Egor Guryev- Founder and CEO of Playkey. Born in 1985 in Perm. Graduated from Perm
Both today and back in 2010 it is comfortable to playit was possible to play cool games only by assembling a powerful expensive computer: with large RAM, a separate video card, a powerful processor and a fast storage. The average user buys a "heavy" game, launches and gets lags and freezes. Cloud gaming from OnLive (USA) and Gaikai (Asia) solved the problem in the early 2000s. Russia did not have its own service, and the Internet did not allow using game streaming - the speed barely reached 2.5 Mbit / s. The OnLive example inspired Guryev, but needed to be adapted.
The main task was to givethe opportunity to play for a person who wants, has time, but is disadvantaged in means, so there is no talk of a console or a cool computer. It was for him that a service was created that did not require installing the game - just registering and launching it. “Our main user is a student or young man of 25–30 years old who has just started working,” Egor Guryev describes his target audience.
For cloud service, computer requirementsthe user is much lower than if he installed the program on his device. A speed of 5–7 Mbps is enough for any game, even for shooters, where quick response is one of the main conditions for winning. But it took the developers several years to achieve this result.
Alliance of hobbies and work
Egor Guryev loved to play computer games since childhoodgames. In parallel with his studies at the university, he started working part-time at ER-Telecom: first he connected new clients, and then moved to the technical support department. Soon, Yegor headed a new division, which was engaged in the selection of content. In 2010, Guryev and his team of six people left Er-Telecom and founded their own company, Enaza.
The content of the work is fundamentally notchanged: Enaza compiled catalogs of paid content and programs that the partner operator sold to its customers. At first, Enaza continued to cooperate with ER-Telecom, and later new customers appeared: Rostelecom, MTS, Svyaznoy, Yandex.Money and others.
But Guryev didn't like reselling content. “The main problem was that when competitors cut prices, our sales dropped dramatically. It was possible to compete only by price, but this led to low margins, ”Yegor recalls. Among other things, Enaza sold keys to games on the Gama-Gama website. Therefore, when in 2012 Guryev learned about the American cloud gaming service OnLive, he had an idea to launch a similar product for users with weak hardware.
OnLive- American cloud computer gaming service,the development and support of which was carried out by the company of the same name. It was announced in 2009 at the Game Developers Conference, an international event for developers, and launched in June 2010. All calculations for the game were performed on a remote server, where saved game files and user profiles were also located. To use the service, the user selected a game from the catalog on the site, after which audio and video were broadcast to his computer. An incoming speed of 5 Mbit/s was sufficient for operation, so even people with weak computers could use it. Access to games was provided for a subscription fee ($9.99). However, the company was unsuccessful in attracting users: according to IDC, only 2% of gamers used the service. OnLive was bought by Sony in 2015 and closed on April 30.
Initially, Egor was interested in the opportunityselling game subscriptions, the technology itself was secondary. “We tried to contact OnLive, but got no response. In 2012, there was still no such level of globalization as it is now, and the Americans were probably not interested in some company from Russia, ”recalls Guryev.
Then he decided to create a similar service.yourself. We found two developers who were free at that moment and explained to them the problem - you need to license the OnLive technology, for which the concept of cloud computing was used. The game was on a remote server, all processing took place there, and the gamer received the picture and sound. At first, the developers were surprised and did not understand how to do this. It took about six months to develop the trial version. “During this period, we managed to prepare for the demonstration of the assembled solution at the CSTB television and telecommunications exhibition in Moscow. There we saw great interest: people asked how to buy, where to use it, ”recalls Yegor.
Money was invested in Playkey fromonline store of computer games Gama-Gama, which Yegor was engaged in earlier: all free money was invested in the development and launch. In 2017, the startup received $ 3 million from IIDF. The search for an investor and work with the accelerator took about a year. All in all, about 300-400 million rubles were invested in the project.
