到这样的观众效应。一位前高管说：“亚马逊把微软拉到了跑步机上。”在亚马逊收购Twitch两年后，微软收购了与之竞争的公司Beam，但未披露交易金额。StreamElements的数据显示，这项更名为Mixer的服务可以让Xbox玩家相互观看对方玩游戏的过程，而2018年这些玩家的观看时间为3960万小时，同比猛增179%，但仍然明显落后于亚马逊的Twitch和谷歌的YouTube Live，位居第三。

Two major milestones in the gaming industry set the stage for a cloudy future. The first: The massive success of Epic Games’ Fortnite, which brought in an estimated $2.4 billion in sales last year and now claims 250 million registered players. Fortnite demonstrated that “cross-platform” games, playable across competing devices from Microsoft, Sony, Apple, and others, could amass audiences far larger than those of the previous era, when titles were limited to specific ecosystems. “Fortnite was critical in getting the message across to all platforms that they have to lower the barrier of entry to their respective walled gardens,” says Joost van Dreunen, head of games for market researcher SuperData.

The second? Twitch. The service demonstrated that people were just as happy to watch and cheer people playing games—call it the kid-sibling phenomenon—as they were to play the games themselves. That kind of interactivity proved that engagement and gameplay were not one and the same. The dynamic expands the addressable viewership for a given title. “Viewing is eclipsing gaming, and a lot of youth of today would say they played the game when they really viewed the game,” says Bonnie Ross, head of 343 Industries, the Microsoft studio that develops Halo.

For Microsoft’s part, the company never saw the spectatorship aspect coming. “Amazon has Microsoft on a treadmill,” a former executive says. Two years after Amazon bought Twitch, Microsoft acquired competing service Beam for an undisclosed amount. Rechristened Mixer, it has become the means by which Xbox customers can watch one another play games, logging 39.6 million hours of viewing in 2018, per StreamElements—a whopping 179% more than the previous year but still a distant third to Amazon’s Twitch and Google’s YouTube Live.

在加州山景城的谷歌I/O开发者大会开幕前，数千名开发者在夏日灼热的阳光下等待着，但这条长长的队伍展示出的焦急心情和天气没有什么关系。为尽可能多的用户制作软件是这些与会者的生计来源，他们很想听听谷歌的销售宣传，从而弄明白自己为什么要为Stadia制作游戏，后者是谷歌的试验性云游戏业务，拟定于11月上线。

和硅谷的大多数推介一样，上台发言的谷歌高管都信誓旦旦地保证其技术水平。谷歌方面表示，Stadia复杂的云构架可以防止不利的网络故障让在线玩家沮丧地丢掉游戏手柄。玩家需要做的只是打开Chrome的一个标签，然后点击几下鼠标，这样就能够玩《刺客信条：奥德赛》等高速度、高解析度的游戏了。

和微软、亚马逊的对等业务一样，谷歌这批人相信自己的巨大数据中心“帝国”可以让他们的高端流媒体视频游戏技术需求具有优势且不会受到干扰。和同类公司一样，谷歌鼓励自己的消费者游戏和企业云团队合作，以确保Stadia推出时不会出现以往困扰网络游戏的问题。

托马斯·库里安曾经长期在甲骨文担任高管职位，现在是谷歌云业务的CEO。他说Stadia的能量源于谷歌企业工程师打造的网络技术，而云游戏是谷歌涉足这个价值数百亿美元行业的途径，“我们的希望是它能够扩大这个市场，而不仅仅是取代别人。就全世界所有用专业台式机玩游戏的人来说，很可能有四分之三的人都买不起这样的台式机。”

换句话说就是，为什么要在四分之三的市场尚未开发之际为了四分之一的市场而争斗呢？微软老员工、目前负责Stadia产品开发的约翰·贾斯提斯持同样的观点。他说，玩家不再愿意“每过几年就买一个昂贵的盒子”，而这样的服务是接触到游戏的更便捷途径，它们没有传统主机市场那样的高门槛。

就连定价也发挥了一定作用——虽然Stadia已经宣布了129美元的套餐和9.99美元的月租费，但谷歌说他们也在评估Stadia的免费版本，后者画质较低，推出的也会晚一些。贾斯提斯指出，尽管技术路线很清晰，但云游戏这样的业务模式还处于“初期阶段”，“有些人确实想用购买模式，另一些则想用订阅模式。我觉得我们不会说只选择其中的一种。”

