Vodafone and Hatch announce 5G premium gaming subscription deal

Vodafone and Finnish company Hatch have announced a partnership which will see three months of the latter's premium, cloud-streaming games service given for free to Vodafone's 5G pay-monthly adopters.

Hatch Entertainment, who originally founded as a Rovio spin-off back in 2016, are an early pioneer of cloud-based mobile gaming. The Hatch app essentially works as a hub for premium games, occasionally serving up an advert to players while they are in the menus or moving to start streaming a new game. It features an extensive library and is exceptionally easy to use — in the time between deciding to write this article and me actually starting to write it, I had a short run of Death Road to Canada and Pixel Heroes.

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There's currently a mass of games already available through the service, although the developers will be gating a stack of premium games behind a $6.99-per-month paywall. Vodafone users who use 5G when it goes live on July 3rd — and have pay-monthly contracts — will get to sample that premium service for three months.

For both Hatch and Vodafone this is a massive capture. The 5G infrastructure will allow for the ever expanding mobile user base to dip their toes into the ever expanding mobile gaming marketplace. On the deal Hatch's Director of Commercial Partnerships, Gunjan Garg, stated, "We are natural partners and we can’t wait to show Vodafone customers a new way to play great games on demand, anytime and anywhere.”

Garg's Vodafone counterpart, Max Taylor, Commercial Director, went on record saying that “We’re excited to be teaming up with the world’s first cloud-based mobile gaming platform and give our customers an extra experience over 5G for no extra cost,"

“Playing games on the go from the cloud is a great example of how 5G can transform an everyday activity and this exclusive new partnership is excellent news for our customers - now they can stream over 100 games from the cloud with instant reaction times and no lag or drop outs.”

The Hatch app is available for free on Google Play, Vodafone users will receive their free premium membership as of the 3rd of July.