Road to clouds
At first, Yegor decided to go the usual way andoffered cooperation to Internet providers. He suggested that they integrate Playkey software into consoles so that users can display the game on the TV screen. But this idea turned out to be a dead end: the operators often changed the models of the set-top boxes, because of which they had to rewrite the program every time. Egor realized that a different scheme of work was needed. Then he switched to selling his own product and launched a website where users bought access to a cloud server.
“The enormous difficulty was that in ourenvironment, there were no developers who would understand this topic. The technology was at the level of Skype and other video conferencing: the image is captured in one place, then broadcast to the server, then to another interlocutor, "Yegor recalls.
The main office is located in Perm, and there was nothe right developers. As a result, Egor found two programmers from Tomsk. Their salary was twice as much as the Perm specialists, but they could make the product that Guryev needed. They worked on outsourcing and, in addition to writing programs, trained the Perm team. Only after one and a half to two years, Playkey office programmers were able to take over these competencies: working with the server part (maintenance, upgrading, raising the fallen servers), programming video capture from the server, bypassing the operating system, working on the logic of media data transfer depending on network parameters and hardware "client. It was also necessary to port each engine to the cloud. Then they began to expand the team and make a full-fledged product on their own. Now the service is not inferior to competitors (Shadow, GeForce Now, LoudPlay), and in some ways even surpasses them.
“At the end of last year, my colleagues and I flew toItaly and bought Google Stadia there. At the airport in Rome, I launched it via Wi-Fi and was surprised - the game freezes very much. Then, sitting on the same couch, I launched Playkey and wondered why nothing crumbled. I don’t know why Google’s programmers couldn’t find a solution to make the game run well, ”says Yegor.
Popular cloud services for computer games
Google Stadia.Appeared in 2019.To use the service, the user needs to buy a gamepad and media player. The user receives access to the games after subscribing. The service works on PCs, tablets and phones. The developers promised 4K resolution. However, according to users, the service is still quite crude and slow, and the number of games is limited (a little more than 20).
PlayStation Now (ex-Gaikai).One of the “veterans” of gaming.The company was founded in 2008, and in 2012 it was bought by Sony Corporation. Initially, users gained access to the cloud service through PlayStation game consoles; later the service was adapted for personal computers. Currently there are more than 600 games in the library. To access you need to subscribe for one or three months. Internet speed must be at least 20 Mbit/s, and the device’s RAM must be at least 2 GB.
GeForce Now.NVIDIA service launched in 2016. The minimum speed is stated at 10 Mbit / s, but for a comfortable game it is desirable that it be at least 20 Mbit / s. Can be played on PCs, smartphones and Macs. The company's catalog contains more than 500 games, to get access to them, you need to buy a subscription (for a month, six months or a year). There are also free games in the catalog. At the end of March 2020, the Russian division of the company announced that users will receive free access to the service for a month. The purpose of the campaign is to support gamers during the quarantine due to coronavirus.
Vortex.The service makes it possible to play directly inbrowser, including your phone and smart TV. The catalog contains more than 100 games, the subscription is made for 100 hours of playing time. The recommended speed is from 20 Mbps.
Shadow.The service allows you to play on any platform, phone, tablet or PC. In addition to games, you can run other applications; after paying for a subscription, users receive a month of unlimited access.
Technically, the work process is as followsway. First, the user selects the game of interest from the catalog. The platform software analyzes its geolocation and determines where the nearest server with it is. The greater the distance, the longer the game will load.
The company deliberately extended the start timegames to minimize subsequent freezes. Playkey believes that it is better to wait two to three minutes before starting the game than to be nervous about constantly freezing and lagging pictures. To speed up the process, some popular games, such as GTA, are uploaded to all servers.
The system collects statistics about the deviceuser and analyzes the capabilities of "hardware": memory, OS, processor. Based on these data, the signal quality is assessed and the balance between the picture and performance is selected. After the game is uploaded to the server, the image is transmitted by the video stream to the user, and the gamer's actions are processed and sent back. The delay is no more than a few milliseconds.
