We had the pleasure of interviewing the team at Blacknut earlier this year. We’ve now had the chance to do a follow-up interview. We are diving deeper into Blacknut’s cloud gaming service and discussing their latest offerings. These include new partnerships with Focus Entertainment and Ubisoft, as well as new subscription offerings.
Read on below for details about the service, including exciting news about new products like new Blacknut-Ubisoft offers to be revealed soon.
Can you please introduce the service and yourself for our readers?
Hello, my name is Thierry Teyssier – Chief Product Officer of Blacknut Cloud Gaming, handling our front end development & UI-UX experience for Blacknut product design.
Blacknut is a subscription-based cloud game streaming service based in France but available in more than 60 countries. Under a single subscription players create up to 5 player profiles and enjoy a full library of premium video games with choices for all members of the family. Blacknut allows players to enjoy all the games from the Cloud on a large selection of compatible devices including Smart TVs, tablets, mobiles, computers, and more. Our approach was to create a family-friendly gaming platform, including pin-protected parental controls, and junior profile management, ensuring players of all ages can join in on the fun.
What sort of trends are you seeing in cloud gaming? Have you seen any growth in your player base and/or in the people interested in the space as a whole?
We are seeing great traction from device manufacturers to include the cloud gaming experience in their product. At Blacknut particularly, we have seen massive growth in our TV players usage; this is of course partially driven by our partnership with Smart TV manufacturers like LG & Samsung, but we believe this also correlates to an overall demand for synergy between gaming IPs and other types of content – e.g. IPs that expanded into TV Shows and movies, and inversely. Think of titles like The Witcher, Last of Us, Assassin’s Creed, Star Wars, Harry Potter and so many more.
This trend is very interesting for us as we see great opportunities for Cloud Gaming technology to thin the frontier between “passive content” & “interactive content.”
Secondly, developers and publishers are showing more and more interest in a cloud gaming distribution model. The fact that with Blacknut they can reach a larger audience (via new devices, new regions of the world, new types of consumers) without large investment costs is a big plus. We already have more than 150 publishers, from the “big players” like Team17, Konami, Disney to our talented and creative indie creator partners, who place their trust in us to bring their games to their target players. The result is a library of top-notch games that is growing faster than ever.
And speaking of “big players”, you likely heard we also just partnered with Ubisoft! We have an exciting range of offers coming down the 2024/2025 pipeline and we can’t wait to see the impact this will have on the Blacknut player base. (A very innocent plug is that we just launched our first annual offer plan, and Ubisoft is giving all new annual plan subscribers a choice between four full standard editions games as a gift to help us celebrate! You guys can see the full offer here.)
The cost of hosting cloud services is not free. Can you comment on the challenges and opportunities in running a cloud gaming service and how you do so sustainably.
Blacknut currently runs on a unique hybrid public-private cloud infrastructure system, accordingly we are able to leverage our costs based on streaming needs for our players – this way they enjoy a premium local cloud experience and we are able to leverage partner cloud networks in an arrangement that benefits all parties. Our partnerships with cloud infrastructure service providers are a key facet of our success.
We know that Blacknut operates both its own cloud gaming services and offers a white-label service for other businesses to resell with their own touch. Can you comment on the synergy between these two models?
Blacknut actually offers three distinct business solutions: distribution of Blacknut, SDK Solutions (Software Development Kits, which allows partners to integrate gaming content inside existing content streaming offerings), and white labels.
Our primary mission is to distribute access to premium games to the largest possible audience; either on Blacknut or through white labels, both solutions contribute in enlarging reach and audienceship with new players for our games.
Regarding the synergy between our Blacknut “Brand” and our white labels, it is the exact same amazing technology and local catalog options but without our iconic Black aesthetic. This business solution is a means of support for our telecom partners to tap into the gaming market without the challenges associated with R&D and technical requirements. Our white labels & Blacknut service are consistently managed by the Blacknut development team whilst our marketing department helps manage the array of labels for our partners, the product remains synergistic with our offering despite the outside “cover”. (if you want to learn more about our B2B activities feel free to check out our B2B site!)