确定细节可能需要几年时间。尽管消费者可能喜欢类似于Netflix或Spotfify的游戏模式，也就是支付月租费，然后玩那些让你心动的游戏，但还不清楚云服务提供商相对于游戏发行商的优势能否让这样的模式成真。游戏发行公司已经看到了平台压力怎样改变了电影、音乐、杂志等行业。除非确定长期内还会有显著增长，否则它们就不想放弃任何一部分销售额。

法国游戏发行商育碧游戏最知名的产品就是《刺客信条》系列，该公司不是特别担心。育碧负责合作与收入的高管克里斯·厄尔利说：“我们对此不那么感兴趣。”该公司在6月发布了自己的PC端订阅服务，名为Uplay+，覆盖100多种游戏，包括《孤岛惊魂》和《波斯王子》。该项服务每月收费14.99美元，将在明年登陆Stadia。厄尔利说，目前“发行公司参与一体化订阅模式的依据还不那么充分”。他还指出，如何持续地将云游戏变现的方案很多，但还不清楚“谁要向谁付钱”。

目前发行公司的焦点是判断现在的成功游戏是否始于云模式，还是说源于该模式的全新游戏将取代常见的IP。Twitch的互动性以及《糖果传奇》等免费增值移动游戏的创新性表明技术进步有可能为游戏参与方式开辟新的途径。只有技术人员才能够参悟出用如今支持人工智能的基础设施来运行游戏会触发怎样的可能性。

厄尔利说：“游戏设计可能出现我们甚至想象不到的革命，而且它将利用云计算的增长。”

The summer sun blazes above the thousands of coders assembled for Google’s ¬annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View, Calif., but the anxiety on display in the long line has little to do with the weather. The event’s attendees, who base their livelihoods on building software for as many users as possible, are keen to hear Google’s sales pitch for why they should create games for Stadia, an experimental cloud-gaming service that the search giant promises to debut in November.

Like most Silicon Valley presentations, the executives onstage overwhelm with ambitious assurances of technical prowess. Stadia’s complex cloud architecture will prevent the nasty networking hiccups that cause online gamers to throw down their controllers in frustration, Google’s representatives say. All gamers will need to do is open a tab in the Chrome web browser; with just a few clicks, they can play a high-speed, high-resolution title such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

Like their counterparts at Microsoft and Amazon, Google brass believe their vast data center empire gives them an edge on the technical demands of streaming high-end video game titles without interruption. Like its peers, Google has encouraged its consumer gaming and enterprise cloud groups to work together to ensure Stadia launches without the problems that have traditionally plagued online games.

Thomas Kurian, a longtime Oracle executive who is now chief executive of Google’s cloud business, says the company’s enterprise engineers built the networking technology that powers Stadia. Cloud gaming is a way for Google to penetrate a ¬multibillion-dollar industry, Kurian says. “Our hope is that it’s expanding the market, not just being a replacement market,” he says. “For every person in the world that games on a professional desktop, there are probably three who can’t afford one.”

In other words: Why fight over a quarter of the market when the rest is greenfield? John Justice, a Microsoft veteran who now leads product development for Google Stadia, agrees. Gamers no longer want to “buy an expensive box every few years,” he says. Stadia, and services like it, are more accessible destinations to engage with games without the high barriers of entry found in the traditional console market.

Even the pricing plays a part: Though Stadia’s $129 bundle plus $9.99 monthly subscription has already been announced, Google says it is also evaluating a free version, with lower-quality graphics, that would debut later. Though the technological trajectory is clear, it’s still “early days” for the business model behind cloud gaming, Justice says. “Some people really do want transaction models, and some people want subscription models,” he says. “I don’t think we will say we will only go with one.”

It could take years to iron out the details. Though consumers would love a gaming model akin to Netflix or Spotify—pay a monthly fee, play titles to your heart’s content—it’s not yet clear that cloud providers have the leverage over game publishers to make that happen. Publishers have seen how platform pressures have changed the business of movies, music, magazines, and more. They don’t want to give up a share of their sales unless they’re certain that there are many more to be had in the long run.

