Epic Games announced its acquisition of Houseparty recently (or more accurately, Houseparty announced Epic Games acquired it). This is an interesting acquisition. Houseparty is a communication platform, allowing people to conduct group video calls on their smartphones, while Epic Games is… a gaming company. Most widely known for Fortnite these days. What exactly does that mean and how will this playout in the industry moving forward?

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I think it was about 12 years ago. I worked at a large corporate, doing my product management work there. In a chat I had with a colleague, he stated that his kids are playing online games and in parallel talking through Skype with the friends they are playing with.

Times have changed since then. Gamers often resort to Discord instead of Skype, discussing games before, during and after they play.

WebRTC and gaming

Voice (and video) communications has become part of the gaming experience, and in part, this has been driven by a technology called WebRTC. Simply put, WebRTC is an open source technology that is now embedded in browsers and can also be placed inside any kind of an app on any kind of device. At its heart, it enables sending and receiving voice, video and arbitrary data in real time. Discord and Skype? They use WebRTC today as part of their technology stack.

Other interesting uses of WebRTC in gaming?

Google Stadia - Google’s cloud streaming platform that enables people to play games on their devices without installing them locally by rendering the game in the cloud makes use of WebRTC. In a recent interview about Stadia, Majd Bakar stated:

Not WebRTC, but relatively similar technology comes from HQ Trivia an online trivia game show where questions are broadcasted in realtime to a large number of players. Many of HQ Trivia’s wannabe’s ended up using WebRTC.

Then there’s the genre of watching people play games. Twitch is the leader here, but there’s also Mixer by Microsoft. Mixer started with low latency broadcasting using WebRTC.

These together cover a wide gamut of interactions while playing games:

Voice Communications and Gaming

When it came to adding voice communications to games, there were 4 paths a game developer could take: in-house DIY, use a third party, use the platform’s option or rely on external services.

In-house DIY

Companies could theoretically develop and embed communication technologies on their own into their games. The main challenge with this approach though, is that doing so requires a lot of effort and technical skill. Especially once you grow in scale.

For most game developers, communications is secondary. It isn’t the core of their game, but rather part of the overall experience. In the same way that game developers rely today on frameworks such as Unreal and Unity (more on these later), they’d probably rather rely on a third party for their communications than develop and own that piece of technology. At least for most of them that’s the case.

Those who want to take that route can still rely to some extent on third parties such as Mumble, an open source voice chat server for gaming.

Use a third party

Game developers can decide to use third parties and integrate an external communication SDK into their product.

There are a few alternatives available in this category, the two most notable ones are Vivox and Teamspeak. While Teamspeak offers a self hosted server alternative for adding voice to games, Vivox is a managed cloud platform that does roughly the same. Vivox has also been the more dominant player.

It is important to mention here that Fortnite (=Epic Games) has been a publicly known customer of Vivox - it appears first in most of the marketing and sales material of Vivox. Just look at their partners page:

Use the platform’s option

XBox and PlayStation both offer voice chat capabilities. The challenge here is that most high end games end up on both platforms, and having committed to one platform or another for communication offer a rather disparate experience.

Think of it as a messaging system that works only on one smartphone. Something like… Apple’s iMessage. Only that it wouldn’t shift to using SMS when sending a message to a friend with an Android device - it won’t be able to communicate with an Android device at all.

With gaming, that’s crossplay - the ability to play a game across multiple platforms. Game developers want crossplay, in order to get their game title in front of a larger audience as possible. Console makers hate it, as it reduces the lock-in factor they have on both players and game developers. Many (most?) games today offer crossplay, but what do you do with the communication part of it? Gamers shouldn’t think about the console or device their friends are using when they want to play and communicate with them.

Rely on external services

The last alternative is the “default” when it comes to games. If you don’t offer any in-game communications, then your players can still go and use Skype. Or Discord. Mostly Discord today.

You won’t be part of the experience, at least not directly, but players will still be communicating.

The success of Discord also led Steam, a gaming distribution platform to add voice chat to their SDK.

Unreal and Unity

The two most popular gaming engines today? Unreal and Unity.

You can call these two platforms direct rivals. Developers will end up using one or the other, and as these platforms want to grow, their own intent is to have as many developers use their own platform and not the competitor’s.

Unreal is owned by Epic Games.

Unity acquired Vivox earlier this year.

Fortnite is an Epic Games game. And is undoubtedly using Unreal. But it also uses Vivox. Which is now owned by Unity. A direct competitor of Unreal.

Epic Games couldn’t continue in this way and let Unity own the voice technology used by Fortnite, and in many ways, let Unity know the popularity and the trends in popularity of Fortnite (and other Epic Games titles) with its players.

It had three alternatives in front of it:

It is important to remember that Epic Games has decided last year to go its own way and own its own destination already. It has started competing directly with Steam by introducing its own games store and is decided to bypass Google Play when launching Fortnite for Android. Why? Mainly to forgo the 30% revenue share that Google and Apple extract from their stores. It could do that with Google’s Android, but not with Apple’s iPhone.

Houseparty’s path with WebRTC

Houseparty rose out of the ashes of Meerkat. Meerkat was a live streaming service that was popular on Twitter - right until Twitter decided to block Meerkat and launch its own competing service - Periscope.

Houseparty was launched as a mobile group video chat type of a service instead of the Meerkat live video streaming service. To get that done, two decisions took place @ Houseparty:

The third party that was used by Houseparty was TokBox, now part of Nexmo. As time went by, and the service grew in popularity and use, Houseparty decided the need to own that technology. They built out the team and brought the knowledge and infrastructure inhouse.

In the past year, like other social networks, Houseparty has been doubling down on features that relate to gaming. The three announcements that come to mind include:

The next chapter of Houseparty will be written along by Epic Games, and gaming will most definitely be an important part of it.

Epic Games + Houseparty

The need to ditch Vivox and move to its own technology, led Epic Games to search for an alternative. It has found that in Houseparty.

Why pick Houseparty and no other?

The replacement isn’t going to be an easy one. To that end, Epic Games will first need to fill in the missing gaps in the Houseparty technology stack. Mainly, a bit more focus on its voice only capabilities and the addition of 3D spatial audio support. In essence, it needs to develop Houseparty to have feature parity with what it uses from Vivox today.

What’s next in communications for Epic Games?

Here are several quick thoughts/suggestions of where Epic Games can take Houseparty:

Communications in/with/around gaming is HUGE

Which is why we see companies big and small trying to figure out how to fit communication technologies such as WebRTC with games. This trend isn’t specific only to gaming - it happens across many market segments where WebRTC gets adopted to support new use cases.