Getting It Now
InstantAction CEO Louis Castle explains how his tech can make full games playable anywhere online - fast
One of the interesting technologies doing the rounds at the moment - both at GDC and Develop this year - is InstantAction, a platform which enables full games to be played within a fraction of the time it would normally take to download and install, and which are playable in virtually any internet environment.
It's a claim that's been made before by others, but here the company CEO, Louis Castle - co-founder of EA's former Westwood studio - explains why it works, and offers his thoughts on why he hopes it will be a nail in the coffin of bricks-and-mortar retail.
InstantAction is a system that allows content created by interactive designers and creators to get directly distributed to consumers. It's a whole system of technologies that work on the web to take that entertainment and bring it right down to the consumer, wherever they want it.
We use several technologies, which is why I'm dancing around the technology issue, but it's really great - because you can discover the games through social networks, web browsing, you can find them in interviews and just about everywhere. You click on it just like you would a YouTube video, but instead of it being a video it's actually an interactive game.
So that's InstantAction - a whole system of being able to take games and give them directly to consumers in a way that nobody's ever done before. Browsable, discoverable, sharable, social networkable - all of those things - on top of being able to run the game right on your computer where you ultimately buy it.
The incremental purchases are also really important - so you get to play for free, the full release version of the game. It's completely secure, and once you get to a point where you're really enjoying it and want to buy a bit more then we can sell it to you incrementally - so you don't have to put up the full price of the game up front.
It's a very different way of distributing - it's letting customers discover and consume content.
That's the wonderful thing about this, it's a licensed technology - so the partner, the content creator, is the one who gets to decide where these things can be embedded. You can white list and black list locations, and also get to control how long the trials are, how much the rentals cost, how much the ultimate purchase cost is - or they can decide not to do rentals or purchase and just go with ad revenue or item purchases, subscriptions and so on.
It's a very different way of doing things - and being able to do all of them allows the content creator to decide how the consumer is going to enjoy that content. We get a piece of all the transactions, but it's a nominal fee - a 30 per cent cut, just like if you were doing a Direct2Drive or Steam, but we offer a lot more value than just a downloadable service.
We also provide all of the metrics as well - so partners can measure how long it takes people to get through the first level, or what kind of items they like. They can do covert testing - they could give some people a 20 minute free trial and other a 15 minute trial, to see which one results in more people buying the game. They can do all that stuff on our platform - it's a full publishing solution.