Verizon attempts to break into the gaming industry.

Verizon, the telecommunications giant that everyone dislikes as much as Comcast (who, by the way, is the voted the worst company in America), is now trying to get into the gaming industry. How, you ask? By creating a service called “VerizonGaming”, which they plan to operate like Netflix. It will be an app on the Nvidia Shield (which is a streaming console-like thing) that you can sign into with your Verizon account and play games.

Verizon, hilariously, spent $1.2 BILLION dollars on something called Go90 in 2015 that was targeted towards millennials and was positioned as a social entertainment platform. “How did that go?” I hear you say. My response is: Have you ever heard of Go90? Probably not, and you never will again since they shut down last year in 2018.

Personally, I do not want to touch anything game, or even internet related that has Verizon’s logo on it. There are plenty of better ways to stream content to your TV than signing up for their wildly overpriced (not confirmed, but I’m making an educated guess) streaming service that would have been billed monthly or annually.

Participants in their closed beta tests apparently get a free $150 Amazon gift card after testing the service for them, so you can bet I looked into how to fund my latest keyboard. Spoiler: it’s already closed. 🙁

Verizon is not alone in their venture into cloud streaming services though, Microsoft is working on their “Project xCloud”, and Google is working on “Project Stream”. To the surprise of probably no one, Amazon is also getting in on the action and developing a streaming game service of its own, but it’s not named yet.

Time will tell which the best one will be, but I think I can go out on a limb and make a safe bet here: it’s not gonna be Verizon.


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Published 2019-01-14 22:38:42

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