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ROCKITPLAY reduces Friction-to-Play with it´s core feature: Start playing games up to 200x faster while downloading
Game Size vs. Bandwidth
Players expect games to look great with hyper-realistic textures, vast worlds, and hours of gameplay. With games often being 100 GB or more, it takes hours from download start to game start – even longer in markets with lower available bandwidth.
Time-to-play is critical in today’s video game economy. A delay of hours between download start and launch is a huge obstacle to getting users into the game. With ROCKITPLAY, users can ‘click-to-play’ for an almost immediate experience, while enjoying the full performance of their local PC.
ROCKITPLAY dramatically reduces Time-to-Experience – up to 200x – without requiring changes to the developer’s source code. Game stores, publishers, and developers can use ROCKITPLAY to create installers that quickly start a game, long before the full download is complete.
Technology
ROCKITPLAY is software developed by DACSLABS that accelerates application starts through machine learning. Based on real user behavior the system intelligently predicts required data blocks in order to start the game during download.
Start
Playing while downloading!
With every start of a game, ROCKITPLAY analyzes required game data and intelligently prioritizes the download of exactly those bits & bytes required to start the game long before download is completed.
Features
How does ROCKITPLAY work?
ROCKITPLAY analyzes an application’s components and intelligently prioritizes the delivery of those parts required for real-time code execution before the full download is complete.
In simple terms: ROCKITPLAY starts a video game after the first level is downloaded allowing players to start playing the game while all other levels are downloaded progressively in the background. In practice, it is a lot more complicated, because games access data in various ways.
Using machine learning algorithms, ROCKITPLAY determines how each game accesses data. ROCKITPLAY intelligently queues and prioritizes that data for delivery to the user runtime ensuring that the gamer can play seamlessly. Actual user gameplay behavior is taken into account so that ROCKITPLAY can assemble data optimally for fast game start.
The accelerated ROCKITPLAY game image can be served from any standard file server environment. By instantly fetching unpredicted data requests, ROCKITPLAY can start games with the smallest initial load possible and deliver unpredicted requests on-the-fly to ensure an uninterrupted gameplay. The result: Amazingly fast game start and continuous playing that competes head to head with game streaming.
Easy Implementation
In the standard process of delivering a video game, ROCKITPLAY comes in at the end, after a developer has created a game ISO or subsequent releases.
ROCKITPLAY then uses automated tools to observe a game’s runtime behavior relative to its data.
Game stores can implement ROCKITPLAY system-wide to offer fast starting games. ROCKITPLAY used in this way will transform application stores into nearly instant experience launchers, able to immediately engage users.
ROCKITPLAY is a powerful tool expanding digital distribution into low-bandwidth regions, able to deliver fast game start with limited available bandwidth.
Fast start and “click-to-play” experiences can be employed to introduce users to new experiences ranging from instant marketing demos to Netflix-like access to video games.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve spoken to a lot of game developers in the US and Europe about the challenges in game marketing and distribution. Games are getting larger, and audiences are increasingly hesitant to try new pay and free-to-play titles. Steam has relaxed all standards and the marketplace is extremely noisy – it’s hard for titles to break through and get onto the screens of today’s gamers.
The new industry consensus is that digital distribution is the way to go for the entertainment and gaming.The benefits to consumers of digital and subscription distribution have won over music, video and soon gaming. Analysts from Piper Jaffray expect games to be sold 100% digitally by 2022, and even if it doesn’t go that far, the writing is on the wall.
However, there’s a big elephant in the room: popular games have significantly increased in size over the last few years. Today’s players expect games to look great down to every detail, including hyper-realistic textures, vast worlds, and long gameplay. This means that games can be 100 GBs or more – which poses a serious problem with file sizes increasing at a 4 times higher rate than the average available bandwidth. For big titles, time to start is HIGHER than it was 10 years ago!
XBox FastStart – the industry is looking for ways to meet demand for faster access
Earlier this year at E3 Microsoft announced FastStart for XBOX, a game download system that “gets you into your game in half the time” for XBOX One owners with a minimum 20Mbps connection.
Imagine a system that could dramatically reduce download times – 10X, or even 100X? Instead of simply accelerating downloads, users can “click to play” game demoes or full versions. And imagine if that system was available to ANY PC game developer, on any website? Instead of increasing the concentration of content, it could allow developers to chart their own course, injecting F2P gamers right into the game, or dramatically improving the digital download experience.
I believe a delay of several hours from download decision to gameplay as the core experience is simply unacceptable. That’s why at ROCKIT we have developed a solution to dramatically reduce a gamer’s “time-to-experience.”
But why care about download times – games will be streamed anyway, right?
Unlike music or movies, high-quality interactive game streaming isn’t working yet – and it won’t be anytime soon. EA’s Chief Technology Officer Ken Moss sees latency as the No. 1 challenge to solve. Games are reactive by nature and any lags and latency will diminish the user experience. Also, infrastructure costs are high – serious gamers want a full PC class experience. To replicate that experience in the cloud will require a huge amount of GPU and powerful CPU compute in the cloud. That’s an expensive and risky model. Experts agree, for instance, Nvidia’s Phil Eisler believes that it could take up to 10 years to solve game streaming’s many issues.
The solution is a nearly instant time to experience with native PC performance
At ROCKIT we have found a way to make downloads faster and smarter. ROCKIT intelligently prioritizes the data required at game start and allows users to play a game long before the download finishes – achieving up to 120X faster ‘time-to-experience’.
ROCKIT radically reduces ‘time-to-experience’ – the time it takes a user from initializing download to actually experiencing a game for the first time. Wait less – Play more!
The solution was built and optimized based on high-performance computing software. It provides users with the full performance of their local system without the inconvenience of long download times. ROCKIT operates at the kernel level – the core of the OS – for maximum performance and stability. Everything is done at the end of development with no need for deep integration – which makes this technology incredibly versatile. ROCKIT is a core tech for platform providers that can run on any infrastructure or simply sourced in a SaaS.
The disruptive opportunity of high performance, instant gameplay
Implementing a fast-start technology removes download times as an obstacle between user and the game experience. That means faster into the game, faster into in-game social connections, and faster into monetization. Similar to how MP3 made music downloads fast and digital distribution suddenly became possible, ROCKIT can take gaming and game developers into a more user-centric future. Now that the technology is market-ready, we are working with developers to explore new opportunities beyond accelerated downloads: international markets, on-demand business models, and new platforms for digital game distribution. Feel free to reach out on Linkedin or f.schwarz@dacs-labs.com by email.
Frank Schwarz, CEO, Dacs Labs