Ubisoft, the French publisher best known for the Assassin’s Creed series, isn’t terribly concerned. “That’s less interesting to us,” says Chris Early, an Ubisoft executive who manages partnerships and revenue. The company in June revealed its own subscription service, called Uplay+, that is playable on personal computers and spans more than 100 titles in its own catalog, including Far Cry and Prince of Persia. It costs $14.99 a month and will also be available on Stadia next year. At this moment, “it makes less sense for a publisher to be part of an aggregated subscription model,” says Early. There are many proposals for how to sustainably monetize cloud gaming, he adds, but it remains unclear “who is going to pay whom.”

For now, publishers are focused on figuring out whether today’s successful titles make sense in the cloud—or whether all-new titles, native to the format, will replace familiar franchises. The interactivity of Twitch and the novelty of so-called freemium mobile games, like Candy Crush, showed that technological leaps could open new paths to gaming engagement. The possibilities that could emerge from running games on the same infrastructure that supports today’s artificial intelligence are something that technologists can only fathom.

“There will probably be evolutions of game design that we can’t even imagine yet,” says Early, “and they’re going to take advantage of the increase of cloud compute.”

在雷德蒙德，我在微软的343 Industries游戏工作室停了下来，员工们带我参观了游客中心——实际上是他们的“圣地”，用于庆祝《光环》系列累计销售额达到60亿美元。那里有游戏中的英雄和反派雕像，比我高很多，感觉就像《光环》版本的希腊众神艺术馆。还有装着纪念品的玻璃盒子。在一面墙上，摆放着游戏中虚构的那些武器的复制品，看起来就像在屏幕上一样吓人。这些复制品的扳机上悬挂着显眼的橘黄色标签，上面写着“道具”，以免有人对“焚烧加农炮”过于当真。

343 Industries成立于2007年，其名称源于《光环》中的一个人物，这家工作室是微软游戏业务的老成员之一。仅去年一年，微软就收购了6家游戏工作室。在今年的E3游戏展上，微软宣布它又收购了一家公司。如今，微软的Xbox Game Studios部门已经拥有15家半自主运营的工作室，而微软认为它们将成为云游戏竞争中的关键资产，特别是和缺乏自主开发游戏的亚马逊和谷歌抗衡的时候。

但并不是所有人都这么看。虽然微软的《光环》和《极限竞速:地平线》的后续作品已经赢得了喝彩，但分析师指出这两款IP存在的时间——《光环》2001年问世，《极限竞速:地平线》出现在四年以后，表明微软旗下的工作室已经江郎才尽。微软游戏业务负责人斯宾塞承认：“这方面我们得努力。这几年我们的自主游戏并没有做到最好。”

Back in Redmond, I stop by Microsoft’s 343 Industries game studio, where employees welcome me to a visitor center—a shrine, really—celebrating the company’s Halo franchise, which has racked up $6 billion in sales since its debut. Statues depicting its heroes and villains tower over my head—a gallery of Greek gods, so to speak, for the gaming set. There are glass museum cases everywhere packed with memorabilia. On one wall is a rack of replicas of the virtual weaponry from the game, as intimidating in person as they appear on the screen. Bright orange tags with the word “prop” hang from their triggers in case someone takes the “incineration cannon” a little too seriously.

Founded in 2007 and named after a Halo character, 343 Industries is one of the older members of the Microsoft game portfolio. Last year alone, Microsoft acquired six game studios; at this year’s E3 industry confab, the company announced that it had picked up one more. Today, its Xbox Game Studios division is a federation of 15 semiautonomous studios that the company believes will be a key asset in the cloud-gaming wars—particularly against Amazon and Google, which lack strong titles of their own.

Not everyone sees it that way. Though Microsoft has won plaudits for successive editions of Halo and the Forza car-racing series, analysts have pointed to the titles’ relative age—Halo debuted in 2001; Forza first appeared four years later—as evidence that Microsoft’s homegrown studios have run out of ideas. “We have work to do there,” acknowledged Spencer, the Microsoft gaming chief. “We haven’t done our best work over the last few years with our first-party output.”