The user's playing time is charged fromusing the billing system. It also helps determine through which connection and from which city a person is playing. This information is used to further improve the technology. In total, the company has about 500 servers in different countries - Russia, Great Britain, Holland, thanks to which it manages to make the game process as stable as possible.
Profit arithmetic
In 2016, the service had several thousandactive subscribers, but despite this, the project remained unprofitable. The expenses were more than the revenue, they tried to increase profitability through the change in technology, guided by the idea that when the product is liked, the gamer spends more time with it. Users received unlimited access to games by subscription, while the subscription fee per person was 199 rubles per month, and server maintenance cost 1,000 rubles. Increasing the subscription price to 400 rubles still did not solve the problem, it only allowed to slightly reduce losses. In addition, it caused a negative reaction and the loss of some of the users.
Egor tried different schemes: increased the amount of subscription, limited access, offered to pay for a subscription for a long time. But all of them turned out to be ineffective and caused negative feedback. As a result, it was decided to take money for the time spent on the server. Among other things, this cut off users who bought a subscription "in a joint effort": with a time-based payment, such a trick made no sense. At first, rates were calculated in minutes and received a flurry of negative reviews, then they switched to hourly rates, which turned out to be more understandable for users. It was thanks to transparency that it brought the least negative responses: a person does not play - money (minutes, hours) is not wasted. True, they still lost part of the audience, but they were able to turn off the servers that these players occupied, so they reduced costs.
Product first, then development
Playkey currently employs about 60 people. “At first, we recruited developers almost continuously, looking for people who understand C ++. There were few such people, so we took everyone we could, ”Yegor recalls.
When the number of employees grew to 70 people, Guryev realized that he had a shortage of product development specialists: the company had only one product manager for 40 programmers.
“The developers set their own goals, whilenobody analyzed whether it was necessary at all. As a result, we came to the conclusion that maintaining the functionality that we had done consumed 80% of the resources, ”explains Egor.
Then each task was turned into a hypothesis: what result it is desirable to get in the end and how it will affect the revenue. The new company policy led to the fact that some of the developers had to be cut. “It was difficult, but we understood that it was necessary to move forward faster,” says Yegor.
After the reorganization, the company began to paymore time to design. Only those tasks were selected that could provide a significant increase in income. The company now has four product teams. They consist of the product manager, who determines what to do, and the developers, who decide how to complete the task set by the manager. Each team deals with its own issues: for example, one conversion, the other - the time of the first user session. It is important that the user plays a lot during the first session.
Also Playkey has a separate commandtesters. They test tasks and technical specifications for them (is everything clear there, is there all the necessary information), new servers. This helps to eliminate errors in the formulation of the problem and to correct them immediately, rather than redoing the finished product later. Also, testers determine when to release new games.
Coronavirus and the future of computer games
Speaking about the prospects for the development of the market, Guryevnotes that every year people play more in time, and the number of players is also increasing. Games are becoming more immersed: if earlier there were quite simple graphics, now it has become brighter, VR has appeared. “It takes more skill to play than 20 years ago. That is, it is difficult to start playing from scratch, but there are very few such users left, most of the current gamers have been playing from birth, ”notes Yegor.
Generally quarantine due to the coronavirus pandemichad a positive impact on the gaming industry. Since the end of March, the company's revenue has doubled in the first week and doubled in the next. “People sit at home, and for the majority, the two main entertainments are watching TV series or playing on the computer,” says Yegor. Because of this, the server capacity became insufficient, which led to an increase in the waiting time for the game to load. One of the ways to increase the capacity was the use of computers in gaming clubs, which are temporarily empty due to quarantine.
Playkey's main task now is to scaleand increase the number of servers. “We are planning to grow in Europe: it is easier to grow near the point where you are now. In the USA, it is difficult to play on Russian and European servers, so we are not touching this direction yet, ”says Yegor about his future plans.
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