Samsung is adding cloud gaming to your Galaxy phone, and it could arrive this week

Ben Schoon | Oct 3 2023 - 6:46 am PT

Galaxy smartphones and tablets are reportedly adding a new app from Samsung as soon as this week, a new report claims, as Samsung will apparently expand its own cloud gaming service to all Galaxy users.

Samsung has somewhat quietly been working on its own cloud gaming service for a while now. The service has been in beta and could arrive on “1 billion” Galaxy devices as soon as later this week, Korea Economic Daily reports.

The new cloud service would apparently be exclusive to Samsung smartphones and tablets, and would launch widely during Samsung’s Developer Conference, which takes place on October 5.

What does a Samsung-backed cloud gaming platform look like? Apparently, the goal is to eliminate download times for games. Users would be able to stream mobile games immediately without downloading the title from the Play Store or Galaxy Store, which Samsung hopes will make ads for games more effective. The company is apparently also planning to cut service fees for this cloud gaming option to be below the 30% seen through the Play Store and Apple App Store in order to attract developers.

The ongoing testing of this cloud gaming service, which is apparently integrated into Samsung Game Launcher, has seen positive response, but it’s been quite clear what Samsung’s goal is. In an interview with VentureBeat in August (via The Verge), Samsung’s Jong Hyuk Woo explained:

90% of the people who have expressed interest in a game publisher’s content, via an ad, don’t actually ever get into the game. We believe that cloud streaming can do something for mobile game publishers by completely collapsing that user acquisition funnel, getting rid of the download and installing and the visit to the App Store. It can dramatically reduce that, that funnel and the inefficiencies within that model. And so game publishers are going to see a significant increase in the number of users who are coming into their games.

Apparently, a big goal of this cloud gaming push on Samsung’s part would be to generate additional revenue from Galaxy owners as the smartphone market has been in decline.

Notably, this isn’t the first push Samsung has made around cloud gaming. In 2022, the company launched Gaming Hub on its TVs, which integrates cloud gaming from Xbox, GeForce Now, Amazon Luna, and, for a little while, the now-dead Google Stadia.