Author: Zen, PANews

On August 20, the first domestic 3A masterpiece "Black Myth: Wukong" was released and quickly occupied the headlines of major social platforms. This popular game at home and abroad has won the hearts of many players with its exquisite graphics. Whether it is the magnificent ancient buildings, the pleasing natural scenery, or the rich and diverse monster bosses, all of them give players a visual enjoyment when they return to the journey to obtain scriptures.

The excellent game graphics are mainly due to the use of Unreal Engine 5, which supports NVIDIA's latest panoramic ray tracing and DLSS 3.5 technology, and can achieve movie-level image quality for both static lighting and dynamic special effects. However, exquisite game graphics require sufficient hardware support. According to the configuration requirements and game test results published by "Black Myth: Wukong", if players want to take into account both game quality and smoothness, they need to use at least GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs.

Therefore, while "Black Myth: Wukong" is selling well, it has also driven a significant increase in searches and transactions for graphics cards and other products. Search volume for related products such as "NVIDIA Black Wukong co-branded graphics card" on Taobao surged by 1379%. In addition to spending a lot of money to "exchange a shotgun for a cannon", the cloud gaming platform provides another more cost-effective option for players who want to spend a small amount of money to experience masterpieces. For example, Tencent START Cloud Game supported the game "Black Myth: Wukong" as soon as it was launched. Officials said that when players set options such as 4K resolution and ultra-advanced image quality, the game screen will also turn on light tracing. Can maintain 64 frames per second. However, due to server support and geographical distance, it is difficult for players in some areas of the country and overseas to enjoy high-definition play.

This geographical limitation, as well as problems such as high consumption, few game resources and even delays, are not uncommon on current cloud gaming platforms, which is why cloud gaming platforms have not yet been widely accepted by mainstream gamers. With the continuous development of DePIN, the decentralized cloud gaming protocol DeepLink has provided a new paradigm for the cloud gaming industry and has opened its "road to verification". Since the launch of the first product in October 2022, DeepLink has spread to more than 110 countries in China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, India, North America, Europe and other regions, attracting more than 1.4 million users.

In the blockchain industry, the concept of cloud gaming is not often mentioned, because the technology itself has a high threshold, and combining it with blockchain technology is also a big problem. So, what is the origin of the DeepLink team? How does their decentralized architecture bring new breakthroughs to cloud gaming? Can players and resource contributors benefit from it? .....With these questions, PANews recently interviewed Yong He, CEO of DeepLink, in order to learn more about the project and the cloud gaming industry.

Cloud gaming industry veterans work together to create

Yong He entered the cryptocurrency industry in 2016 and launched DeepBrain Chain (DBC), an artificial intelligence computing platform driven by blockchain technology, in 2017. After four years of research and development, the mainnet was launched in 2021. While looking for applications for DeepBrain Chain, he took a fancy to the decentralized cloud gaming platform DeepLink and established a partnership with it. Out of recognition, he personally invested $1 million in the project.

In 2022, after the crypto market entered a bear market, Yong He was invited to serve as DeepLink CEO and began to be responsible for the project's financing and product sections. At the beginning of this year, DeepLink announced that it had received $8 million in angel and A rounds of financing. Together with more than $5 million raised in the public token sale, the project's funding has now exceeded $13 million.

"I want to make DeepLink a benchmark project on the DBC artificial intelligence public chain." Yong He said that just as some applications on Ethereum have achieved explosive growth, its ecosystem can attract a variety of developers to settle in. Obviously, the success of DeepLink, which focuses on DePIN+AI technology, will be crucial to the future development of DBC.

The main reason for betting heavily on DeepLink is that the core team of the project has more than ten years of rich experience in the field of cloud gaming technology. The project founder and CTO was the director of the research institute of Shunwang, a cloud gaming solution provider, specializing in technology research and development, and other members are core technical personnel from Cisco, Intel, Nvidia, Huawei and other companies.

