As you may have seen, Gamereactor recently attended Mobile World Congress 2022 in Barcelona. During our time at the technology convention, we caught up with various tech companies and firms, including Radian Arc at the AMD booth, where we had the chance to talk with the company’s CEO David Cook all about their cloud-based gaming subscription service, Blacknut. As part of our chat, we asked how the technology behind the cloud-based system works, with Cook telling us.
“What we’ve done is we’ve partnered with AMD, and taken their latest GPUs, their cloud-based GPUs, and we’ve put those together with a proprietary software stack that runs on top of that, and we’ve put that inside of the operator’s network. The goal there is that by doing that, we can get the best possible performance. That includes the start-up time for the game, which is obviously really important for the users, as well as actually the latency in terms of playing the game as well. The other part is that for cloud gaming, economics is very important right. There needs to be able to be a service that can run and run profitably, so by moving the games to the cloud, we can actually run multiple games per GPU. So, the AMD GPUs, we have one GPU that lets you run up to four games per GPU and we have one that will let you run up to 12 games per GPU. When you combine that with the concept of actually having the GPUs sitting on the Telco’s network, you can really lower the cost of delivering the games as well.”
Shortly afterward, Cook told us a little bit about the subscription model and how much it will cost to get access to Blacknut, as well as a little about the service’s catalogue and what kind of games it will offer.
“It is a subscription. It’s a monthly subscription. The pricing of that does vary depending on where in the world it is. Typically, the pricing is around the similar pricing of a Netflix service, so if you’re in the US, it will be about $10, here it might be about €12-15, depending on the country. But we also have pricing plans that work very well in LATAM America, South-East Asia, India, and places like that.”
“Content. It’s great content. If you are in Europe, you can get access to games like Disney games, so a very robust catalogue, and again it’s very family friendly games as well, so that works very well in that Telco environment, where it might be being bundled with a 5G plan or a data plan or something like that.”
You can check out our full interview with Cook below, to learn even more about Blacknut.
