German telco group Deutsche Telekom has revealed plans for a renewed 5G gaming push via a collaboration with GPU giant Nvidia’s cloud gaming platform GeForce NOW.
Announced at the Gamescom show in Cologne, Deutsche Telekom plans to launch the new gaming service in autumn this year, promising cloud gaming with “particularly stable response times” to smartphones via some network optimisation. It uses Nvidia’s cloud gaming platform GeForce NOW, with DT claiming it is Europe’s first network operator to enable latency-optimised mobile gaming with the cloud platform based on 5G standalone technology.Back to 5G+ Gaming, the service seems to have gone through some changes in terms of the partner companies used to enable it. In August last year, also at Gamescom, DT, ALSO, and cloud gaming firm Ludium Lab gave a demo of the 5G+ Gaming service.What was being pitched back then was a cloud gaming package of 100 games free of charge for a six-month-period, accessed via an app called Sora Stream from Ludium. It commercially launched the 5G+ Gaming tariff in October that year, and it was explained after the free trial customers would have to pay €9.99 per month to access Sora, but DT's 5G+ gaming tariff would continue to be free.The release says smartphones have remained the most popular gaming platform among German gamers for several years, and it cites the 2024 annual report by the German Games Industry Association, which found around 24.6 million people in Germany play mobile games – whether on a smartphone, tablet, or both. Nvidia and DT certainly talk a good game about gaming performance and what is capable of being delivered over mobile networks now – though how big a deal all this ends up being still rests on how many people actually want to play AAA games on their smartphone over 5G and on a bus, as opposed to at home over wifi and on a sofa.