Achieve B+C success with DePIN+AI

In the field of cloud gaming, related companies can generally be divided into two categories: cloud gaming platforms and cloud gaming technology providers. The former directly provides cloud gaming services to the player community, and mainstream platforms include Tencent Start Cloud, Migu Quick Game, NVIDIA GeForce Now, etc.; the latter focuses on providing underlying technical support for cloud gaming platforms or other third parties, such as Weiling Times, whose valuation increased 20 times within a year after making cloud games for "Genshin Impact". DeepLink has both, and its two products, DeepLink Software and DeepLink Protocol, solve different needs respectively.

"DeepLink Protocol is an underlying basic protocol, and DeepLink Software is a cloud gaming platform developed based on this protocol." Yong He further explained that as an open source decentralized AI cloud gaming protocol, DeepLink Protocol allows for the sharing of GPU computing power in a distributed manner, providing decentralized ultra-low latency AI cloud gaming rendering technology, which can be widely used in cloud Internet cafes, cloud e-sports and game companies.

He said that after using the DeepLink protocol, a Korean Internet cafe reduced its one-time investment from 1.8 million yuan to less than 1 million yuan, saving a lot of machine equipment costs. In addition, it is reported that a large e-sports hotel group in Nanjing has reached an in-depth cooperation with DeepLink Protocol and DBC in the middle of this month, and will significantly reduce initial investment and operating costs by connecting to the GPU computing power of DBC.

In essence, DeepLink Protocol is an application of DePIN. Its GPU network has connected a large number of GPU miners on the machine supply side. They place GPU machines in the IDC center to provide computing resources and receive rewards in the form of DLC tokens. Each GPU machine provider needs to pledge a certain amount of DLC tokens in advance. If the GPU network is unstable, the corresponding tokens will be deducted as a penalty, which is almost equivalent to the miner's monthly income. This strict penalty mechanism makes them work harder to maintain the reliability of the server, and the stability of its physical facilities on the cloud is further guaranteed.

In terms of the application of AI technology, DeepLink Protocol mainly uses AI algorithms to improve the resolution and quality of game images, similar to the DLSS technology developed by NVIDIA, which further reduces the demand for GPU performance. This allows players to reduce the pressure on the GPU and increase the game frame rate while maintaining high image quality.

How does decentralization benefit players?

With the development of communication technology, hardware facilities and cloud gaming technology, many cloud gaming platforms mentioned above have basically gained a foothold, and their product logic of "lowering hardware thresholds and breaking scene shackles" has also been recognized by many players.

However, on the one hand, there are more players' demands for "playing high-quality games with low-configuration hardware" to be further explored, and on the other hand, the competition among various platforms for the existing market is also fierce. It is not easy to carve out a niche in such an environment. In this regard, Yong He analyzed the differences between DeepLink as a decentralized cloud gaming solution and these manufacturers or platforms on the market.

Since DeepLink does not require high investment and purchase of a large number of machines and hardware like the centralized cloud gaming platforms on the market, its operating costs can be greatly reduced. Therefore, DeepLink can pass on the savings to the player community, which means that players will pay a lower cost when experiencing cloud gaming services. According to Yong He, the DeepLink platform pricing is particularly low, basically within 30% of the current mainstream price (about 0.1 to 0.2 US dollars per hour).

In addition, if centralized cloud gaming platforms want to cover more areas, they must build a large number of data centers within their operating range. However, since the user scale is not large enough, it means that even after huge investments, it is difficult to achieve a balance between income and expenditure. This is why most gaming platforms can only cover a few countries and regions, and why cloud gaming platforms such as Caiji Games, Youzu Network, and Graiyun Games have been shut down in the past few years. DeepLink's distributed blockchain technology can make data centers and GPU server nodes spread all over the country, and even allow players with high-end hardware configurations to share their devices with other users. Yong He revealed that among the current more than 1.4 million users, more than 300,000 players have high configurations and participate in sharing.

Finally, strictly speaking, DeepLink integrates cloud gaming and cloud computer platform services, supporting multiple devices such as mobile phones, PCs, Vision Pro, etc. Players can play a variety of games including AAA blockchain games without being restricted by the resources of the game platform. This service that is friendly to Web3 players is also a major feature of DeepLink.

