約翰在哪？在外星太空船上，你帶領的武裝小隊正在有條不紊地搜尋一個人，這個問題一直縈繞在你的腦海中。他是自己人，一位看來和大家走散了的戰斗英雄。這一幕發生在2558年，人類遭到了外星軍隊的襲擊，而你最不愿意看到的情況就是自己麾下訓練有素的戰士投敵。

你小心翼翼地穿過飛船狹窄的通道。周圍很暗，令人感到壓抑，只有太空船的艙壁上泛著一層詭異的藍光。倘若沒有武器上閃爍的鈷藍色光輝，你看到的就將只是隊友們的深色背影。突然幾個陌生的影子進入你的視線，你悄悄地用食指扣住扳機。一道寶藍色光線從瞄準鏡中指向前方。

但他們發現了你！顏色各異的致命激光束從外星人的武器中發射而出，打在飛船的艙壁上又折射出去。你迅速橫跨一步，如果周圍的空間能夠再大一點兒的話，你就可以找到很好的瞄準位置。但為時已晚，在你還擊前，一束精準的激光把你送到了彩虹色的墳墓中。

游戲結束。（再來一局嗎？）

感謝微軟長盛不衰的游戲IP《光環》，近20年來，類似的游戲場景得以出現在千家萬戶的客廳中，玩家可以在微軟越來越受歡迎的主機Xbox上玩到這款游戲。上述豐富游戲內容是《財富》雜志最近赴華盛頓州雷德蒙德的微軟總部訪問時所見，但它并不需要性能強悍的消費電子硬件就能夠達到現代第一人稱射擊游戲應有的速度和絢麗程度——此類游戲一直以運算量大而著稱。只需要一部智能手機，具體來說是和傳統Xbox游戲機手柄配對的智能手機。

智能手機的性能已經這么優秀了嗎？不盡然。但它們空前的普及程度已經顯著改變了人們消費傳媒的方式。皮尤研究中心2019年估計，全世界擁有手機的人口超過50億，其中逾一半是可以上網的智能手機。在索尼的隨聲聽問世后就可以隨身攜帶的音樂如今紛紛流媒體化。電影和電視一度只限于較大的屏幕，現在則通過無線網絡進了人們的衣兜。

如今視頻游戲也準備邁出這一步。如果不是游戲玩家，你或許不會意識到能夠帶來質變的流媒體會有多么重要。今天的游戲行業規模龐大。市場研究機構Newzoo預計，今年全球游戲行業的規模將達到1520億美元，比去年全球影院和家庭電影市場970億美元的規模大57%，是191億美元的全球錄制音樂市場的8倍。和這些行業一樣，視頻游戲制作公司已經抓住了流媒體看似無限的潛力，而且它們之間已經開始了競賽，要看的是誰先找到門道。

被廣大公司高管所熟悉的“云計算”則是支撐流媒體的秘密武器。把“計算”任務轉移到遙遠而且規模驚人的服務器中心，再通過不間斷的互聯網連接和我們的個人設備連在一起，就可以讓我們所有人按自身需求用上超級計算機級別的數字處理能力。這樣的能力水平，再加上Newzoo預計到2022年全球游戲行業年銷售額有望達到1960億美元，讓微軟這家游戲行業里的中堅力量，碰巧也是云服務領域中的龍頭對于所謂的云游戲非常感興趣。

也正是出于這樣的原因，在三星蓋樂世手機上運行的《光環5》仍然可以提供讓人眼前一亮的視覺效果。我們在雷德蒙德看到的游戲演示的實際運行地點是微軟設在160英里（約258公里）以外的華盛頓州昆西數據中心。該數據中心是微軟計劃設立的13處設施之一，而這些設施將按微軟野心勃勃的Project Xcloud提供游戲流媒體服務，該項目將于今年秋天啟動公開測試。

游戲領域的上一次重大突破出現在10年前，當時智能手機的出現帶來了原始但異常火爆的手機游戲，比如《糖果傳奇》和《憤怒的小鳥》。Newzoo的分析師湯姆·維吉曼說：“云游戲基本上是同一種東西。你可以接觸到所有這些受眾，而且他們不需要有高檔游戲PC或者昂貴的主機。”

