Samsung’s new gaming hub launches in Australia
We have observed in the past that few nationalities are such keen early adopters of new tech as Australians. It means they generally get to try out the weird and wonderful ahead of the rest of us, as with a population of only around 25 million, Australia is the ideal place to road-test new gaming ideas with a limited release. We’ve seen it numerous times across gaming and iGaming, but now, there is general excitement that Australia is one of the first countries that can try out Samsung’s new virtual gaming hub.
Aimed at the new generation of gamers
Across the world, but in Australia especially, there is a new generation of gamers emerging. This is not in the sense of an age range, like Gen-X or millennials. On the contrary, the new generation of gamers is effectively everyone, and has no limits.
Gaming has gradually evolved into a mainstream pastime, and the truth is, to talk about the “gaming generation” as an age group might have made sense a few years ago. But similarly in the 1950s, we might have talked about the “TV watching generation”. Today, gaming as an industry generates more revenue than movies and music put together, and if that doesn’t speak of its universal appeal, nothing does!
Samsung is wise to the way the wind is blowing and has pitched its offering at what we might call the multi-generational gaming community of the 2020s.
Play to win with Gaming Hub – but not at the casino
Jeremy Senior is a Vice President at Samsung Australia in Sydney. It’s fair to say that he got plenty of countrymen and women in a state of excitement when he talked about the scope for Australians to “play to win” by using Samsung Games Hub. Anyone thinking it meant that even for one night, Australians could put aside their VPNs and Bitcoin accounts to have a night of casino gaming from their TV screens can dream on.
Yes, casino gaming is massively popular in Australia, especially when it comes to pokies. However, the regulatory landscape remains complex. We won’t go into it in detail here, but the people at Gamble Online Australia have written about it extensively and you can visit their page about casinos in Australia to learn more.
Gaming hub boasts significant gaming partnerships
If it is any small comfort to casino gamers, we can at least recommend that they “never say never.” The game hub is really no different to the TV hubs with which we are already familiar. So while the latter include different TV and movie apps, such as Fox, Amazon Prime, Netflix and so on, the gaming hub provides access to Xbox, Amazon Luna, Nvidia GeForce Now, and various others.
It’s no great leap to surmise that just as smart TVs can provide access to adult TV channels, they might at some point do the same with the gaming hub with access to adult-only casino platforms – but that is something for the future.
Right now, the Samsung gaming interface provides quick and easy access to games. During Samsung’s keynote address at CES2022 in Las Vegas last year, Andrew Georgiou described how Samsung’s gaming hub “bridges the gap between hardware and software to create a simpler, easier way to discover and play tons of games from great partners like NVIDIA GeForce Now and Utomik.”
It means that Australian gamers with appropriate Samsung smart TVs will now have a one-stop repository for all their gaming needs. All they need to so is connect a controller and, assuming they have the appropriate accounts, the full libraries of games from the various platforms will be there to access.
The software also provides curated content. Again, this follows the same model as the way smart TVs currently provide curated trailers and other information about new and upcoming TV shows and movies from across a range of channels.
Supported hardware for Samsung Gaming Hub
Samsung has confirmed that all of its 2022 onward Smart TVs support the Samsung Gaming Hub. These include the Neo QLED models and the Smart Monitor Series. They have also confirmed support for many 2021 Smart TVs, including the QN 700 to 900 series, AU7000 to 9000s and several others. The company has yet to confirm whether it will bring Gaming Hub to models made before 2021.
Speaking of hardware, there is strong compatibility when it comes to controllers. All the usual game controllers from the likes of Sony, Microsoft and Google are supported, and can be connected by Bluetooth. A particularly nice touch is that passthrough controller inputs are supported. What this means is there is no need to switch from one controller to another when switching across supported gaming services.
