Malaysia finally has a cloud gaming service, but it’s only for Celcom customers

There are plenty of cloud gaming services throughout the world at the moment, but none of them are actually officially available in Malaysia, until now that is. Celcom has just announced a new partnership with networking infrastructure company Radian Arc and cloud gaming service Blacknut. As part of this partnership, Celcom MAX customers will be able to access the Blacknut cloud gaming library for RM40 per month.

Celcom MAX is the telco’s all-in-one plan that consists of both the Celcom Mega mobile data plan as well as its Celcom Home Fibre broadband service. We’ve covered the fibre and mobile postpaid combo before, but now Celcom has added a subscription to the Blacknut cloud gaming service for RM40 per month as a monthly addon option. With cloud gaming, you won’t need to download it to your computer or get the latest hardware; instead, the game is streamed to your device from a remote server while you still control it. Celcom is also offering all new and existing Celcom MAX customers a free one month trial of the service for those curious about cloud gaming still. Users who sign up for Blacknut will be able to stream and play games via most Android devices, iOS devices, PCs and Mac computers.

According to its FAQ page, you’ll want to ensure your internet speed is at least 6Mbps, which seeing as the base Celcom MAX package offers 100Mbps internet speeds on fibre, shouldn’t be a problem. Meanwhile, over on the actual Blacknut website itself, it says that you’ll be able to create up to 5 different profiles on a single Blacknut account, meaning that you could ostensibly share it with your whole household. Parental controls are also available, and progress is synced across your devices, which makes sense seeing as you are technically streaming the game off its servers. Curiously, Blacknut themselves advertise over 500 games in its library to choose from, while Celcom claims over 400 titles to play.

A typical Blacknut subscription will cost you USD15.99 (~RM66.93) per month, so if you’ve been planning to get it anyway and you’re a Celcom MAX user, this would be much cheaper. This also isn’t the first time Blacknut has partnered up with a telco service to promote its cloud gaming service either. Together with Radian Arc, they’ve already partnered up with the likes of Indonesia’s Moratelindo and Brazil’s Telecall to offer a similar package for their own customer base.

As for the actual gaming experience, you probably shouldn’t be expecting the latest triple-A titles like God of War or Battlefield 2042. A quick look through Blacknut’s library shows that it’s mostly casual indie titles and kids games, along with a number of older and mid-market games. Some of the more notable titles in its library includes Northgard, Aragami, Warhammer: Chaosbane, Saints Row IV and Metro 2033 Redux. Another thing to take into account is whether or not Blacknut’s servers and Celcom’s internet service are robust enough for cloud gaming. It’s important to note that cloud gaming users may run into latency troubles, especially during peak hours or when the servers hosting the game are too far from the users themselves.

If you’re interested in signing up for Blacknut via Celcom MAX, you can check it out on Celcom’s website.