對此感興趣的不光是雷德蒙德微軟總部的那些人。一直大舉擴張云業務的谷歌已經宣布，將在今年年底前按承諾推出Stadia云游戲平臺。與此同時，同城對手、在云服務領域遙遙領先的龍頭企業亞馬遜正在評估怎樣把Twitch，也就是人們觀看游戲直播的首選平臺帶到更高的水平上。在大企業身后，一批身份復雜的較小挑戰者也在開發，或者據說正在研究它們自己的游戲流媒體訂閱服務，這其中既有蘋果公司、英偉達、沃爾瑪和威瑞森等《財富》美國500強公司，也有美國藝電、Valve這樣的游戲開發商，還有Blade和Parsec等初創企業。

但這些公司都沒有三巨頭的云計算實力，三巨頭則能夠借助其基礎設施來為自己的最知名的軟件和服務賦能。亞馬遜、谷歌或微軟能否成功打造下一代游戲主機并不重要。無論如何，它們都將從中受益。

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.

薩蒂亞·納德拉對否定論者已經習以為常。多年來，華爾街分析師一直在問，為什么以Windows操作系統和Office辦公軟件著稱的微軟會在視頻游戲等看來如此微不足道的東西上浪費資金。2014年7月納德拉成為微軟CEO后，這種質疑聲變得更大。仍然對前任的移動設備決策失誤耿耿于懷的納德拉承諾，將讓微軟不再受消費領域干擾，并且朝著利潤豐厚的企業服務邁進。有些人甚至敦促微軟徹底退出游戲業務。長期以來一直在觀察微軟的Wedbush Securities的董事總經理丹尼爾·艾夫斯說：“在四五年前，我們還有其他人都建議他們剝離那塊兒業務。”但這種情況已經發生了改變——去年，微軟的游戲收入首次超過100億美元，其中包括Xbox游戲機、Windows游戲和第三方游戲銷售分成。

艾夫斯笑著說，當我問納德拉為什么微軟不放棄游戲業務，他回答說：“許多人都在說微軟應該做各種各樣的事情。如果我聽了外面的人所有的話，那這家公司就幾乎不會進行創新了。”

說句公道話，這幾年納德拉一直遲遲不愿將游戲業務列入微軟整體戰略的核心。盡管取得了成功，但游戲只占微軟年收入的十分之一左右。云計算的成長是微軟市值今年突破1萬億美元的主要原因；包括Azure云計算服務在內，該公司“智慧云”業務一個季度的收入就相當于游戲業務一年的收入（再見，《光環》！）。

但如果能夠讓游戲業務的未來和微軟強大的云引擎搭上關系呢？好吧，現在說到點子上了。艾夫斯說，2014年納德拉首次披露將斥巨資25億美元收購異常火爆的建造類游戲《我的世界》時“人們稍感不解”，但現在可以清楚地看到納德拉正在“基于他的游戲是整體業務一部分的理念而播下種子”。微軟不光是要保留游戲業務。就像它對Windows和Office的做法一樣，微軟將利用其云計算基礎設施來顯著提升游戲業務的規模并改善所有跟微軟合作的視頻游戲發行商的命運，使之遠遠超過之前可能的水平。

如今，游戲在微軟的“核心”地位已經不容置疑。2017年年底，納德拉將游戲業務負責人菲爾·斯賓塞提拔到了微軟管理團隊中，以強調這一點。同時，微軟管理層對云技術推動的游戲持樂觀態度。負責微軟云平臺產品管理的朱莉婭·懷特估計，向視頻游戲發行商提供Azure服務的價值為700億美元，差不多相當于拼車服務上市公司Uber。懷特說，今天的大多數網絡游戲都是在游戲發行商經營的私人數據中心里開發和運營的。其他行業的技術趨勢表明這種情況持續不了多久。她指出：“雖然游戲開發行業的情況截然不同，但他們面臨的考驗和磨難跟開始采用云技術的商業銀行或零售公司一樣。”

