The way I discovered retro cloud gaming service Piepacker was probably to be discovered: not through a press release in my inbox or a push from a PR guy, but when a friend mentioned it in a WhatsApp group and invited me to play . I’ve never heard of it and the name sounds silly, but my friends say it has some cool old SNK games to play. I watched the video on the website and it looked interesting.
The pitch is very simple: classic game, instantly playable in your browser, with – this is the important part – multiplayer enabled and integrated video chat. It’s a mix of cloud gaming and virtual parties, it’s free to play, and inviting friends is as easy as sending them a link.
A few things struck me right away with the concept. Of course, immediacy is common to all cloud gaming services. But the social element also seems to be important, as does the way it resonates with the games on the service, which are mostly local multiplayer games from arcades or old home consoles: simple, straightforward games designed to compete with those next to them. people play with you. Piepacker puts the social experience ahead of the game itself with its great video chat and easy game switching. It creates an online space for relaxed, chatty, informal gaming sessions with friends — and, almost as a byproduct, it’s closer to an online re-release than the original multiplayer experience of these older games. This is the sofa in the clouds.
Honestly, the game lineup isn’t great. You won’t find anything from Capcom, Sega, Konami, or Midway’s heyday here.There are some real gems like Metal Slug X, wind jammerand The King of Fighters ’98while the deal with veteran British outfit Team 17 brings some old-school Britsoft social gaming classics such as Worm World Party and smart football. Piepacker also tries to develop and publish new indie games for the platform, including Bomberman-style games arsena bomber.
But that’s not the point. Fun with Piepacker, once you’re in and chatting, you can browse its archives and try some random esoterics you might find there, such as the very interesting Neo Geo fighter true deadly furyor modern NES games Miniature Mageor the funny silly zombie brawler Night Raider. Because you’re with friends, it can even be fun to play something as objectively bad as PlayStation kart racing scar a few minutes.Generally, on Piepacker, the more mindless the game is, the easier the dialogue is – so you don’t necessarily want to be and also Engaged anyway.
The fun of Piepacker, once you’re in chat, you can browse its archives
Piepacker has yet to really make a name for itself, although it has attracted support from the retro community through a successful Kickstarter campaign, as well as investments from the LEGO Group, among others. This isn’t necessarily the future, but success or failure, there is something here: Cloud gaming is conceived differently than high-tech approaches like Google Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming.
“When I was a kid, I used to have the Game Boy, and I dreamed of another device, the Game Gear from Sega,” co-founder and CEO Benjamin Devienne said of Zoom in Bordeaux, southwest France. Devienne, a handsome, passionate entrepreneur type, is about to explain the thinking behind Piepacker by citing Nintendo’s legendary engineer Junpei Yokoi’s approach to “lateral thinking and withering technology.”
“The contrast between the two handhelds is very interesting,” Devienne said. “The Game Gear is arguably better, you know, color screen, better sound chip, maybe better gaming. But the thing is, it’s more expensive. Plus, you need a lot of battery to get through the day. Another On the one hand, the Game Boy is much lower tech, like a black and white screen, the sound is so bad, you can barely see what’s going on on the screen. But it’s cheaper and has a stronger battery.
“In hindsight, [Nintendo] The battle is won with accessibility and low tech. When we started looking at the cloud gaming space, we were like, Hey, every service is great, like Google Stadia, PlayStation Now, but they’re designed for a world with fiber optics, 4K, 60 frames per second. It’s a world with tons of Game Gears and we’re like, Hey, can we build the first Game Boy in cloud gaming — something that’s a lot less tech-savvy but has a much smaller footprint?“
The result is a cloud gaming service that uses 60 times less bandwidth than Google Stadia. That’s good news for Piepacker, which has dramatically reduced costs and enabled a free-to-play business model. That’s good news for the environment — as Eurogamer reports, cloud gaming services that require high bandwidth and a lot of computing power on the server side can be very energy-intensive during long gaming sessions. That’s good news for users who don’t have top-notch internet service at home, whether in southwestern France (“We have good wine and cheese, but the internet sucks!” quipped Devienne) or emerging markets like Brazil, India, Southeast Asia, etc. markets, and North Africa, where infrastructure is still catching up.
Piepacker’s lean part lies in its proprietary technology (and that’s where it gets its curious, soon to change name: “packing” is a method of compressing processes on a server to use less bandwidth, and Devienne and his What the co-founders used to experiment with the technology happened to be called “pie”). Partly due to its philosophy, visual fidelity can give way to truly engaging social interactions. Competing with the home console experience is not the point. Part of that is the selection of retro games, which are certainly less technically demanding and easier to optimize.
Retro is where Piepacker has established its niche so far, but for Devienne it has always been a means of getting the service off the ground. He’s not interested in creating a license-based retro streaming catalog like Antstream (it has a deeper gaming selection than Piepacker, but lacks social features). No intention to start charging subscription fees or anything like that. Instead, Devienne wants to host more modern indie games and turn Piepacker into a marketplace where developers can monetize their games the way they like (and of course Piepacker gets a cut of it).He recommends Team 17’s crazy co-op cooking game overcooked As an example of a game that runs very well on Piepacker, he’s right — but Stadia has shown that players may not be willing to pay for a game they only have in the cloud.
At the same time, Piepacker is making a decent amount of money selling custom 3D filters for its video chat windows. (Devienne used to do analysis and research for Facebook and Twitch, so he’s not worried about players willing to spend as much as $1,500 on animated virtual masks.) Further down the line, there’s also a plan for a Twitch integration that will allow viewers if they’re hosted on On Piepacker, you need to pay to jump into the streamed game, the streamer will get 70% of the revenue, and Piepacker will get the rest.
“When I was on Twitch, the thing that really blew my mind was Twitch Plays Pokémon,”he said. “I was like, why isn’t anyone making a game that uses this mechanic to engage the audience? We should make one!” Where was that arsena bomber Originally, it was a prototype that allowed viewers of charity streams on Twitch to vote for control of a UFO that could disrupt Bomberman-style moves. He imagines viewers paying to challenge their favorite streamers in Street Fighter, or to influence single-player games with items, cheats, or extra enemies, as they do now by tipping streamers.
It all comes back to relationships
It all comes back to the human connection. Before Piepacker did video chat, Devienne noticed in early testing that nearly all players had Zoom or Hangouts open at the same time. After integrating the feature, habits have changed. “We realized that the way people start consuming games is very different from the way they consume games on other platforms. For example, 70% of the time, they touch the gamepad, but 30% of the time, they don’t touch anything. They just Chat. To me, Piepacker is a lot like the experience when you invite friends and you play around a table, like a board game or research and developmentand the game is almost an excuse [for] dialogue. You know, it’s a way of connecting with others. He wondered if players would return for the game or their friends, so in another test he quarantined the group and started removing the availability of their favorite games to see if they would keep coming back. They did Arrived.
That’s not to say Piepacker will necessarily be a profitable mass-market platform. But what it does do is show very clearly the potential for cloud gaming to be different or an extension of the gaming experience as we know it, rather than just providing a convenient way to access it. (Google Stadia has a grander version of the idea, but with the closure of its first-party development studio, we can’t seem to see a future realization.) Devienne and his team have focused their attention on the social potential Cloud gaming, this is a lesson that larger cloud players should heed.
