Piepacker cloud gaming takes after Nintendo

Piepacker is a retro cloud gaming site that I found out about through my friend’s WhatsApp group. He had mentioned the service and asked me to join. I’d never heard of it, and the name sounded silly, but my friend said it had some cool old SNK games available to play. It looked great!

The pitch is very simple: classic games, playable instantly in your browser, with — and this is the important part — multiplayer enabled and integrated video chat. It’s cloud gaming and a virtual hangout rolled into one, it’s free to play, and inviting a friend is as easy as pinging them a link.

Several things I found immediately appealing about the concept. Cloud gaming services all share the same immediacy. The social aspect was also important. This resonated well with the games, which were primarily local multiplayer games from arcades and old home consoles. These games are simple, straight games, that can be shared with anyone nearby. Piepacker’s prominent video chat feature and simple game-switching puts the social experience above the actual games. It creates an online space for relaxed, chatty, informal gaming sessions with friends — and, almost as a byproduct of this, it gets a lot closer to the original multiplayer experience of some of these old games than even online-enabled reissues can. It’s a couch in the cloud.

The lineup of games isn’t stellar, to be honest; you won’t find anything from the heydays of Capcom, Sega, Konami, or Midway here. A few true gems are included, such as Metal Slug X, WindjammersPlease see the following: King of Fighters ’98While a deal was made with Team 17, a veteran UK company, it has also brought back some classic Britsoft social-gaming gems such as Worms World Party It’s a sensible game of soccer. Piepacker is also an experimenter in publishing and developing new independent titles for the platform. This includes the Bomberman style. Arsène Bomber.

But this isn’t really the point. The fun of Piepacker, once you’re in and chatting, is to poke around its archive and try some of the random esoterica you might find there, such as the extremely fun Neo Geo fighter Real Bout Fatal Fury., the current NES video game Micro MagesThe entertainingly dumb, zombie-brawler Night Slashers. Because you’re with friends, it can even be fun to play something as objectively terrible as the PlayStation kart racer SCARSFor a few moments. As a rule, on Piepacker, the more mindless the game, the more easily conversation will flow — so you don’t necessarily want to be You can alsoSing anyway

Piepacker still hasn’t made a big name for itself. However, it was able to attract the support of the retro community through its successful Kickstarter campaign as well as investments from Lego Group. It’s not necessarily the future, but whether it succeeds or not, there is something there: a different way to conceive of cloud gaming, contrasting with the high-tech approach of the likes of Google Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming.

“When I was a kid, I used to have the Game Boy, and I was dreaming about another device, which was the Game Gear by Sega,” co-founder and CEO Benjamin Devienne says over Zoom from Bordeaux in Southwestern France. Devienne is a handsome, enthusiastic entrepreneur type, and he’s about to invoke the legendary Nintendo engineer Gunpei Yokoi’s “lateral thinking with withered technology” approach to explain the thinking behind Piepacker.

“The contrast between these two handheld devices was very interesting,” says Devienne. “The Game Gear was arguably better with, you know, color screen, better sound chip, maybe better games. The problem with the Game Gear was that it was much more costly. You also needed many batteries to get through the day. However, the Game Boy had much less technology. The Game Boy’s screen was black and white, with poor sound quality, so you couldn’t see anything on it. It was still cheaper and had a much stronger battery.

“In hindsight, [Nintendo]These two factors won the battle for accessibility and low technology. When we looked at cloud gaming, it was like: Hey, every service is awesome, like Google Stadia, PlayStation Now, but they’re designed for a world where you have fiber, where it’s 4K, 60 frames per second. This is a world where you have a lot of Game Gears, and we’re like, Hey, can we build the first Game Boy of the cloud gaming space — something that is much lower tech, but with a much lower footprint?”

This cloud gaming platform uses 60% less bandwidth than Google Stadia. That’s good news for Piepacker, lowering its costs considerably and making its free-to-play business model possible. It’s good news for the environment — cloud gaming services that require high bandwidth and lots of computing power at the server end can be very energy-intensive over long play sessions, as Eurogamer has reported. And it’s great news for users who have less than stellar internet service at home, whether that’s in Southwest France (“We have good wine and cheese, but bad internet!” quips Devienne) or in emerging markets like Brazil, India, Southeast Asia, and North Africa, where infrastructure is still catching up.

Part of Piepacker’s leanness is in its proprietary technology (which is also where it gets its curious, and soon to be changed, name: “packing” is a way of compressing processes on a server to use less bandwidth, and the processes that Devienne and his co-founder were using to experiment with this technology happened to be called “pies”). Its philosophy is a part of the reason. Visual fidelity is no longer important. The real attraction is the social interactions. It is partly due to the selection of retro games. These are easier to optimize and less technical.

While Retro has been the area where Piepacker has carved its niche, Devienne sees it as a way to get the service started. He’s not interested in creating a licensing-based retro streaming catalog like Antstream’s (which has a much deeper game selection than Piepacker, but lacks its social features). There’s no intention to start charging a subscription or anything of the sort. Devienne wants to offer more indie titles, and Piepacker will become a platform where developers can make monetized games as they wish (with Piepacker receiving a cut). He suggests Team 17’s frantic co-op cooking game Do not overcook as an example of a title that would work exceptionally well on Piepacker, and he’s right — but Stadia has shown players might be unwilling to pay to own games only in the cloud.

Piepacker makes decent income selling 3D filters to its chat rooms. (Devienne used to do analysis and research for Facebook and Twitch, and as such he’s unfazed that players are willing to spend up to $1,500 on animated virtual masks.) Further off in the future, there’s also a scheme for Twitch integration that will allow viewers to pay to jump into streamers’ games if they’re hosted on Piepacker, with streamers taking 70% of the revenue and Piepacker the rest.

“Something that really blew my mind when I was at Twitch was Twitch Plays Pokémon,” he says. “I was like, why is nobody doing games that use this kind of mechanic where we can involve the viewers? We should make one!” That’s where Arsène BomberThe prototype was created to allow viewers who were watching a Twitch charity stream to elect to have a UFO destroyed by Bomberman-style action. He sees people paying for the opportunity to tip their streamers, to be challenged at Street Fighter or to have an influence on a single player game.

Human connection is the key. Devienne noticed that most players were using Zoom or Hangouts simultaneously before Piepacker introduced video chat. The feature changed the way people viewed games. “We realized that people started to consume games very differently than they consume games on other platforms. For instance, 70% of the time, they touch the gamepad, but 30% of the time, they don’t touch anything. They talk. To me, Piepacker resembles a lot the kind of experience you have when you invite friends, you’re around the table playing, like, a board game or D&DThis is almost as good an excuse for the game. [for] conversation. It’s, you know, a way to connect with other people.” He wondered if players were returning to the service for the games or for their friends, so in another test, he isolated groups and started removing the availability of the games they liked best to see if they would keep coming back. They did.

Piepacker will not become a mass-market, profitable platform. This does show that cloud gaming can be more than an easy way to get to existing games. (Google Stadia had a more grandiose version of this idea, but with the closure of its first-party development studios, it seems we won’t get to see that future realized.) Devienne and his team have zeroed in on the social potential of cloud gaming, and it’s a lesson the bigger cloud players would do well to pay attention to.