Latin America has the players. What it does not yet have, in sufficient quantity, is the infrastructure to serve them. That is the gap Haroldo Jacobovicz has identified at the center of Brazil’s gaming expansion, and the problem he has built a business to address.
Brazil’s gaming market now includes more than 103 million players. Close to three-quarters of the population engages with online games in some form, with women making up nearly half of all players. The market’s growth reflects converging factors: broader internet access, higher rates of smartphone ownership, a young population that grew up with interactive entertainment as the norm, and more recently, government legislation that formalized gaming as a cultural and economic sector deserving of tax incentives.
Jacobovicz arrived at gaming through a deliberate process. After selling his telecommunications business, he was already committed to working in computer virtualization. He spent time examining which sectors placed the greatest technical demands on virtual computing solutions. Gaming stood out. The difference, he argues, is time sensitivity. Telecommunications infrastructure is measured in reliability and geographic coverage. Gaming adds milliseconds as a performance dimension. Cloud gaming services need latency below 80 milliseconds. Competitive gaming requires responses between 20 and 50 milliseconds. That is not a preference — it is the threshold below which the product functions and above which it does not.
Most cloud infrastructure was not designed with that threshold in mind. It was built for business workloads that operate at predictable, steady volumes. Gaming generates a fundamentally different demand curve. Player numbers can remain stable for extended periods and then spike tenfold or more within hours when a major game update drops or a live event draws concurrent users. Infrastructure designed for predictable loads fails under those spikes. The result is degraded performance precisely when player engagement and excitement are highest — the worst possible moment to disappoint.
Edge computing is the structural answer Jacobovicz points to for Latin America. Deploying processing resources at distributed points across the network, rather than centralizing them, reduces the distance data has to travel. That reduction directly addresses the latency problem. It also allows infrastructure to scale regionally, which is particularly important in a continent where network conditions vary widely by geography. Companies willing to invest in edge infrastructure across strategic points in the region are, in Jacobovicz’s view, positioned to capture significant demand.
Real-time data analytics is the second major opportunity. Game developers generate vast volumes of player data continuously. Platforms capable of processing that data in real time allow developers to track behavior, identify problems, and make decisions grounded in what players are actually doing rather than what designers assumed they would do.
Security completes the picture. Virtual economies process real money. Account protection must be robust without introducing friction into the experience. Competitive integrity must be maintained against cheating, which threatens the core value of multiplayer platforms. These requirements operate simultaneously and cannot be addressed in isolation from one another.
Jacobovicz’s view is that the companies best placed to serve this market are those that treat developers as partners rather than clients for generic cloud services. Embedded knowledge of a developer’s specific demands produces solutions built for real conditions.