Blacknut's Journey in Building a Cloud Platform for Premium PC Games

Introduction

I’m Nabil Laredj, VP Business Development & Licensing at Blacknut, a leading cloud gaming platform. My team and I are essentially in charge of building an awesome catalog of games for the whole family while creating an extensive distribution network through telecommunication partnerships, Smart TV access, and D2C.

I have been involved in the gaming industry for over 15 years now. I began my journey in this amazing industry at Gameloft in their London office where I was essentially in charge of clearing license rights for any games using cars, music, celebrities, TV shows, movies, sports IPs, etc…

After a few years of deep-diving in the mobile space, I continued my journey in the console space with Electronic Arts in the UK. I was mainly in charge of business affairs with a focus on our biggest franchises at the time: FIFA and Speed for Speed. Not a small task when looking at the number of IPs involved!

The innovation level in the gaming industry is truly amazing and I was rapidly intrigued by cloud gaming and the benefits the technology could bring to players.

I started my cloud gaming journey back in 2014 with g-cluster, a European cloud gaming pioneer that had partnerships in place with SFR and Orange, the two largest telcos (telecommunications) in France. My role consisted of licensing great games ranging from indie to AAA. I learned a lot and the data we gathered continues to be useful today.

I’m now heading the licensing and Biz Dev department at Blacknut where the team has built the leading pure player in the cloud gaming space.

Story of Blacknut

Blacknut is now the world's leading pure-player cloud gaming service dedicated to the general public, distributed both direct to consumers and B2B through telcos, device manufacturers, OTT services, & media companies.

The platform offers the largest catalog of premium PC games with 600+ premium titles carefully selected for the whole family, all included in a monthly subscription (a lot like how Netflix and Spotify function but in this instance with video games)

The service is now available in 50+ countries across Europe, Asia, North America, and Latin America on a wide range of devices, including PC, mobiles, set-top-boxes, and Smart TVs.

The company was founded in 2016 by Olivier Avaro (CEO) and is headquartered in Rennes, France, with offices in Paris, Seoul, and San Francisco. Looking at the sheer amount of games being published on Steam, it became clear that discoverability was an issue in the industry. We tried to develop a platform where we would curate great games that didn’t necessarily have the visibility they deserved on Steam and highlight them on our platform.

Collaboration with Game Developers

The relationship is really easy and it was important for us to implement a simple and smooth process with game makers when building the platform. We wanted to create something that would benefit both players and game creators. For our players, they can access hundreds of games on any of their preferred device(s) without any downloads and play instantly. For game makers, we only require an existing build of the game and we take care of all the technical work and marketing.

For games to be playable on all devices, we tend to focus on games that have full controller support. This would enable those games to be playable on PC or Mac but also directly on Smart TV or mobile devices.

Also, we’re mainly looking at premium titles as opposed to freemium titles with in-app purchases.

Ultimately, we’re building a balanced catalog of premium games including genres such as RPG, racing, adventure, casual, platformer, FPS, co-op, etc… where kids, teenagers, and parents alike can find great games to enjoy. We also add new games on a regular basis so that there’s always new fresh content to discover and play.

Optimizing Games for Streaming and Cloud-Based Gameplay

There’s actually no dev work or SDK required to onboard a game on the platform as we literally only need a Windows build. Right now, all the optimization is done on our side from a streaming and infrastructure level.

That being said, we do have a lot of data that we can share with our game partners. On top of the standard reports, we have access to a lot of quantitative and qualitative data as to what makes a game successful on a cloud gaming platform. We know some of the big players in the industry are very protective of this data and simply share nothing with studios and publishers.

That’s quite the opposite on our side and we believe this data is very valuable and provides very useful insights.

To go further in that direction, we’re building an online access where our game partners can check their games’ performances but also anonymized data by game genre, device, etc.

From a marketing perspective, we also work on game(s) launches on the platform with a proper schedule and communication plan, featuring both direct to consumers and B2B when working with distribution partners such as telcos, for instance.

Challenges

It’s always been a long-term play from our perspective and we understood very early in the process that establishing a new business category with a new way to access and consume games would take time and require a lot of focus from every level of the company.

Cloud gaming is fairly recent and one of our first challenges was to create awareness around this opportunity. As for any new business, there was a legitimate caution from studios and publishers at first and we were not expecting them to go all in from day one.

We’ve patiently built relationships over the years and as we grew our audience, we began to receive more and more interest from game makers.

One of the turning points, besides the deployment of 5G, was the publicity for cloud gaming created by Google Stadia, Microsoft Cloud, and Amazon Luna. They all contributed to putting cloud gaming on the map at a large scale.

It’s really important to meet with your game partners on a regular basis to let them know about your progress and update them on where you are. This means that our team usually attends all major gaming events such as E3, Gamescom, GDC, and Tokyo Game Show but also local or regional events such as Digital Dragons, Brazil Game Show, Gamescom Asia, EVA, Pocket Gamer, etc.

Overall, we’ve tried to create a virtuous circle where, as we grow our reach with telcos or TV partnerships, we get access to more quality content. And as we grow the quality of our library, we generate interest from larger distribution partners.

Benefits of Partnership with Blacknut

Blacknut currently has the largest catalog of licensed games ranging from very cool indie game developers up to popular publishers such as Disney, Team17, Curve Games, PLAION, Konami, Outright Games, Focus Entertainment, etc…

As opposed to cloud gaming platforms such as GeForce Now, there's no need for the player to pre-own the games from a digital platform to play a game on Blacknut. Our games are already licensed from over 100 different publishers in order to give instant access to our users without any additional payment.

The vast majority of our players are occasional players who don’t necessarily own a powerful PC or the latest generation console. As such, Blacknut brings a really cool value proposition to game makers by widening their audience while generating new streams of recurring revenue. All of that is at no cost to the developers as we don’t require any dev work to launch games on our platform.

From a revenue perspective, Blacknut provides a revenue share based on playtime. This means that royalties are generated each time a game is played on the platform.

Our most important distribution avenues include OTT platforms such as Amazon Fire TV, Smart TV manufacturers (Samsung TV, LG TV), and telecom operators (over 30 telco partnerships already signed). This allows us to bring games to a very comprehensive set of devices that would require important development costs to address for a studio or a publisher. Cloud gaming enables that access at no cost and brings a fantastic opportunity for games to be played by a different audience than on traditional platforms.

Ultimately, game makers want to be where the players are and, through our exponential growth over the past few years (currently signing and delivering new distribution partnerships almost every month), we now provide an interesting and complementary distribution offering. 

Future Plans

First off, we will continue to bring quality content to our players and a number of really exciting partnerships will be announced before the end of this year.

Games are at the heart of what we do so we listen to our players' and partners’ feedback in order to build a reference platform for cloud gaming.

One of our focuses this year is to launch new content passes on Blacknut which will bring either dedicated publisher content or dedicated genres of games. The first one we already announced is the Focus Entertainment Pass bringing over 20 games in addition to the Blacknut subscription which will launch later this year. Others will be announced soon.

We’re also bringing cool features coming in 2023 that are not announced yet. We’re very excited about the future and you should hear from us again very soon as we announce new B2B and game partnerships!

Nabil Laredj, VP Business Development & Licensing at Blacknut