Nvidia's (NVDA +5.93%) fourth-quarter fiscal 2023 results (for the period ended Jan. 29) focused a lot on how the company is on track to make the most of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. In fact, "AI" was mentioned a whopping 75 times on Nvidia's late-February earnings conference call. That's not surprising since the demand for the company's graphics cards could soar big time thanks to the growing adoption of generative AI applications such as chatbots.
But at the same time, investors need to be aware of another market where Nvidia is in the driver's seat since it could substantially boost the company's growth in the long run.
NASDAQ: NVDA
Key Data Points
Cloud gaming is growing despite a slowdown in the overall video gaming market
Nvidia's GeForce Now cloud gaming service might not have received a lot of attention on the earnings call, but it would be a good idea to dig a bit deeper into how the company fares in this space. That's because the cloud gaming market is expected to clock a terrific annual growth rate of 41.7% over the next decade, generating more than $42 billion in annual revenue in 2032.
The cloud gaming market's growth is just getting started. Video-game data and analytics provider Newzoo estimates that this industry generated $2.4 billion in revenue last year -- a massive jump of 73% over the cloud gaming industry's 2021 revenue of $1.37 billion. What's more, the cloud gaming market's terrific growth last year came at a time when the overall video gaming market was in a state of decline.
According to Newzoo, the global video gaming industry's revenue was down 4.3% in 2022 to $184.4 billion. Surging inflation, the fear of a potential recession, and the fact that gamers spent a lot of money on hardware and software during the pandemic weighed on the market last year.
But cloud gaming still grew rapidly, which is not surprising because it gives gamers a cheap way to enjoy their favorite games without having to invest in expensive hardware or having to buy gaming titles.
Gamers simply need to buy a subscription to a cloud gaming service such as GeForce Now, which will allow them to stream games to their phones, laptops, desktops, internet browsers, and even televisions. The games run on remote servers in data centers, and they are delivered to the user using a fast internet connection.
Nvidia's paid membership plans ($9.99 or $19.99 a month) allow members to stream games in high resolution and at high frame rates, irrespective of the hardware.
For instance, a Windows personal computer (PC) with the old 64-bit Windows 7 operating system, is capable of streaming games through GeForce Now with the help of a fast internet connection. On the other hand, building an entry-level gaming PC could cost at least $300, and that might not be enough to play the latest graphics-intensive games.
This explains why the cloud gaming market's growth could be here to stay for a long time to come, and that's going to be a tailwind for Nvidia stock. Let's see why.
Nvidia is dominating this growth hot spot
Nvidia generated $11.9 billion in revenue from its graphics business last year. Of this, $9 billion came from sales of gaming graphics cards and $1.5 billion from sales of professional visualization cards used in workstation PCs. So the company generated $10.5 billion from sales of physical graphics cards, indicating that the GeForce Now cloud gaming business generated $1.4 billion in revenue last fiscal year.
Based on Newzoo's estimate that the overall cloud gaming market generated $2.4 billion in revenue last year, as discussed earlier, Nvidia's revenue share of this fast-growing space stood at 58% last year. What's more, it had 25 million GeForce Now subscribers at the end of fiscal 2023, up from 15 million a year ago.
The terrific growth in Nvidia's cloud gaming subscriber base also means that it is the service of choice for gamers. According to Newzoo, there were 31.7 million paying users of cloud gaming services last year, which means that Nvidia's share of subscribers in this huge market stood at an impressive 79%.
Looking ahead, the number of people streaming games from the cloud is expected to more than double by 2025, and the market is expected to sustain its momentum in the long run, as we have already seen in this article.
So if Nvidia continues to be a dominant player in cloud gaming in the long run, it could generate a lot of revenue from this space. For instance, a 50% share of cloud gaming's potential revenue after a decade could add $21 billion to Nvidia's top line based on the $42 billion revenue the market is expected to generate in 2032.
That would be way bigger than the company's annual gaming revenue of $9 billion last fiscal year. Of course, if Nvidia manages to enhance its dominance in cloud gaming, it could generate more revenue from this space. All this gives investors yet another reason to be positive about this tech stock's long-term prospects, especially considering the impressive catalysts it has in other markets such as the automotive sector and data centers.
