SINGAPORE (March 6): The Covid-19 virus has hit the tech industry hard, with several large-scale global tech events cancelled or postponed until further notice. But it’s not all gloom and doom: Phone giants like Oppo and realme are continuing to release exciting new products while a new study gives some insight into online behaviours. We round up the most exciting things happening in tech over the past few weeks.
Ready, set… but no game?
Arguably the biggest event in the gaming industry calendar, the 2020 Game Developers Conference (GDC) has been cancelled amid Covid-19 fears. The GDC, which was supposed to be held on March 16, was already on shaky ground after major names in the industry such as Microsoft, Unity, Epic, Amazon, Facebook and Sony pulled out of the event in February, when the virus outbreak hit a peak. The GDC is an annual gaming conference where developers usually announce new games, products or projects in the highly-competitive, multi-billion dollar industry. It is considered the highlight of the year for gaming enthusiasts. On the GDC website, the organisers posted: “After close consultation with our partners in the game development industry and community around the world, we’ve made the difficult decision to postpone the Game Developers Conference this March.” They added that they fully intend to host a GDC event later in the summer (June-August). “We will be working with our partners to finalize the details and will share more information about our plans in the coming weeks,” they stated.
No face time for Facebook’s F8
On Feb 27, social media giant Facebook said it is canceling its F8 developer conference, its biggest event of the year, over concerns about the novel coronavirus. The event was initially scheduled to take place in San Jose, California, on May 5 and 6. It is a widely anticipated Facebook event and attracts more than 5,000 developers, creators and entrepreneurs from around the globe. Facebook will replace the main F8 conference with “locally hosted events, videos and livestreamed content”. The cancellation of Facebook’s event now puts the spotlight on two other tech giants, Google and Apple. Google I/O, the search giant’s annual event, is scheduled for May 12 to 14, while Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference usually takes place in June. Already, other large-scale tech events across the world had been cancelled in wake of the coronavirus outbreak, including the Mobile World Congress, the giant mobile phone conference in Barcelona.
Singapore still got game
If your parents have ever nagged you about spending too much time on your phone playing mobile games, you can now say it’s not your fault — mobile gaming in Singapore is just that good. In a recent report by London-based Opensignal, an independent mobile analytics company specialising in quantifying mobile network experience, Singapore has topped the global charts when it comes to mobile games experience. In the report, “The State of Mobile Games Experience”, which examines the user experience on close to 38 million devices across Opensignal’s active user base globally, Singapore scored the highest in metrics such as latency, packet loss and jitter — metrics which determine the impact on gameplay and the overall multiplayer games experience on an operator’s network. Singapore’s score comes in at 85.5 out of 100, far ahead of the average of 61.1 seen for the APAC region, and beating out the Netherlands and Japan. The score means that the vast majority of users deemed their network experience acceptable, and nearly all users felt like they had control over the game and received immediate feedback on their actions. There was also no noticeable delay in almost all cases. Mobile gaming is definitely on the rise in Singapore. The local mobile games market is projected to hit a revenue of US$53 million ($73.7 million) in 2020 alone and a market volume of US$56 million by 2024. Globally, the Apple App Store and Google Play Store mobile game revenue amounted to US$9.2 billion in the third quarter of 2019, according to IHS Markit and Priori Data. The US generated the greatest share, with mobile game revenue of over US$2.5 billion, followed by Japan with just over US$2 billion. Mobile data and analytics company App Annie forecasts that the mobile games industry, including China, will generate revenues of US$100 billion in 2020. Gaming experiences will only improve as 5G speeds take off. 5G’s improved latencies, as well as higher speeds, will greatly increase the appeal of real-time multiplayer mobile gaming and perhaps eventually even lead to a shift to cloud gaming. “Already, we have seen break-out smartphone multiplayer games become successful. The deployment of 5G will improve the responsiveness and reliability of mobile networks which will make the experience of playing mobile multiplayer games even more enjoyable,” the report stated. Mobile games are proving to become a favourite pastime among Singaporeans – in fact, studies have found that Singaporeans spend more time playing video games as compared to their peers in Japan and South Korea. Game on, fellow Singaporeans.
Taking on 5G
Perhaps realising that 5G will grow the mobile gaming industry in even greater swaths, Chinese phone makers Oppo and realme (formerly a part of the Oppo stable) are taking on 5G in a big way by releasing two new 5G powered phones, the Oppo Find X2 and the realme X50 Pro 5G, just last month. Oppo’s new flagship will feature a Qualcomm SM8250 Snapdragon 865 chipset, run on Android 10, and be 5G-ready. It is expected to go head-to-head with Samsung’s Galaxy S20, the South Korean tech giant’s flagship. The new Galaxy will only be released in Singapore on March 6, so for now there is scant detail on it. At the same time, realme, the fastest growing smartphone brand right now, unveiled its first 5G flagship smartphone, the X50 Pro 5G. realme’s strategy of capturing the mid-range market has worked well so far. Their first 5G flagship comes packed with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 5G processor (the same as Oppo Find X2’s), a 64 MP Hawk Eye AI quad-camera and other hardware that seems to imply they’re jumping hot-and-heavy onto the 5G bandwagon
