SAN FRANCISCO — Approxy, a startup delivering instant-play HD games from the Cloud, has adapted cloudpaging technology from Numecent for use in a white-label, end-to-end platform for developers, publishers and aggregators. Approxy was originally incubated as a joint venture with Numecent and has now been spun-out as an independent company.
Cloudpaging divides a downloadable game into small fragments called pages, which are then fetched on demand over HTTP/S by a Virtual MMU (Memory Management Unit) on the client machine. The game immediately starts executing inside a Virtual Console — without actually requiring any installation. This can reduce ‘time-to-gratification’ by anywhere between 10x to 50x for a large game.
Subsequent accesses to the previously fetched pages are locally cached so that the experience remains as good as a local install. This allows the game to be off-lined and even played without a network connection.
Approxy engineers have extended cloudpaging to make the experience even better for gamers, by pushing small fragments of games called ‘partials’ to a user’s Virtual Console. This makes even the very first interaction with the game instantaneous to the player.
“As modern games cross over the 10GB size, the initial day-long download experience is becoming one of frustration for users and lost revenues for publishers, especially in the free-to-play segment,” said Dr. Yavuz Ahiska, co-founder and CEO of Approxy. “Cloud-Gaming represents a tremendous global opportunity for the industry, but we need to make it ‘friction-free’ for both users and publishers alike. We believe cloudpaging with the Approxy extensions is the right technology platform to make this happen.”
Dr. Ahiska, is a serial entrepreneur best known as the co-founder of 3Dlabs – at one time a $1B company on NASDAQ and one of the fathers of 3D graphics on the PC.
Approxy is currently in the midst of its Series-A funding round and running Beta trials with a number of tier-1 developers and publishers around the world.