It remains to be seen whether cloud gaming will be the next big thing. The appeal is obvious. The game you're playing runs in a nearby data center, and the video output is streamed directly to your local device. When you interact with the game, everything is relayed to the data center.
When it works, it's a great experience. A flexible and easy way to play games on multiple devices without purchasing new hardware. Therefore, many companies have launched services that allow you to play games remotely. These include Nvidia's GeForce Now service, Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming, Amazon Luna, and Google's now-defunct Stadia cloud gaming service.
However, the majority of people still play video games on their local devices. A French company called Shadow tried something different by bringing the entire computer to the cloud. It's not just cloud gaming, it's cloud computing. You can access Windows in the cloud and install everything you need. However, Shadow has not yet become a mainstream service.
Three former Shadow employees, Fergus Leleu, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, and Yannis Weinbach, decided to leave the company and try something different with their new startup, Playruo. Instead of letting you play games in the cloud, their new company lets you play game demos in the cloud.
Click on the link to launch the game demo
In many ways, Playruo fulfills the original promise of Google's Stadia. This means you'll be able to launch and play video games from your web browser without having to install anything. Just as a user shares a document by sharing a link in his Google Docs, game publishers can turn game demos into shareable links.
Behind the scenes, Playruo's streaming technology is based on Kyber, a two-way streaming technology created by Playruo's CTO, Jean-Baptiste Kempf. Kempf is also best known as the president of VideoLAN, the organization behind the popular open source video player VLC. He has also worked on various video encoders and decoders used by the largest video platforms such as Netflix and YouTube.
Playruo relies heavily on open source software components such as FFmpeg to encode audio and video streams and libVLC to decode streams on your local device. The company uses QUIC as the transport layer network protocol.
I tried some demos in Google Chrome on macOS, and the service worked as expected. Click on the demo link and start playing in just a few seconds. With a solid fiber connection over Wi-Fi, it felt like I was playing the game locally.
How to make a viral game
Thousands of games are released on PC and consoles every year. Unless you have a huge marketing budget, it's difficult to stand out.
To make matters worse, game publishers are also competing with older games. Some of the most played games of 2023 have been around for more than a decade. For example, Minecraft, DOTA 2, GTA V, League of Legends, etc. He's definitely one of the reasons why there's been a lot of layoffs in the gaming industry lately.
Playruo's pitch is that game publishers can use it as part of their launch campaigns to maximize their chances of success. For example, publishers can embed thumbnails with links to demos on YouTube at the end of video trailers, making it easy to try out the game.
Playruo Link can also be integrated into your game launcher. Imagine a popular Twitch streamer sharing a link to a demo of his multiplayer game so viewers can team up with the creators of their favorite Twitch content.
Unlike traditional cloud gaming services, Playruo's clients here are game publishers, who pay startups to provide demos. If the demo goes viral, it could lead to increased sales for the game. Playruo is already working with Old Skull Games to promote Cryptical Path.
“We are very familiar with the cloud gaming business model from past experience. The big pitfall is that various platforms do everything they can to prevent users from overusing their services,” Playruo said. Weinbach, co-founder and head of product, told me.
“It's a little silly and counterintuitive. So we thought of a business model where it was interesting to us that people would stay for a long time,” he said. In other words, a viral demo can be considered a success for game publishers.
Playruo needs to be able to quickly expand its server fleet (up and down) based on demand. The company relies on public cloud companies that provide GPU-equipped virtual machines, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Scaleway.
This becomes an important part of Playruo's model. If your startup has too many servers running without anyone to launch demos, you'll end up with a hefty hosting bill at the end of the month. If the startup doesn't have enough servers, many gamers will receive an error when trying to launch the demo.
But if it works well, Playruo can serve as the top of the game buying funnel. After a 15-minute demo, players can get a link to add the game to their Steam wishlist, join their Discord server, or get more information by entering their email address. Masu. They may also not realize that they have played a game that is not installed on their system.