Clutooth Cloud Gaming
By: Udyan Sharma
Tags: Cloud Services, Business Ideas, Startup, Business Development, Cloud Gaming

Startup Proposal Assignment

BUSINESS IDEA

After the rise of the gaming industry in the 1950s, it has been evolving continuously and has become a major form of entertainment for everyone irrespective of age. In fact, the induction of mobile gaming in recent years has gained momentum and is becoming popular among people due to the portability and the graphics processing capabilities of inexpensive mobile phones. We also saw the release of various gaming consoles like the PlayStation and the Xbox. However, most gamers still prefer PCs over mobile phones and gaming consoles, the reason being the ultimate experience and the availability of a vast collection of games exclusively developed for operating systems like Windows. Unfortunately, a gaming PC with such capabilities can be very expensive.

With the evolution of technology, cloud computing has emerged as a popular alternative to traditional data centres and it is evident that cloud computing is the future of data storage and virtualization. Clutooth Cloud Gaming proposes to offer a low latency cloud gaming platform as a service which would eliminate the need for buying expensive graphical processing units for high-end 4K gaming.

The users will be able to play games with high graphics requirement from a variety of operating systems such as the Windows OS, Linux OS, macOS, Android, and even their browsers. This startup has extreme potential provided the low competition in the Indian market and the high profit to loss ratio.

MARKET DEMAND

The global gaming industry had a market value of $151.55 billion in the fiscal year 2019. According to a recent report by Newzoo’s senior marketing analyst Tom Wijman, this valuation is expected to top $159.3 billion in revenue by the end of 2020.

There is a lot of demand for a cloud gaming service in the market and with the current pandemic, people are transitioning towards indoor gaming, thus increasing the market demand for this product significantly.

RELEVANT PRODUCTS IN THE MARKET

The idea of cloud gaming is relatively new in the market and it is rapidly growing with a few companies offering this service. Fortune 500 companies like Google, Sony and Microsoft have developed products like Google Stadia, PlayStation Now and XCloud. Other similar products include Shadow and Vortex Gaming. This startup is an extreme game changer in India because these services are only available to the residents of the United States and there is only one competitor, The Gaming Project in the Indian cloud gaming market. This idea is novel as compared to other existing products in the market because it can generate high revenue with a low initial investment.

TARGET CUSTOMERS

“India recorded about 365 million online gamers in the financial year 2020. This number is estimated to reach 510 million by the fiscal year 2022,” according to Statista.com.

The service will be mainly targeted to Indian residents because there is only 1 existing product in this field in India, while there is a huge demand for such a product. And, since 55% of gamers are in the age group 10 and 24 years, we believe that they are potential customers which can be turned into regularly paying customers easily. It is expected that the conversion rates will be higher in urban regions because of the higher availability of basic technological equipment required to access the service.

TECHNOLOGIES AND EXPERTISE REQUIRED

An array of technologies is required for the success of this startup.

Web Development expertise is required for the development of the frontend website.

For the backend, AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) reserved G4 instances in Mumbai region with up to 4 NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPUs, 48 vCPUs and 192 GiB of memory will be used to deploy the cloud gaming infrastructure.

The EC2 instances will be deployed with the Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Base AMI. Expertise in Python programming language and AWS Lambda service is required for EC2 automation.

AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS) will be used for hosting virtual machines and storing the games. AWS Systems Manager and AWS SDK will be used for debugging and troubleshooting tasks. AWS CloudWatch and Cost Explorer will be used for setting alarms and managing the costs. AWS Direct Connect will be used for reducing the data transfer costs significantly.

Expertise in Microsoft Windows Server administration is required for managing the active directory and group policy objects.

Remote desktop access technology is required to allow the users to access the virtual machines deployed on the cloud from their device.