云龍頭的戰利品——今年1月，微軟讓游戲主機領域的長期對手索尼（以PlayStation游戲機著稱）成了自己的Azure客戶，而且雙方承諾將在未來的某些游戲項目上合作，此舉震驚了游戲界。這就好像通用汽車和福特宣布聯手挑戰特斯拉一樣——毫無疑問，這樣的跡象表明競爭格局將迅速而急劇地變化。

這同樣表明，納德拉設想的微軟要比當初有更大的覆蓋范圍。當我問他，將自己定位成企業軟件公司的微軟為什么要這么努力地打造消費娛樂業務時，他回答說：“這項業務規模更大，對吧？它比其他業務都大。我為什么不去做游戲呢？它契合我們的業務。它能夠和通用平臺連接在一起。我們認為自己的能力很獨特。”但問題在于，這個領域所有參與者都在這么想。

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粉絲3.9萬的埃爾維斯或許也屬于這個圈子。28歲的網紅主播理查德·泰勒·布萊文斯，也就是粉絲熟知的“忍者”，已經登錄Twitch。他要和好友打幾盤“吃雞”游戲《堡壘之夜》。隨著他操縱的人物拿著武器在游戲的虛擬環境中奔跑跳躍，布萊文斯大聲指揮著，就像NFL的四分衛。他的粉絲則抓住所有局勢平淡的機會來發言。彈幕和“忍者”的話一起在對話框里快速滾動著。有些粉絲會對布萊文斯的每一次操作都做出反應（“慢了，忍者”）；其他人實際上并沒有看直播，而是在自顧自地聊天（《海底總動員》為什么是一部“相當好”的皮克斯電影）。

換句話說，這只是Twitch上普通的一天。制作公司StreamElements統計，去年粉絲——絕大多數為男性，而且大多都在34歲及以下——在Twitch上觀看游戲直播的時間達到令人咂舌的93.6億小時。2011年Twitch從流媒體視頻網站Justin.tv中剝離出來，該網站是用戶制作內容領域里的領跑者。據報道，2014年亞馬遜對該網站報價9.7億美元，在競價中擊敗了YouTube的母公司谷歌。Wedbush Securities的分析師邁克爾·帕赫特估算，去年Twitch實現收入4億美元。

Twitch用的是Amazon Web Services（AWS），也就是亞馬遜的云計算業務，而且已經迅速成為亞馬遜整體視頻游戲戰略的基石。AWS已經在向視頻游戲發行商出售計算資源和開發工具。有消息稱，AWS還將推出面向流媒體視頻游戲的服務，而不僅僅是播放游戲視頻（該公司拒絕發表評論，但最近為“尚未宣布的3A游戲”招聘技術性人員已經顯露了它的意圖。和美國職業棒球小聯盟一樣，3A代表游戲預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.)

游戲行業的兩大里程碑確立了以云為基礎的未來。第一個里程碑是Epic Games的《堡壘之夜》大獲成功，去年估計銷售額為24億美元，而且目前披露的注冊玩家數量為2.5億。《堡壘之夜》表明，“跨平臺”游戲，也就是在微軟、索尼、蘋果及其他公司相互競爭的設備上都可以玩的游戲積累的受眾群體要遠遠超過以前那個時代，或者說某款游戲只限于某個生態系統的時代。市場研究機構SuperData的游戲部門負責人霍斯特·范德魯恩說：“《堡壘之夜》的關鍵之處在于它告訴所有的平臺，它們必須降低其覆蓋領域的門檻。”

第二個里程碑？是Twitch。它表明看別人玩游戲并為其喝彩給人帶來的快樂程度和他們自己玩游戲一樣——可以將此稱為“小兄弟”現象。這種互動證明參與和玩游戲并不是同一件事情。它擴展了某款游戲的潛在受眾群體。微軟旗下開發了《光環》的游戲工作室343 Industries的負責人伯妮·羅斯說：“看游戲直播正在超越玩游戲本身，今天許多年輕人會說他們是在真正看了直播后才去玩的游戲。”

