It’s still unclear whether cloud gaming will ever become the next big thing. The appeal is clear: The game you’re playing runs in a data center near you, and the video output is streamed directly to your local device. When you interact with the game, everything is relayed back to the data center.
When it works, it’s an amazing experience. It’s a flexible, easy way to play games on multiple devices without buying new hardware. That’s why several companies have released services that let you play games remotely — there’s Nvidia’s GeForce Now service, Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming, Amazon Luna, and Google’s now-defunct Stadia cloud gaming service.
But the vast majority of people still play video games on their own, local devices. He called a French company Shadow Try something different by bringing your entire PC to the cloud: It’s not just cloud gaming. it’s a cloud computer use. You can access Windows in the cloud and install anything you want. But Shadow hasn’t become a mainstream service either.
Fergus Leleu, Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Yannis Weinbach – three former Shadow employees – decided to leave the company and try something different with their new startup, Playruo. Instead of letting you play your games in the cloud, their new company lets you play a game demonstrations in the cloud.
Click a link to start a game demo
In many ways, Playruo fulfills the original promise of Google’s Stadia: It lets you launch and play a video game from your web browser without having to install anything. Just like people share Google Docs links to share a document, game publishers can turn a game demo into a shareable link.
Behind the scenes, Playruo’s streaming technology is based Cyber, a two-way streaming technology created by Kempf, Playruo’s CTO. Kempf is also best known as its chairman VideoLAN, the organization behind the popular open source video player VLC. He has also worked on various video encoders and decoders used by some of the biggest 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 the stream on your local device. The company uses QUIC for its transport layer network protocol.
I tried a few demos in Google Chrome on macOS and the service worked as expected. You can start playing just seconds after clicking the demo link, and on a stable fiber connection over Wi-Fi, it felt like I was playing a game locally.
How to make a viral game
There are thousands of games released on PC and game consoles every year. Unless you have a huge marketing budget, it’s hard to stand out.
Worse, game publishers are also competing with old games. Some of the games with most games of 2023 have been around for more than a decade — think Minecraft, Dota 2, Grand Theft Auto V or League of Legends. It is arguably one of the reasons why they existed so many rounds of layoffs in the game industry recently.
The aim of Playruo is that it can be used by game publishers as part of a launch campaign to maximize their chances of success. For example, at the end of a video trailer, a publisher could embed a YouTube thumbnail with a link to the demo so you can try out the game easily.
Playruo links can also be embedded in game launchers. Imagine a popular Twitch streamer sharing a link to a multiplayer gameplay demo so viewers can engage with their favorite Twitch content creator.
Unlike traditional cloud gaming services, Playruo’s client here is the game publisher and pays the startup to offer a demo. Chances are that a demo that goes viral will lead to increased game sales. Playruo is already working with Old Skull Games for promotion Secret route.
“We know the business model of cloud gaming quite well from our past experience. The big pitfall is that the different platforms do everything they can to prevent you from using the service too much,” Playruo co-founder and chief product officer Weinbach told me.
“It’s a bit ridiculous and contradictory. So we came up with a business model where it’s interesting for us that people stay for a long time,” he said. In other words, a viral demo could be considered a success for a game publisher.
Playruo will need to make sure they can quickly scale their server fleet (up and down) based on demand. The company relies on public cloud companies that offer GPU-powered virtual machines, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Scaleway.
This will be a critical part of Playruo’s model. If the startup has too many servers running with no one running demos, it will result in an expensive hosting bill at the end of the month. If the launch doesn’t have enough servers, many players will get an error when trying to start a demo.
But if it works well, Playruo can act as the top of the funnel for game purchases. After a 15-minute demo, players can receive a link to add a game to their Steam wishlist, join a Discord server, or enter their email address for more information. And they may not even realize that they played a game that was not installed on their system.
