Intel acquires cloud gaming service RemoteMyApp

Intel has acquired RemoteMyApp, a Szczecin, Poland-based startup providing cloud gaming solutions to businesses, for an undisclosed sum. RemoteMyApp CEO Andreas Hestbeck broke the news this morning to Polish media, which an Intel spokesperson confirmed to VentureBeat via email.

“We acquired RemoteMyApp for its leading team of cloud services designers and engineers, and we are excited to welcome the RemoteMyApp team to Intel,” the spokesperson said. “ Intel will continue to support RemoteMyApp’ s key customers per their contracts.”

Founded in 2014 by Radoslaw Zawartko and Rafał Krochmal, RemoteMyApp — which had raised over $4.7 million prior to the acquisition — partners with companies to create streaming gaming experiences for their customers. The startup’s platform provides the backend infrastructure on top of which companies can build apps and interfaces, or opt for RemoteMyApps’ out-of-the-box user and admin solutions.

On the player side, RemoteMyApp offers Vortex.gg, a subscription-based cloud gaming service running on the IBM Cloud that offers a catalog of titles like Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto V, and League of Legends starting at $9.99 per month for 50 minutes of play. The Vortex.gg app — which RemoteMyApp claims has been installed over 10 million times  — allows customers to link games to existing Steam, Origin, and Epic Games libraries and access them remotely, along with save files.

As Hestbeck explained in an interview with European outlet Silicon Canals: “Our technology is provided via business-to-business partners or Vortex.gg and our own platform. A player simply needs to download one of our dedicated apps, choose a subscription plan, and that’s it. Games are then streamed from our network of powerful servers delivered by the business-to-business partner or via Vortex.gg, straight to the users’ preferred device.”

Recently, RemoteMyApp announced a collaboration with PM Connect, a U.K.-based mobile payment provider, to bring Vortex.gg to PM Connect telco clients Orange and Vodafone. The startup has another high-profile customer in Deutsche Telekom, whose cloud gaming platform — MagentaGaming — is powered by RemoteMyApp’s technology.

Market opportunity

Cloud gaming is estimated to have generated $158 million in 2019, a number that could climb to $3.1 billion by 2024, according to some analysts. In Asia alone, Niko Partners pegs the addressable market for cloud gaming at about 10% of the total population of 1.5 billion gamers, which could reach 500 million by 2025.

Awareness of cloud gaming remains low — only 9% of gamers said they were “extremely familiar” with the technology in 2019. And RemoteMyApp competes with heavyweights including Facebook’s Cloud Games, Nvidia’s GeForce Now, PlayStation Now, Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming, Tencent’s Xianyou, and Google Stadia, as well as business-to-business rivals Ubitus and Blacknut. (In a challenge to RemoteMyApp’s business, Google this year began offering Stadia’s technology as a white label product, letting other companies use the tech without becoming a part of the Stadia ecosystem.)

But Intel — which hasn’t signaled that it intends to launch a cloud gaming service of its own — likely plans to marry RemoteMyApp’s products with its existing hardware as a combined chips and services bundle. Cloud gaming requires GPUs as well as CPUs, and RemoteMyApp provides an especially compelling use case for Intel’s recently announced Intel Server GPU.

In 2020, Intel launched a “high-density, low-latency” GPU and processor datacenter package designed to support more than 100 simultaneous Android cloud gaming users and up to 160 simultaneous users. Already, the company has collaborated with Tencent on the latter’s streaming game infrastructure, and Intel last year announced partnerships with Ubitus and Gamestream to equip the startups’ infrastructure backends with Intel hardware.

“My adventure with gaming began with the iconic Duke Nukem 3D game and led to the place where, together with the RemoteMyApp team, we created the highest quality technology service, thanks to which millions of players around the world have access to their favorite games anytime, anywhere. We’re proud to be joining the Intel team and, together, we will continue to create world-changing innovations,” Hestbeck said in a statement.