DLC Tokens: User Consumption and Miner Incentives

"The purpose of the token is very critical. I think this is the core factor in whether a project can develop in the long run." Yong He said that DeepLink's DLC token adopts a deflation model and can support the formation of a circular economy system. When users use DLC to pay for cloud gaming services, DeepLink Protocol will charge a 20-30% commission for each cloud gaming transaction and settle it in DLC. These tokens will be 100% directly destroyed. As the number of users increases and the consumption time increases, the number of DLCs destroyed will also increase exponentially. In this way, the circulation of DLC in the market can be gradually reduced, and the value of the token will increase.

On the GPU provider side, as supporters of generating and providing DLC, they can receive token rewards, which is also the core income source for miners. Currently, the total amount of tokens is 2 billion per year. The higher the value of DLC, the greater the benefits that GPU providers can obtain, and such a positive cycle will also attract more miners to join. In addition, as mentioned above, when miners place GPU servers in the IDC center, they need to pledge a certain amount of DLC to ensure long-term and stable services. Users and miners are thus connected in series through tokens, forming a closed-loop economic system.

In addition, DeepLink mining is divided into two parts: CPU traffic mining and personal GPU machine mining. Only node owners can participate. The total reward is 12% of the total DLC tokens (12 billion), of which CPU traffic nodes account for 4% and personal GPU nodes account for 8%. The total number of nodes is limited to 120,000 and will not be increased. The purchase cost of these nodes is actually equivalent to a pledge to ensure the stability of the system. Regarding the node sales method, DeepLink is divided into 10 levels, the lowest level is $30 per node, and each node will receive an additional 30,000 DLC airdrops.

"Based on the current market price of DLC, the total value of 30,000 tokens is approximately equivalent to $90. Therefore, the selling price of the node is actually lower than the price of buying tokens on the market." He said this is because DeepLink hopes to attract more miners to join and improve its ecosystem. "So this is actually some benefits for node providers."

Decentralization: A new path for cloud gaming

In 2020, cloud gaming became one of the hottest technology concepts after the infrastructure such as network transmission was mature enough. At that time, the well-known consulting firm NewZoo found through user portraits that players were divided into 8 categories, all of which corresponded to the characteristics of cloud gaming. For example, cloud players like the sharing of cloud games, price-sensitive players like the low threshold of cloud games, and even heavy players are interested in the cross-terminal experience and convenience of cloud games. However, it is not easy to open up a blue ocean. At present, the general consumption level of cloud game users is low and most players are not very interested in cloud games, which are criticized for being more hype than reality.

Yong He believes that the cloud gaming industry needs to focus on two factors. One factor is that the cost must be low. If the cost is too high, it will not be able to reach the player group who actually has the demand for "low-end devices to operate high-quality games". Only when the consumption cost is low enough can the platform attract gamers. On the other hand, IDC coverage is limited, and players who are far away from it will have a very poor gaming experience. Google, once one of the leaders in cloud gaming platforms, was forced to shut down its cloud gaming platform Stadia and focus on cloud gaming technology solutions because it was too centralized, with concentrated data centers and the high cost of enterprise-level GPUs provided by Nvidia. Other large cloud gaming platforms also have more or less similar dilemmas.

Small and medium-sized cloud gaming companies have achieved good development in recent years, but they are unable to invest in large amounts of GPUs in advance due to the need to balance revenue and expenditure. The high cost of enterprise-level GPUs and limited IDC coverage ultimately make these platforms have obvious regional characteristics, each occupying a small piece of land. Yong He said that this is the inevitable result of centralized cloud gaming platforms, and that their growth will reach a bottleneck at a certain point in time.

Therefore, after more than a decade of cloud gaming technology development, DeepLink team technicians chose to apply blockchain technology and its decentralized model in order to achieve cost reduction and efficiency improvement, and expand coverage while reducing costs. Players are no longer limited by physical distance and centralized server bottlenecks, and can enjoy a smoother gaming experience. In addition, this decentralized architecture also provides more GPU providers with opportunities to participate, forming a new economic model. This will not only improve the resource utilization efficiency of the system, but will also promote the popularity of cloud gaming, allowing more users of low-configuration devices to enjoy high-quality gaming experience.