就微軟來說，它從未看到這樣的觀眾效應。一位前高管說：“亞馬遜把微軟拉到了跑步機上。”在亞馬遜收購Twitch兩年后，微軟收購了與之競爭的公司Beam，但未披露交易金額。StreamElements的數據顯示，這項更名為Mixer的服務可以讓Xbox玩家相互觀看對方玩游戲的過程，而2018年這些玩家的觀看時間為3960萬小時，同比猛增179%，但仍然明顯落后于亞馬遜的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開發者大會開幕前，數千名開發者在夏日灼熱的陽光下等待著，但這條長長的隊伍展示出的焦急心情和天氣沒有什么關系。為盡可能多的用戶制作軟件是這些與會者的生計來源，他們很想聽聽谷歌的銷售宣傳，從而弄明白自己為什么要為Stadia制作游戲，后者是谷歌的試驗性云游戲業務，擬定于11月上線。

和硅谷的大多數推介一樣，上臺發言的谷歌高管都信誓旦旦地保證其技術水平。谷歌方面表示，Stadia復雜的云構架可以防止不利的網絡故障讓在線玩家沮喪地丟掉游戲手柄。玩家需要做的只是打開Chrome的一個標簽，然后點擊幾下鼠標，這樣就能夠玩《刺客信條：奧德賽》等高速度、高解析度的游戲了。

和微軟、亞馬遜的對等業務一樣，谷歌這批人相信自己的巨大數據中心“帝國”可以讓他們的高端流媒體視頻游戲技術需求具有優勢且不會受到干擾。和同類公司一樣，谷歌鼓勵自己的消費者游戲和企業云團隊合作，以確保Stadia推出時不會出現以往困擾網絡游戲的問題。

托馬斯·庫里安曾經長期在甲骨文擔任高管職位，現在是谷歌云業務的CEO。他說Stadia的能量源于谷歌企業工程師打造的網絡技術，而云游戲是谷歌涉足這個價值數百億美元行業的途徑，“我們的希望是它能夠擴大這個市場，而不僅僅是取代別人。就全世界所有用專業臺式機玩游戲的人來說，很可能有四分之三的人都買不起這樣的臺式機。”

換句話說就是，為什么要在四分之三的市場尚未開發之際為了四分之一的市場而爭斗呢？微軟老員工、目前負責Stadia產品開發的約翰·賈斯提斯持同樣的觀點。他說，玩家不再愿意“每過幾年就買一個昂貴的盒子”，而這樣的服務是接觸到游戲的更便捷途徑，它們沒有傳統主機市場那樣的高門檻。

就連定價也發揮了一定作用——雖然Stadia已經宣布了129美元的套餐和9.99美元的月租費，但谷歌說他們也在評估Stadia的免費版本，后者畫質較低，推出的也會晚一些。賈斯提斯指出，盡管技術路線很清晰，但云游戲這樣的業務模式還處于“初期階段”，“有些人確實想用購買模式，另一些則想用訂閱模式。我覺得我們不會說只選擇其中的一種。”

確定細節可能需要幾年時間。盡管消費者可能喜歡類似于Netflix或Spotfify的游戲模式，也就是支付月租費，然后玩那些讓你心動的游戲，但還不清楚云服務提供商相對于游戲發行商的優勢能否讓這樣的模式成真。游戲發行公司已經看到了平臺壓力怎樣改變了電影、音樂、雜志等行業。除非確定長期內還會有顯著增長，否則它們就不想放棄任何一部分銷售額。

法國游戲發行商育碧游戲最知名的產品就是《刺客信條》系列，該公司不是特別擔心。育碧負責合作與收入的高管克里斯·厄爾利說：“我們對此不那么感興趣。”該公司在6月發布了自己的PC端訂閱服務，名為Uplay+，覆蓋100多種游戲，包括《孤島驚魂》和《波斯王子》。該項服務每月收費14.99美元，將在明年登陸Stadia。厄爾利說，目前“發行公司參與一體化訂閱模式的依據還不那么充分”。他還指出，如何持續地將云游戲變現的方案很多，但還不清楚“誰要向誰付錢”。

目前發行公司的焦點是判斷現在的成功游戲是否始于云模式，還是說源于該模式的全新游戲將取代常見的IP。Twitch的互動性以及《糖果傳奇》等免費增值移動游戲的創新性表明技術進步有可能為游戲參與方式開辟新的途徑。只有技術人員才能夠參悟出用如今支持人工智能的基礎設施來運行游戲會觸發怎樣的可能性。

