Getting It Now
InstantAction CEO Louis Castle explains how his tech can make full games playable anywhere online - fast
Well, it's already successful because it's been doing it for three years. The first thing is that I don't know of anybody else that has the kind of technology that we've been showing everybody for years - they haven't been paying attention too much, because the games have mostly been indie games, but this technology is very robust, and millions of people have played with it.
I'm sure other people will come up with technology, but it's not just the ability for people to play through a browser - it's the ability to take any game, no matter what engine it's been built with, and run that through a browser... and to serve it through a browser in the same way you'd serve to video.
Nobody's done that, and that's part of the strength of bringing in a team from IAC to go down and create InstantAction in the first place. These are the guys that created Evite and Match.com - they know what they're doing on the web. They created the edge-serving technology that actually sends a game in the same way that you'd send a webpage.
Well it's difficult - if your connection speed isn't 'that fast' you're going to have to wait a little bit longer to get your free trial. But let's take a typical two hour install of a game like Call of Duty 2 - that install is now down to under 15 minutes... so that's not terribly long to wait on your cable modem.
Now, if you happen to have a really fast connection and you could have gotten that game down in an hour, then your wait time is now only five minutes, so you're much happier. But we're not sensitive to download in the same way.
Our history has been with independent game developers - what's really nice about a game like The Secret of Monkey Island, that game loads in under a minute, even on a really bad connection. Because we only have to load about 50MB, that's next to nothing - even though it's a 3GB game, we only have to load that much.
So indie games are even smaller, and they load almost instantaneously - they don't really even need some of the features we offer, like the thin client and stuff, which is great. We're fully supportive of those guys, and it's not like they can't use the platform - there's no velvet rope there, we want people to use it and a lot of titles to come out on it.
We do have to prioritise the higher end content, because it takes a lot more effort to get those working right - but ultimately we want it to be a platform that anybody can use.