Uplivion Technologies has set out to replace the DVD as the primary means of distributing high-end AAA computer games and to make them available through the web browser instead. Our technology enables players to start playing a game by simply navigating to a website and pressing the play-button, much in the same way as watching a video on YouTube. To make this possible, we are developing a highly optimized suite of technologies that cover all aspects of streaming games across the internet.
Modern browser games are generally developed on top of web technologies such as Flash and Java. These platforms, however, are not specifically designed for game development, leading to significant losses in graphics quality and performance. For that reason, developers of AAA titles almost exclusively develop their games in C++. Our product closes the gap between established gaming technology and browser technology, allowing any game to be easily embedded into the browser. Our technology can integrate with any kind of games engine, be it off the shelf, or custom made.
Our product targets games developers that have an interest in making their games available to the player in a way which is as free of technical barriers as possible. Using our technology, they can reach any person who knows how to use a web browser with minimal additional development effort. Beyond that, we are developing technology that makes playing games online as comfortable and efficient as possible. We continually further our research and development in the field; thereby we distinguish ourselves from the competition.
On Steam, the market leader in the field of digital distribution of games, a game must be downloaded to the player’s computer completely, before they can start playing. Even with a modern broadband connection, the download still takes a considerable amount of time. Assuming a 16 Mbit/s line for example, downloading an average AAA game (about 6 GB of data) takes 50 minutes (click image to the right) under lab conditions. In practice, the download takes considerably longer, since protocol overhead needs to be taken into account, and the entire available bandwidth can generally not be consumed over an extended period of time.
For this reason, beyond embedding games into the browser, we are developing further technologies which make delivering games using the browser as efficient as possible. This includes technologies that allow the streaming of games across the internet, such that the game data no longer needs to be completely present on the player’s computer for them to play the game. This enables players to enter any game as instantaneously as watching a video on YouTube. A further core technology is compression for 3D mesh data that allows storing such data far more efficiently than the naive approach that is used throughout the industry today. It is specifically designed to meet the needs of the games industry and leaves the original mesh unmodified. This allows us to dramatically reduce the amount of data that a game ships with. We believe that this technology is key to distributing games through the internet, much in the same way as mp3 compression is key to distributing music through the internet.
We would much appreciate the opportunity to meet with you to answer any remaining questions, at which time we will be happy to discuss further technical details of our product.