Unity, GameString Team For Cloud-Based Web Player Game Streaming

Unity Technologies and streaming technology firm GameString are teaming up to build a cloud-based game server for Unity content. The company plans to create a platform for a "virtual interactive channel" for content control over 3D games on a variety of web-enabled devices. Through a "dual rendering method", GameString says it wants developers to be able to serve optimized experiences to players using a web browser. Further, the companies hope that the cloud-based rendering tech will help developers serve higher-end social games and "more hardcore" web games. Unity said it's "excited" to work with the GameString technology to ease deployment and provide broader platform support for Unity Games. For GameString's part, it benefits from Unity's massive presence in the browser-based gaming space. The company claims over 350,000 registered users of its software and 45 million installs of its Web Player. "As consumer demand for visually rich-browser-based games increases, social, casual, MMO and more hard-core games are maturing and filling up our daily online entertainment," says Chris Boothroyd, CEO of GameString, calling the new platform "an opportunity to increase and improve what casual, as well as high-end gamers want." The system the two companies are developing delivers Unity's Web Player rendered from the server cloud, enabling a higher rate of concurrent users. "This new platform will also allow developers to bring larger and more triple-A level games to the browser based ecosystem," he says. The GameString Arcade Server will be offered through a publishing licensing model, and suggests that the fact it can support multiple concurrent Unity game instances per server can reduce developer costs. In the future, the companies say they'll add the ability to stream live game content in addition to content running on the Web Player.