“The opportunity to shorten time-to-experience is tremendous. We are excited to get gamers into DREADNOUGHT faster than ever before.”
Markus Windelen
Managing Director at Six Foot Europe
“The oppor”As a passionate gamer for over 25 years now, I want to play my desired games as soon as they are available. But nothing makes me feel more uncomfortable than waiting for the download to end, while my friends are already playing. Games are made for being played a lot – and downloads are made for finishing fast!”
Marco Radeck
Head of Marketing, KIVI.one
“ROCKIT is full of awesomeness. The first time I tried ROCKIT I was deeply impressed about the quality and the potential that comes with this technology. This will change the way of digital distribution in a way MP3 changed music distribution.”
Thorsten Rendel
Partner Business Evangelist Gaming, Microsoft
“The implementation was as easy as promised. Really bulletproof technology, stellar performance. It looks like a game-changer in digital distribution. I hope this tech goes live very soon. Our gamers will love it!”
Dieter Schoeller
CEO & Founder Headup Games, Head of Publishing Thunderful
“Digital innovations like ROCKITPLAY lower friction-to-play for players on Antidote and ultimately game distribution.“ said Aleix Canals, CEO of Sekg. Players on Antidote unambiguously confirmed, they would like to see ROCKITPLAY in digital stores of their choice.”
Aleix Canals
CEO of Antidote by Sekg
DACSLABS has announced the successful scalability test of its cloud-based platform ROCKITPLAY. During the test, players were able to start playing THQ Nordic’s Gothic Playable Teaser after a small fraction of the game downloaded, while the rest of the download continued in the background.
ROCKITPLAY is the first-ever cloud engine to provide nearly instant access and local play for downloadable software and cloud gaming markets. Through its FastStart feature, games are available to be played from as little as 1% downloaded, making it much faster than a full download and requiring no game code changes. ROCKITPLAY promises that game stores will be able to differentiate themselves by making their game libraries available to play almost instantaneously. Additionally, ROCKITPLAY can help free to play publishers by eliminating download dropouts, driving revenues and lowering the average user acquisition cost.
In collaboration with THQ Nordic and the playtesting platform Antidote, over 1000 users recently tested games accelerated by ROCKITPLAY FastStart.
“Antidote helped us to evaluate our breakthrough technology that brings an end to frustrating download waiting times,” said Frank Schwarz, CEO of DACSLABS. “Antidote shined as a platform not just for games, but also for evaluating core game technology, in our case, the delivery of ROCKITPLAY FastStart powered games.”
According to Antidote’s post-experience user survey, over 90% of those surveyed were very satisfied with ROCKITPLAY FastStart and would like to see a feature like FastStart implemented in their favorite game store. Additionally, 76% said they would rather buy a game with FastStart implemented than the same game without it. 77% said they would try more games if they were available with FastStart.
Bring Netflix-like Access to Your Store & Save Big on Patches
Instant-like Game Start Boosts User Acquisition & Revenues
Getting players into the game or game demo fast can be critical to making a paid or free-to-play title a success. Friction to play is the common term used to describe the problem of long download times and other obstacles to getting users playing. Earlier this month, DACSLABS tested ROCKITPLAY ( www.rockitplay.com ) – its groundbreaking FastStart Cloud Engine, delivering THQ Nordic’s playable teaser Gothic together with the game test platform Antidote with users worldwide. With ROCKITPLAY, gamers can start a game with as little as 1% of the game downloaded, virtually eliminating friction-to-play. The findings were stunning – over 90% of participating gamers were very satisfied with ROCKITPLAY FastStart and would like to see a feature like FastStart implemented in their favorite game store. In addition, 76% shared they would rather buy a game with FastStart implemented than the same game without it. And 77% confirmed, they would try MORE games if these were available with FastStart.
“Antidote has proven that community feedback can provide valuable input for emerging game titles,” said Aleix Canals, CEO of Sekg. “Emerging technologies like ROCKITPLAY in combination with Antidote create exciting opportunities to lower friction-to-play for game evaluation on Antidote and ultimately game distribution.”
The Gothic playable teaser packs the full game experience with only a fraction of the game content, a challenge that would stump most pre-load technologies. Yet with ROCKITPLAY, gamers only had to download 1.7GB @ 200Mbit/s or 3.6GB @100Mbit/s of the total 10.4GB teaser to start gameplay. ROCKITPLAY employs machine-learning from real gameplay to always deliver just enough content to start a game as fast as possible. In addition, smart pre-fetching retrieves any missing game data on-the-fly over the network, so that gamers can enjoy uninterrupted, full native gameplay while the download continues.
This demonstration is a major milestone for FastStart technology, and shows how ROCKITPLAY FastStart can support AAA titles with any scale of game distribution. The technology can be employed on any game with no code changes, even game demos that would be challenging for any pre-load approach. ROCKITPLAY FastStart helps game stores differentiate themselves, converting their entire library into a click-to-play experience. The solution can also aid F2P publishers by eliminating download dropouts, driving revenues and lowering the average user acquisition cost. Emerging cloud gaming services can offer a local play option so gamers can play anywhere, anytime.
MCV/DEVELOP has featured the full press release online and you can read a news feature (in German) at Gamesmarkt.