作为三大消费云公司中唯一的视频游戏老资格开发商，如果微软希望保持对亚马逊河谷歌的天然优势，就必须改变这种状况。毕竟，和传媒行业的其他领域一样，视频游戏同样以内容为王。正是出于这样的原因，微软的对手才开始从美国艺电（《Madden NFL》、《极品飞车》）和2K Games（《文明》、《NBA 2K20》）等顶尖游戏公司挖经验丰富的老手，目的就是打造自己的游戏IP。亚马逊和谷歌出奇同步地分别推出了自己的付费项目，以便Prime和YouTube同Netflix展开竞争。

但冰冻三尺非一日之寒。亚马逊2012年组建了游戏部门，七年后裁掉了几十名开发人员，因为它重新给自己编织了一个基于云的未来。（亚马逊对这个消息反应平淡。一位发言人告诉《财富》杂志：“亚马逊对游戏投入很大，而且仍然将会把大量资金用于Amazon Game Studios、Twitch、Twitch Prime、AWS、我们的零售业务以及其他运营部门。”）

SuperData的分析师范德鲁恩相信三巨头在云领域里的动作要在五年以后才会对传统游戏行业产生明显影响。他说，在此之前要关注的是云计算龙头为了“逐步推出”云游戏服务而对数据中心基础设施的持续投资。

为什么亚马逊、谷歌和微软要就一个如此遥远的未来弄出这么大的动静呢？分析师帕赫特说，这就是科技行业熟悉的“先下单，再扩容”业务模式的一部分——发表演讲，立下目标，寄希望于早期动力像滚雪球那样变成不可逾越的竞争优势。他指出，毕竟，“Facebook经过发展才成立价值10亿美元的点子。Uber也是如此。”

微软尤其不愿意错过机会。它仍然对在移动领域里败给谷歌及其安装操作系统耿耿于怀。（联合创始人比尔·盖茨在今年早些时候很惋惜地表示，微软“只差一点点就能够主导移动操作系统了”。）

那么整装待发的时候到了。纳德拉说：“我们参与这场游戏是为了游戏着想，而不是要达到其他目的。”（财富中文网）

本文另一版本登载于《财富》杂志2019年8月刊，标题为《科技巨头的新巷战》。

译者：Charlie

审校：夏林

That must change if Microsoft, the only video game veteran among the Big Three consumer cloud companies, hopes to maintain its natural advantage against Amazon and Google. After all, in video games, as in other parts of the media industry, content is king—which is why Microsoft’s rivals have moved to hire gaming veterans from top shops such as Electronic Arts (Madden NFL, Need for Speed) and 2K Games (Civilization, NBA 2K20) in an effort to build their own franchises. It is an uncanny echo of the moves by Amazon and Google to build their own premium programming, for Prime and YouTube, respectively, to compete with Netflix.

But Rome wasn’t built in a day. Seven years after establishing a gaming group in 2012, Amazon laid off dozens of game developers as it reorganized itself for a cloud-based future. (Amazon downplayed the news. “Amazon is deeply committed to games and continues to invest heavily in Amazon Game Studios, Twitch, Twitch Prime, AWS, our retail businesses, and other areas within Amazon,” a spokesperson tells Fortune.)

Van Dreunen, the SuperData analyst, believes it will take up to five years before cloud-driven efforts by the Big Three will significantly affect the traditional gaming industry. Until then, look for cloud computing’s leaders to continue investing in their data center infrastructure to support the “gradual rollout” of cloud-gaming services, he says.

Why would Amazon, Google, and Microsoft make so much noise about a future that’s so far away? It’s all a part of the “land and expand” business model familiar to the technology industry, says analyst Pachter: Give a speech, plant a flag, hope that early momentum snowballs into an insurmountable competitive advantage. After all, “Facebook wasn’t a billion-dollar idea until it was,” he says. “Uber wasn’t a billion-dollar idea until it was.”

Microsoft, in particular, has no intention of missing out. The company still regrets losing the mobile war to Google and its Android operating system. (Microsoft “missed being the dominant mobile operating system by a very tiny amount,” cofounder Bill Gates lamented earlier this year.) To underperform in an area where it has a head start of almost two decades would be, in a word, unconscionable.

Time to suit up, then. “We’re in gaming for gaming’s sake,” Nadella says. “It’s not a means to some other end.”

A version of this article appears in the August 2019 issue of Fortune with the headline “Big Tech’s New Street Fight.”