Cloud Gaming Market

Cloud gaming has expanded rapidly in recent years by offering on-demand computing resources to gamers anywhere, anytime, and on any device. However, there’s a significant trade-off: cloud gaming typically introduces an additional 40–150 ms of latency, resulting in an 85%–800% increase compared to local gaming through dedicated servers.

For an optimal user experience, physical proximity and network distribution are crucial — putting gaming nodes close to end users can substantially reduce latency. Yet, building large centralized data centers in every location is inefficient and costly.

Current landscape

Google had previously attempted to tackle this problem with their cloud gaming platform, Google Stadia. There are plenty of reasons to attribute to Stadia’s eventual demise: poor marketing, user misalignment, etc. But a core reason that often goes overlooked is their under deliverance of technology. While Google Stadia promised “negative latency”, this was inherently impossible with the tech stack they were operating. After all, latency has to be bottlenecked by physical proximity at a certain point.

There are plenty of other examples of this. Xbox Cloud alone has 40M subscribers with known latency issues because they rely on large data centers which are normally centralized, can have extremely low and inefficient usage, and far from users that want to utilize them. While this is a “good enough” solution for more casual/single player games, it falls short for gamers that are looking for optimal immersion in competitive/multi-player games.

Why P2P Networks Offer an Advantage

Cloud gaming is particularly interesting because it occupies a unique niche:

1) Physical proximity and network distribution are critical for reducing latency.

2) Cloud gaming doesn’t require massive hardware to deliver optimal service.

This is why we believe P2P networks have an advantage over centralized cloud providers as on the one hand P2P networks can place nodes much closer to end users, and on the other hand they don’t require large, expensive data centers — consumer-level nodes are often sufficient to deliver optimal performance and they can exist where data centers don’t exist or are slow to develop.

Alignment with Market Supply

According to Canalys, there are already 2 billion gaming PCs worldwide, with 100 million added annually. Despite rising PC production, recreational PC usage hasn’t kept pace. Meanwhile, the demand for gaming continues to grow exponentially.

This gap — where powerful PCs exist but aren’t fully utilized — presents an opportunity for a P2P-style cloud gaming network. It can tap into idle computing resources, bridging the gap for gamers who need low-cost, high-quality access to games, especially in emerging markets where buying dedicated gaming hardware is often cost-prohibitive.

Overall, we believe that edge computing and low latency cloud gaming could become a mainstream way of distributing the games in a similar way to how streaming platforms enabled new ways of content distribution that provide more flexibility, optionality and convenience for the end users.

Enter Shaga

Shaga at its core is a DePin product on Solana that is designed to leverage edge computing for minimal latency.

Shaga uses edge computing in order to bring a cloud gaming experience; anyone can set up a node and share play with others. Suppliers are able to make use of their rigs that are optimized for gaming, and gamers are able to enjoy high-performant gameplay with better latency, and lower costs. Through this, gaming PC owners effectively become individual data centers while reaping passive rewards for essentially no cost. There won’t be a requirement to purchase any Shaga customized hardware to participate in the DePin network, thereby making the barrier to entry into the ecosystem as low as possible.

While Shaga is agnostic for the type of game (supports both Web 2.0 and 3.0 games), it’s also necessary to point out the unique access point they offer for Web 3.0 games with a controller with in-built hardware wallet that abstracts blockchain from end-users while allowing them to interact with primitives like NFTs, tokens, and other web3 primitives.

Real-World Use Cases

Gaming-on-the-go

Imagine you don’t own a gaming PC or you’re away from your gaming PC — at a café, a library, or even traveling — and want to take a break to play a high-quality game. Instead of carrying a powerful laptop or relying on distant cloud servers, you can just open Shaga on any device (tablet, phone, or lightweight laptop) to “borrow” a nearby node’s computing power. This way, you enjoy low-latency, high-fidelity gaming wherever you are, whenever you want.

Local Multiplayer & Social Play

However, Shaga is also a social platform. With the infrastructure behind edge computing that they’ve built, they can do much more than just give consumers a better solo gaming experience. With more localized games like Super Smash, FIFA, or Tekken gaining a lot of popularity, users can now play these games with one another without being in the same room through their FriendGrid system.

Game Streaming & Collaboration

Game streaming is an enormous market, with more than 7 million active streamers on Twitch and 35 million daily active users. Shaga enables these streamers to collaborate directly with select viewers by letting them play on the same screen with one-click — adding a new layer of social interaction to an already thriving community. This creates a more immersive, participatory experience, transforming passive viewers into active participants.

We believe that this is the tip of the iceberg and all of these use cases allow Shaga to actively contribute unique and interesting experiences to the gaming and social community.

UX at the crux of the product

Shaga has been built, taking into consideration the end user, both the nodes and the gamers on the network. They allow nodes to use their idle computing resources to create value for users, while also generating additional sources of revenue. These computing resources give gamers the ability to utilize cloud gaming resources, but in significantly higher qualities provided by the pure physics of the speed of light. Not only that, but now gaming can be a more social and immersive experience through their FriendGrid system.

To preserve good UX, Shaga is planning on doing frequent cloud saves as checkpoints for game state. Should any kind of failure happen on a given node, the game would reload on another node using such cloud saves. Eventually, there would also be a staking and reputation system that should further strengthen game theory and incentivize good actors.

Team

The Shaga team is highly dedicated and intentional, focusing on building a product that delivers an amazing user experience. We are confident they will redefine how games are played — not just in Web3 but in Web2 as well. Shaga is more than “just another cloud gaming platform.” It’s a decentralized, user-powered network that can fundamentally change how games are marketed, played, and monetized.

Check out https://shaga.xyz to get involved or simply follow them on X https://x.com/playonshaga for any upcoming relevant updates.

Investing in Shaga: The first consumer DePIN Protocol was originally published in IOSG Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.