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 to the data center.
When it works, it’s an incredible experience. It’s a flexible and easy way to play games on multiple devices without purchasing new hardware. That’s why many companies have launched services that allow you to play games remotely: there’s Nvidia’s GeForce Now service, Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming, Amazon Luna, and Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service. , now extinct.
But the vast majority of people still play video games on their own local devices. A French company called Shadow I tried something different by putting your entire computer in the cloud: it’s not just cloud gaming, it’s cloud computing. You can access Windows in the cloud and install whatever 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 games demos in the cloud.
Click a link to start a game demo
In many ways, Playruo delivers on the original promise of Google’s Stadia: it lets you launch and play a video game from your web browser without installing 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 on Kyber, a bidirectional streaming technology created by Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the CTO of Playruo. Kempf is also best known as 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 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 your local device. The company uses QUIC for the transport layer network protocol.
I tried some 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 solid fiber connection over Wi-Fi, it felt like I was playing a game locally.
How to create a viral game
Thousands of games are released every year on PC and game consoles. Unless you have a gigantic marketing budget, it’s difficult to stand out.
Worse still, game publishers are also competing with older games. Some most played games in 2023 have been around for over a decade – think Minecraft, DOTA 2, GTA V or League of Legends. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why there was so many rounds of layoffs in the video game industry recently.
Playruo’s pitch 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 can embed a thumbnail on YouTube with a link to the demo so you can try the game easily.
Playruo links can also be integrated into game launchers. Imagine a popular Twitch streamer sharing a link to a multiplayer gaming demo so viewers can team up with their favorite Twitch content creator.
Unlike traditional cloud gaming services, Playruo’s client here is the publisher of the game and pays the startup to offer a demo. There is a good chance that a demo that goes viral will lead to an increase in game sales. Playruo is already working with Old Skull Games to promote Enigmatic path.
“We know the cloud gaming business model quite well thanks to our past experience. The big pitfall is that the different platforms do everything they can to prevent you from using the service too much,” Weinbach, co-founder and product manager of Playruo, told me.
“It’s a bit ridiculous and counterintuitive. So we thought about an economic model in which it is 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 ensure that it can quickly scale its server fleet (up and down) based on demand. The company relies on public cloud companies that offer GPU-enabled virtual machines, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Scaleway.
This will be an essential part of Playruo’s model. If the startup has too many servers running without anyone running demos, it will result in an expensive hosting bill at the end of the month. If the startup doesn’t have enough servers, many players will receive an error when trying to run a demo.
But if it works well, Playruo can be the top of the funnel for game purchases. After a 15-minute demo, players can get a link to add a game to their Steam wishlist, join a Discord server, or enter their email address to get more information. And they may not even realize that they played a game that wasn’t installed on their system.
