You’ve heard of playing games on your TV, but now it’s time to get ready for… playing games on your TV.
As part of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) happening in Las Vegas, Samsung has unveiled the Samsung Gaming Hub. This will be a discovery platform for game streaming services, and will be available on select 2022 Samsung Smart TV models.
You might be wondering if this means Samsung is throwing their hat into the gaming ring. The answer is kind of. Samsung has joined forces with NVIDIA GeForce Now, Google Stadia, and Utomik to bring their full gaming libraries to the Hub, which will be powered by Tizen hardware.
With game streaming services becoming more popular, this new Gaming Hub will reportedly make it easier for gamers to access games available on the three aforementioned streaming services. The company also notes that users will be able to pair their favourite controllers to their Samsung TVs in order to play.
Alongside game streaming services, the Samsung Gaming Hub will also give users access to Youtube Gaming, where they can follow their favourite streamers.
Game streaming does require gamers to have a pretty strong and consistent internet connection. If you’ve got this, the Samsung Gaming Hub is a very viable option for gaming. Considering ongoing issues with console availabilities due to chip shortages, it makes sense.
Samsung Smart TVs generally don’t come cheap, so it is very much a premium option for gaming. On the other hand, it’s not exactly cheap to buy a next-gen console and a TV to use it on.
Of course, this isn’t the first time Samsung has had games on their Smart TVs, with Android games such as Crossy Road, Star Fighter, and Urban Ninja available to play on select Samsung Smart TVs. However, this will be the first time Samsung TVs have AAA games available to play via these streaming services.
Furthermore, this also isn’t the first time cloud gaming has hit smart TVs. LG last year announced that they were bringing GeForce Now and Stadia to their WebOS smart TVs, as well as Stadia being supported on smart TVs from a wide range of other smart TV manufacturers like Hisense and Philips. Regardless, this is an interesting addition to the growing support for cloud gaming.
There’s no set release date for these new Samsung Smart TVs, just a general 2022 release window. Samsung also announced other services that will be available with their new line of smart TVs, including co-watching TV and movies with friends and… buying and selling NFTs, which is very cool.
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