Piepacker cloud gaming takes after Nintendo

I discovered Piepacker, a retro cloud gaming platform that was originally meant for the elderly through a WhatsApp conversation. A friend shared it with me and asked me to join. Although the name seemed a bit silly to me, my friend told me that it offered some old SNK games. It looked great!

The pitch is simple. Classic games are available instantly from your browser with integrated video chat and multiplayer. 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.

There were a few aspects that 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 largely 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. There are a handful of true gems, like Metal Slug X, Windjammers, and King of Fighters ’98, while a deal with veteran UK outfit Team 17 has brought a few vintage Britsoft social-gaming classics like Worms World Party and Sensible Soccer. Piepacker has also experimented with developing and publishing new indie titles for the platform, including the Bomberman-style Arsene Bomber.

But that’s not 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, or the modern NES game Micro Mages, or the 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 SCARS for a few minutes. As a rule, on Piepacker, the more mindless the game, the more easily conversation will flow — so you don’t necessarily want to be too engaged anyway.

Piepacker has yet to really make a name for itself, although it has attracted support from the retro community with a successful Kickstarter campaign, as well as investment from the Lego Group, among others. 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 the two handheld devices was quite interesting, says Devienne. Devienne says that the Game Gear had a better color screen and a better sound chip. It also offered better games. It was also more costly. Also you needed a lot of batteries to go through the day. On the other side, the Game Boy was much lower tech, like, black-and-white screen, pretty bad sound, and you could barely see what was happening on the screen. It was still cheaper and had a much stronger battery.

“In hindsight, [Nintendo] won this battle with accessibility and low tech. And when we started to look at the cloud gaming space, we were 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? “

The result is a cloud gaming service that uses 60 times less bandwidth than Google Stadia. This is good news for Piepacker as it lowers its costs and makes its free-to play business model feasible. 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. It’s also great news for those who don’t have the best internet access at home in countries like Southwest France (“We have good wine, cheese and internet!” Devienne jokes) and in developing markets such as Brazil, India and Southeast Asia where infrastructure is still improving.

Piepacker is lean because of its proprietary technology. This is where the company gets its curious and soon-to-be changed name. “Packing”, which is a method of compressing server processes to reduce bandwidth usage, is what Devienne and his cofounder used to test this technology. The processes they were using happened to be “pies”. Part of it is in its philosophy, where visual fidelity can take a back seat to the social interactions that are the real draw; competing with the home console experience is not the point. And part of it is the choice of retro games, which are of course technologically undemanding and much easier to optimize around.

Retro has been the place where Piepacker established its market niche. But for Devienne it was 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. Rather, Devienne is hoping to host more modern indie titles and turn Piepacker into a marketplace where developers can monetize their games how they like (with Piepacker taking a cut, of course). He suggests Team 17’s frantic co-op cooking game Overcooked 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.

In the meantime, Piepacker is making decent money selling custom 3D filters for its video chat windows. (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 Pokemon,” he says. I was amazed that no one is making games with this type of mechanic, where the viewers can be involved. We should make one!” That’s where Arsene Bomber started out, as a prototype that allowed viewers of a charity stream on Twitch to vote to control a UFO that could disrupt the Bomberman-style action. He imagines viewers paying to challenge their favorite streamer at Street Fighter, or to influence a single-player game with items, cheats, or extra enemies, in the same way they tip streamers now.

Human connection is the key to all of it. Before Piepacker had video chat, Devienne noticed in an early test that almost all players had Zoom or Hangouts open at the same time. When the feature was integrated, habits changed. “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 chat. 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&D, and the game almost becomes an excuse [for] conversation. “It’s a way for people to get to know each other.” To test if the players would return to the service again, he separated groups and made sure they had access to only the best games. They did.

None of this is to say that Piepacker is bound to become a profitable, mass-market platform. But what it does is demonstrate, quite clearly, the potential of cloud gaming to differ from or expand the gaming experiences we know, rather than just provide a convenient way to access them. (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 are focusing on cloud gaming’s social benefits. This is something that larger cloud gamers would be wise to take note of.