Review Fix Exclusive: Inside Playkey

Review Fix chats with Egor Gurjev, Co-founder and CEO of Playkey, who discusses the Cloud-Based gaming platform and what makes it an intriguing option for gamers looking to stream their favorite games.

Review Fix: How was Playkey formed?

Egor Gurjev, Co-founder and CEO of Playkey: Playkey.net is one of the cloud gaming pioneers. The project was established in 2012 by a team who had already been working in the digital content market for several years. As of today, Playkey is one of the leaders in the cloud gaming sphere, proving its commerce efficiency and the success of its technology. Here are some statistics that help support this notion:

• 3 million visitors to playkey.net monthly
• More than 250,000 paid subscribers
• 120 servers across London, Moscow, Amsterdam and Frankfurt
• Agreements with Ubisoft, Capcom, SEGA, Wargaming, Bethesda, and others
• Market placement in EMEA and CIS countries
• More than 250 AAA-class games in Playkey’s service catalogue with consistent monthly growth
• An office in Europe that is working on development and expansion of Playkey throughout the world

Review Fix: How does it all work?

Gurjev: Playkey.net is the centralized cloud gaming platform. Using a network of powerful gaming servers, Playkey runs games in the cloud and provides the user with a high-quality video stream of the game. The user interacts with the game in real-time through the Playkey client. This makes the user’s hardware and system configuration completely irrelevant. Playkey is powered by a proprietary video encoding and streaming technology which guarantees top-notch graphics and high processing speed. There is no longer any need to download and install a videogame, or even to invest in expensive hardware. Playing in the cloud is now as easy as watching an online video!

Playkey’s decentralized blockchain-powered cloud platform, allows anyone to play unlimited top-rated games from around the world without downloads or installations as well. In addition to Playkey’s servers, miner’s PC will be included into the new Playkey ecosystem. There, miners will be able to contribute their computing power, acting as cloud service providers, and will be paid in cryptocurrency through the PKT token. All parties benefit from the Playkey ecosystem: Miners get an efficient option to utilize their computational capacities that is more efficient, more stable, and less risky than cryptocurrency mining. Gamers will be able to choose the best and closest server for playing. Game developers and publishers will expand their client base.

The whitepaper outlines the ecosystem in more detail: https://cdn.playkey.net/img/playkeynet/ico/Whitepaper.pdf

Review Fix: What makes it different from other streaming sites?

Gurjev: Our closest competitors in the field of cloud gaming are LiquidSky and Geforce Now. The difference from LiquidSky is that Playkey provides a ready-to-use service. The user installs the Playkey client, clicks on the game, enters his or her key and plays. On the other hand, LiquidSky works with just a plain desktop in the cloud, forcing you to put Steam on it yourself, download a game, install it and do everything just like on a home computer. Plus, if it does not work, you will be using the settings yourself whereas with Playkey, everything is on a turn-key basis. The difference from Geforce Now is that Geforce Now only works on NVidia Shield. This requires you to have to buy the console anyway, which is quite expensive. In the niche of decentralized systems for gaming, there are no other startups proposing decentralization for games. The closest competitor in this field is SONM, which is about cloud computing in general (they call it fog computing). Playkey is focused on games only.

Review Fix: How friendly has the indie game community been to you guys?

Gurjev: We get a lot of requests from the indie games developers to add indie games to the Playkey roster. However, the primary focus of the Playkey platform is to make AAA-titles and top-notch games available for a low-end PC. Indie games don’t usually have high tech requirements, which makes them a low priority to the cloud gaming platform concept. Therefore, we are still focused primarily on video game hits from major game publishers.

Review Fix: What relationships with AAA publishers are you most proud of?

Gurjev: It is an honour for us to cooperate with all of them and we are extremely proud we are trusted by companies of global stature!

Review Fix: What’s next for Playkey?

Gurjev: The Playkey ICO blockchain featured platform is the next huge step in developing the cloud gaming product and the game industry as well. It is an ambitious and very resource-consuming target; but we are ready to cope with that.

Review Fix: Anything else you’d like to add?

Gurjev: We have already collected $5.8M within the ICO crowdsale, which is already enough to start the process of implementing the decentralized cloud gaming product. Now until the end of November, we will welcome new investors who would like to join our experienced team who share the idea of developing a better digital world!

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About Patrick Hickey Jr. 13819 Articles
Patrick Hickey Jr. is a full-time Assistant Professor of Communication & Performing Arts and Director of the Journalism program at Kingsborough Community College and is the chairman of the City University of New York Journalism Council. He is the Founder and Editor-In-Chief of ReviewFix.com. He's also a former News Editor at NBC Local Integrated Media and National Video Games Writer at Examiner.com where his work was mentioned in National Ad campaigns by Disney, Nintendo and EA Sports. Hickey was also the Editor-In-Chief of two College Newspapers before he received his BA in Journalism from Brooklyn College. Hickey's work has been published in The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Complex, The Hockey Writers, Yahoo!, Broadway World, Examiner, NYSportScene Magazine, ProHockeyNews.com, GothamBaseball.com, The Syracuse Post-Standard, Scout.com and the official sites of the Brooklyn Aces and New York Islanders. His first book, The Minds Behind the Games: Interviews With Cult And Classic Video Game Developers was released in April 2018 and is chock full of interviews with legendary developers. His second book in the series, The Minds Behind Adventures Games, was released in December 2019. His third book, The Minds Behind Sports Games, was released in September 2020. His fourth book, The Minds Behind Shooter Games, was released in March 2021. The Minds Behind Sega Genesis Games and The Minds Behind PlayStation Games were released in 2022 and The Minds Behind PlayStation 2 was published in January 2023. Hickey is also a contracted comic book writer, currently penning his original series, "Condrey," as well as "The Job," "Brooklyn Bleeds" "Dem Gulls" and "KROOM" for Legacy Comix, where he serves as founder, owner and Editor-in-Chief. Hickey Jr. is also a voice actor, having starred in the 2018 indie hit and 2019 Switch, PS4 and Xbox One release, The Padre (also serving as English language Story Editor), from Shotgun With Glitters. The sequel, The Padre: One Shell Straight to Hell was released in February 2021- Hickey also served as a Story Editor and Lead Voiceover performer. He has also done narration and trailers for several other titles including The Kaiju Offensive, Relentless Rex and Roniu’s Tale. Hickey is also the lead voiceover performer on Mega Cat Studios’ upcoming title WrestleQuest, responsible for nearly 90 characters in the game, as well as Skybound's Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood, where he voices both Dracula and Renfield, as well as several other characters. He also stars in Ziggurat Interactive’s World Championship Boxing Manager 2, where he performs the VO of nearly every male character in the game. He also worked on the Atari VCS’s BPM Boy.

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