Not all that surprising, EA is getting into the cloud-streaming market and has begun testing its new service. Announced on Medium, the company is randomly selecting users to participate in a technical preview to test its upcoming service.

With Microsoft and Google either launching or entering public betas of their streaming services later this year, EA is on-track to enter the market around the same time. And the idea is similar, stream games from the cloud, rather than hosting them locally.

Initially, EA is offering beta-testers the ability to stream FIFA 19, Titanfall 2, Need for Speed Rivals, and Unravel. The intent of the technical test is to understand the latency and ‘jitter’ of the game in real-world scenarios.

As for the backend, it looks like EA is building their own technology. The company states in the announcement post that they are using AWS and the public cloud, to build out their network. And because EA isn’t explicitly locked-in to AWS, they can use Google and Azure data centers to help bring their content physically closer to users when needed.

And like Microsoft and Google, EA expects to bring its streaming services to mobile devices.

EA has a massive library of games and the cashflow to build-out a competitive streaming service and it’s clear that they will be entering this market in the near future. While we wait to see how Microsoft’s services perform in the real-world, EA and Google are a step ahead of Microsoft, for the moment.

Tagged with Cloud Streaming, EA