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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