About PlayCast

During Christmas 2021 a childhood friend of mine from Alaska was visiting and we ended up in a feverish whiteboard session brainstorming a crazy new idea for a technology company.  We couldn't help contrasting the failure of Google's Stadia launch with the wild success of Twitch.  Apparently gamers didn't want yet another closed gaming platform, no matter how revolutionary the solution for delivering it was.  What they wanted was a free and open community to share their gaming experiences on, even if it meant nearly zero actually gaming interactivity!  The funny thing about Twitch is that it would have been just another Youtube knock-off it hadn't been for the purely coincidental lauch of the Open Broadcast Studio tool back in 2011.  Without OBS, Twitch would have been just another video site plus chat.  During the same period Epic, the #1 game on the Apple appstore sacrificed that position to sue Apple!  That's how fed-up game developers were with closed markets imposing their crude business models and gated communities on them.  

I love Epic's fantastic technology, love the technology Google pioneered with Stadia, and thought that OBS was one of the most amazing open-source Projects I'd ever seen, and I was in awe of the idea that gamers would love to just WATCH each other play games even if it meant nearly zero actual playing with one another.  The media was all talking about whether or not the latency of cloud native gaming solutions like Stadia and Xcloud while ignoring the observation that they seemed to be thrilled with the 100% latency of Twitch.  No play at all was more compelling that creating another account and fishing out the credit card to join Stadia or Xbox Live.  

My co-founder Trey Overton and I had grown up in Alaska playing role playing games like D&D and our favorite... Call of Cthulhu and all the classic board games. (He was "Aaron" at the time, but nicknames!) Painting miniatures for epic battles pushing little figurines around giant tables that could last days at a time while we spent hours rolling dice and pushing little figures around with pokers and tape measures.  While we love modern video games, we felt that they had lost the imagination and social intimacy of the classical role-playing experience.  What if we could think of a way to bring that experience back to gaming?  

The vision behind Playcasting is to try to recreate that experience in the twenty first century by unifying gaming and streaming into an open platform that enables anyone to host a gaming community.  Technically Playcasting could be described as adding input and video conferencing to a tool like OBS.  In fact we integrated OBS support directly into the Playcast Server to enable streamers to try it immediately without changing a thing.  We also designed our first-generation solution to just work with all existing PC games unmodified to enable game developers to explore the new genres it enables without having to adopt any API's.  If everyone likes what they see, the plan is to release tools that enable game developers and streamers to build the capability directly into their content and to create and host their own large-scale communities completely free of cost or expensive cloud infrastructure.  

Ironically we achieve the unprecedented speed of Playcasting by avoiding the cumbersome overhead of the cloud altogether.  Playcasting is a P2P network that enables gamers and streamers to create their own communities by using their own gaming rigs to host them directly.  Every gaming PC shipped for the past decade has included powerful hardware accelerated encoding and transcoding hardware, seldom used by anyone but modern streamers and amazing tools like OBS.  

We'd like to thank the folks at OBS, Google Stadia, Epic Games, Nvidia, Twitch, Parsec and many others for furnishing the inspiration for what we hope the game industry will find to be a revolutionary new gaming and media genre.  This technology is very new, has many rough edges and introduces a lot of understandable concerns about how best to turn it into a mature new format.  We hope that with a lot of input and support from the community that we'll figure it out together.  To try to balance all of these early concerns we've tried to package the technology in an easily digestible and testable form and we recognize that it will need to evolve substantially to become a ubiquitous new solution for content creators of all forms.  

I'd also like to thank our early believers, Bill Gossman, Bing Gordon, and the handful of old friends who slaved away with me for almost two years in relative isolation to produce this technology together.  We all just wanted to be able to play together again the way we did when we were kids in Alaska during the long dark winters when our imaginations were our greatest source of entertainment.  

-Alex St. John
CEO and Co-Founder