Haroldo Jacobovicz: Treating Gamers as Co-Creators of Infrastructure Solutions
Haroldo Jacobovicz made an observation early in his transition into gaming infrastructure that shapes how he thinks about the entire market: gamers, more than almost any other user group, are willing to engage directly with technology providers, offering criticism, feedback, and suggestions as active participants in the development process. That openness to co-creation, he argues, makes gaming an unusually productive environment for building better solutions.
This is not a peripheral point. It reflects a broader argument about how technology companies should position themselves relative to the gaming industry — not as external suppliers delivering capacity from a distance, but as embedded partners whose knowledge of the ecosystem grows through close, ongoing interaction with developers and players alike.
Jacobovicz’s background is in telecommunications and computer virtualization. After selling his telecommunications company, he committed to working in virtual computing and spent time identifying which sectors were most demanding — and most likely to benefit from innovation. Gaming met both criteria. The technical requirements are strict: cloud gaming services need latency below 80 milliseconds, competitive players require responses between 20 and 50 milliseconds, and demand patterns are far less predictable than anything traditional infrastructure was designed to handle. A gaming platform can operate at normal load for weeks, then see player numbers multiply tenfold overnight when a major update releases. Infrastructure built for stable workloads fails under those conditions.
Brazil’s gaming market provides both the scale and the urgency. More than 103 million players, nearly three-quarters of the total population, play online games. Women represent close to half of all players — a figure that illustrates how thoroughly gaming has moved beyond its origins as a narrow demographic interest. Government legislation passed in 2024 combined tax incentives with official cultural recognition, giving the sector regulatory stability that encourages long-term investment.
The infrastructure gaps Jacobovicz identifies are specific. Edge computing — placing processing resources at distributed points in the network rather than centralizing them — is the most urgent priority for Latin America, where sufficient distributed infrastructure does not yet exist to deliver the latency performance the gaming market requires. Data analytics at scale comes next: developers need real-time processing capabilities to understand player behavior and make informed product decisions during live operations, not just retrospectively.
Security in gaming involves a set of overlapping demands that do not map cleanly onto conventional frameworks. Virtual economies now process real money, so account protection has genuine financial stakes. Players expect that protection to operate without adding friction — no one wants to authenticate during a live match. Competitive platforms must also address cheating, which does not only affect individual players but degrades the entire value of the product. Solving financial security, data privacy, and competitive integrity simultaneously remains one of the sector’s open problems.
What runs through all of Jacobovicz’s analysis is a conviction that gaming rewards providers who learn the context before designing the solution. Generic infrastructure, applied to gaming’s specific demands, produces predictable failure.