厄爾利說：“游戲設計可能出現我們甚至想象不到的革命，而且它將利用云計算的增長。”

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，我在微軟的343 Industries游戲工作室停了下來，員工們帶我參觀了游客中心——實際上是他們的“圣地”，用于慶祝《光環》系列累計銷售額達到60億美元。那里有游戲中的英雄和反派雕像，比我高很多，感覺就像《光環》版本的希臘眾神藝術館。還有裝著紀念品的玻璃盒子。在一面墻上，擺放著游戲中虛構的那些武器的復制品，看起來就像在屏幕上一樣嚇人。這些復制品的扳機上懸掛著顯眼的橘黃色標簽，上面寫著“道具”，以免有人對“焚燒加農炮”過于當真。

343 Industries成立于2007年，其名稱源于《光環》中的一個人物，這家工作室是微軟游戲業務的老成員之一。僅去年一年，微軟就收購了6家游戲工作室。在今年的E3游戲展上，微軟宣布它又收購了一家公司。如今，微軟的Xbox Game Studios部門已經擁有15家半自主運營的工作室，而微軟認為它們將成為云游戲競爭中的關鍵資產，特別是和缺乏自主開發游戲的亞馬遜和谷歌抗衡的時候。

但并不是所有人都這么看。雖然微軟的《光環》和《極限競速:地平線》的后續作品已經贏得了喝彩，但分析師指出這兩款IP存在的時間——《光環》2001年問世，《極限競速:地平線》出現在四年以后，表明微軟旗下的工作室已經江郎才盡。微軟游戲業務負責人斯賓塞承認：“這方面我們得努力。這幾年我們的自主游戲并沒有做到最好。”

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.”

作為三大消費云公司中唯一的視頻游戲老資格開發商，如果微軟希望保持對亞馬遜河谷歌的天然優勢，就必須改變這種狀況。畢竟，和傳媒行業的其他領域一樣，視頻游戲同樣以內容為王。正是出于這樣的原因，微軟的對手才開始從美國藝電（《Madden NFL》、《極品飛車》）和2K Games（《文明》、《NBA 2K20》）等頂尖游戲公司挖經驗豐富的老手，目的就是打造自己的游戲IP。亞馬遜和谷歌出奇同步地分別推出了自己的付費項目，以便Prime和YouTube同Netflix展開競爭。

但冰凍三尺非一日之寒。亞馬遜2012年組建了游戲部門，七年后裁掉了幾十名開發人員，因為它重新給自己編織了一個基于云的未來。（亞馬遜對這個消息反應平淡。一位發言人告訴《財富》雜志：“亞馬遜對游戲投入很大，而且仍然將會把大量資金用于Amazon Game Studios、Twitch、Twitch Prime、AWS、我們的零售業務以及其他運營部門。”）

SuperData的分析師范德魯恩相信三巨頭在云領域里的動作要在五年以后才會對傳統游戲行業產生明顯影響。他說，在此之前要關注的是云計算龍頭為了“逐步推出”云游戲服務而對數據中心基礎設施的持續投資。

為什么亞馬遜、谷歌和微軟要就一個如此遙遠的未來弄出這么大的動靜呢？分析師帕赫特說，這就是科技行業熟悉的“先下單，再擴容”業務模式的一部分——發表演講，立下目標，寄希望于早期動力像滾雪球那樣變成不可逾越的競爭優勢。他指出，畢竟，“Facebook經過發展才成立價值10億美元的點子。Uber也是如此。”

微軟尤其不愿意錯過機會。它仍然對在移動領域里敗給谷歌及其安裝操作系統耿耿于懷。（聯合創始人比爾·蓋茨在今年早些時候很惋惜地表示，微軟“只差一點點就能夠主導移動操作系統了”。）

那么整裝待發的時候到了。納德拉說：“我們參與這場游戲是為了游戲著想，而不是要達到其他目的。”（財富中文網）

本文另一版本登載于《財富》雜志2019年8月刊，標題為《科技巨頭的新巷戰》。

譯者：Charlie

審校：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.”