Can you describe (in as much detail as you are able to provide publicly) your cloud gaming architecture? In particular, our readers are often interested in knowing the following:
- Number and locations of your data-centers and/or edge facilities
- Node level hardware including CPU, GPU specifications, memory specs and storage specifications (including on-node and/or networked storage)
- Codecs used and available resolutions, frame rates
- Supported end user devices
- Any other novel aspects of your cloud gaming architecture that you’d like to highlight
Thank you for understanding but some of these elements are part of what makes Blacknut Blacknut, so we aren’t able to share this information with readers at this time.
What I can tell you is we cover Europe, North-America, (with reinvesting last year and currently hosting a solid capacity), South-Asia, and have deployed in LATAM starting with Brazil with more regions to open soon; same is the case with the MENA region which deployed last year. India is also currently overseeing a “soft-launch” whilst already operational.
Regarding our end user devices, it is in our core mission to democratize access to video games, so we want Blacknut to be available on the widest choice of devices ensuring players can always find their ideal IP. We currently have the largest OS compatibility in the cloud gaming space across PC, Mobile, Smart TV, set top boxes, and OTT (by our estimate, this reach with our usership means our games are addressable by more than 10 billion devices!)
Do you have any plans to further the reach of your service, to more territories or perhaps to more smart devices, such as more models of smart TV OS?
We are continually growing the Blacknut service to new devices and new territories – in fact this year alone we added India which was a huge milestone. At some point, we might run out of new territories but we will continue to incorporate new devices including Smart TV (since our beginning we invested with accessibility on Android TV and FireOS) and this area continues to manifest a growing audience for us.
How do you curate and control the games that you release on to the service? Do you have the support of the publishers for each game released? Do games ever rotate out of the blacknut subscription program – like they do on Xbox Game Pass for example?
Our games are curated with players of all ages in mind, and a major factor in maintaining our impressive catalog is our relation with publishers (we are continually growing our catalog and add an average of 10 new games per month). Over the years, we’ve patiently built these relationships as we grew our audience, and as our platform has grown we have received more and more interest from publishers as well.
Blacknut handles the entirety of integrating games for the cloud internally, meaning we are able to handle the process from A-Z. For game makers, we only require an existing build of the game and we take care of all the technical work and marketing. We are also one of the few platforms that shares our player data (of course with their permission) to our publishers so they can understand how their games are being played, and allowing Blacknut to build insight on the “best” games for region and per device so we can better cater to our players.
I feel like it’s worth noting Blacknut has a very specific kind of player base – we have both new entrants to the gaming world as well as gamers, which is a major reason we ensure our catalog has something for everything; respectively, all of our games are accessible for all our types of player, meaning our catalog can reach both, allowing publishers to reach new audiences in a cross exchange of content one part of our audience might not have otherwise discovered, and vice versa.
Finally, we also recently launched our LeLab initiative. LeLab is a cloud native game laboratory which allows creators, either students or amateur developers/publishers to publish their Cloud Native Gameplay in an experimental space and innovate directly based on Blacknut player feedback. The goal is to create a community from an audience, giving developers access to test & publish onboarding tools, support and featuring capacities, and real user feedback and data. This tool is the first of its kind, a true “Cloud Native” laboratory for video game creators to support transitions and optimization for the cloud from inception through launch. Best of all, all elements of the endeavor are located in a dedicated space inside Blacknut App for ease of use for both players and creators. The project is still in its infancy but we are so excited to see it evolve.
Are you in talks with any other developers or publishers to secure their games for your service?
As already mentioned we have just launched our partnership with Ubisoft!
This was a massive addition to the Blacknut catalog as the platform now sports Ubisoft Bonus Games, and the Ubisoft Gift with subscription for our annual plan, plus more exciting Blacknut-Ubisoft offers to be revealed soon.
Earlier this year we also launched our new “+” space, so we are in discussion with several major publishers and developers to bring their games to both the Blacknut platform creating new Pass partners, exactly like that of our inaugural pass partner Focus Entertainment.
Many thanks for taking part in this interview. Is there anything else you would like to add?
Nope, but thank you all for your time and be sure to keep watching Blacknut – we have some super exciting content and offers coming down the pipe for our players & partners!
