It’s still unclear whether cloud gaming will ever become the next big thing. The appeal is obvious: the game you play 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 sent back to the data center.
When it works, it’s an amazing experience. It’s a flexible and easy way to play games on multiple devices without having to buy new hardware. That’s why many companies have launched 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. A French company called Shadow has tried something different by putting your entire computer in the cloud: it’s not just cloud gaming, it’s cloud Calculate. 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, the new company lets you play them 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 having to install anything. Just as 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 two-way streaming technology developed by Jean-Baptiste Kempf, Playruo’s CTO. Kempf is also better 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 some of the largest video platforms, including Netflix and YouTube.
Playruo relies heavily on open source software components such as FFmpeg to encode the 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 a few demos in Google Chrome on macOS and the service worked as expected. You can start playing just a few seconds after clicking the demo link, and with a stable fiber connection over WiFi, it felt like I was playing a game locally.
How do I create a viral game?
Thousands of games are released on PCs and gaming consoles every year. Unless you have a huge marketing budget, it’s difficult to stand out from the crowd.
Worse still, game manufacturers are also competing with old games. Some of the most played games of 2023 have been around for more than a decade – think Minecraft, DOTA 2, GTA V or League of Legends. This is probably one of the reasons why there have been so many rounds of layoffs in the gaming 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 could embed a thumbnail on YouTube with a link to the 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 game demo so viewers can collaborate with their favorite Twitch content creator.
Unlike traditional cloud gaming services, Playruo’s customer here is the publisher of the game, and they pay the startup for offering a demo. Chances are good that a demo that goes viral will result in increased game sales. Playruo is already working with Old Skull Games to promote Cryptical Path.
“We know the cloud gaming business model pretty well from our previous experience. The big danger is that the various platforms will do everything they can to prevent you from using the service too much,” Weinbach, Playruo’s co-founder and head of product, told me.
“It’s a bit ridiculous and counterintuitive. So we thought about a business model where it’s interesting to 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 needs to ensure that it can quickly scale its server fleet (up and down) as needed. The company relies on public cloud companies that offer virtual machines with GPUs, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Scaleway.
This will be a crucial part of Playruo’s model. If the startup runs too many servers without anyone running demos, it will result in an expensive hosting bill at the end of the month. If the startup does not have enough servers, many players will receive an error message when trying to start a demo.
But when it works well, Playruo can act as a top 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 to receive more information. And they may not even realize that they were playing a game that wasn’t installed on their system.