It’s still unclear whether cloud gaming will ever become the next huge thing. The advantage is clear: the game you are playing runs in a nearby data center, and the video signal is directly streamed to your local device. When you interact with the game, everything is fed back to the data center.
When it works, it’s an amazing experience. It’s a versatile and simple way to play games on multiple devices without having to buy fresh hardware. That’s why many companies have launched services to play games remotely – Nvidia’s GeForce Now, Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming, Amazon’s Luna and Google’s now-defunct Stadia cloud gaming service.
However, the immense majority of people still play video games on their own local devices. A French company called Shade I tried something different by moving my entire computer to the cloud: It’s not just cloud gaming, it’s the cloud data processing. 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 fresh startup, Player. Instead of letting you play games in the cloud, their fresh company lets you play games demos in the cloud.
Click the link to start the game demo
In many ways, Playruo delivers on the original promise of Google Stadia: allowing you to launch and play a video game in a web browser without having to install anything. Just like people link to Google Docs to share a document, game publishers can turn a game demo into a shareable link.
Behind the scenes it relies on Playruo’s streaming technology Cyber, a two-way streaming technology created by Jean-Baptiste Kempf, Playruo’s chief technology officer. Kempf is also better known as president VideoLAN, the organization behind the popular open source video player, VLC. He also worked on various video encoders and decoders used by some of the largest video platforms, including 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 the local device. The company uses QUIC for its transport layer network protocol.
I tried several demos in Google Chrome on macOS and the service worked as expected. You can start playing just seconds after clicking the demo link, and with a constant fiber-optic connection over Wi-Fi, it felt like I was playing locally.
How to make a viral game
Thousands of games are released every year for PCs and game consoles. Unless you have a huge marketing budget, it’s demanding to stand out.
To make matters worse, game publishers are also competing with elderly games. Some most played games in 2023 has been around for over a decade – think Minecraft, DOTA 2, GTA V or League of Legends. This is probably one of the reasons why this happened so many series of layoffs recently in the gaming industry.
Playruo says game publishers can employ it as part of their launch campaign to maximize their chances of success. For example, at the end of a video trailer, a publisher can embed a thumbnail on YouTube that contains a link to a demo so you can easily try out the game.
Playruo Links can also be integrated into game launchers. Imagine a popular Twitch streamer sharing a link to a multiplayer demo so that viewers can team up with their favorite content creator on Twitch.
Unlike customary cloud gaming services, Playruo’s client is the game publisher and it pays the startup to provide a demo version. There is a chance that a demo that goes viral will lead to more game sales. Playruo is already working with Venerable Skull Games on promotion Mysterious path.
“From our previous experiences, we know the cloud gaming business model quite well. The biggest pitfall is that different platforms do everything they can to prevent you from using the service too often,” Playruo co-founder and head of product Weinbach told me.
“It’s kind of ridiculous and counterintuitive. That’s why we thought about a business model in which it is captivating for us that people stay in the company for a long time,” he said. In other words, a viral demo can be considered a success for the game publisher.
Playruo will need to ensure that it can quickly scale its server fleet (up and down) depending on demand. The company relies on public cloud companies that offer GPU-based virtual machines, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Scaleway.
This will be a key part of the Playruo model. If a startup has too many servers running and no one is running demos, it will lead to an exorbitant hosting bill at the end of the month. If the startup does not have enough servers, many players will receive an error when trying to run the demo.
But if it works well, Playruo can act as the top of the game purchasing funnel. After the 15-minute demo, players can receive a link to add the game to their Steam wishlist, join a Discord server, or enter their email address for more information. They may not even realize that they were playing a game that was not installed on their system.
