PROJECT OVERVIEW.
ICO date: 1st November to 30th November.
Playkey, a leading cloud gaming provider, is contemplating an ICO with the intent of exponentially accelerating the pace of cloud gaming development through decentralization. The aim is to provide gamers with a reasonably-priced opportunity to play top rated games anytime and anywhere, using any device connected to Internet, without having to purchase a high-end PC or console.
BACKGROUND.
Gaming is moving into the cloud, following video, music and other services. For gamers, cloud gaming is 10x cheaper than owning personal gaming hardware (PC/console), leveraging share economy principles.
The development of GPUs, the Internet, and low-latency streaming, have diminished the demand for personal gaming hardware. In fact, the next generation of consoles could be the last one that is based on hardware.
Moving gaming into cloud technology has now become inevitable - 70% of Steam players are unable to play AAA titles like GTA V in high resolution, and 30% of players cannot even run such titles on their obsolete PCs.
Playkey’s mission is to leverage the cloud gaming revolution during the early stage by decentralization. They will provide a decentralized ecosystem with a core platform for miners and gamers, based on blockchain technology, which provides private/professional GPU owners with a new way to earn money. That way that is more efficient, more stable, and less risky than crypto-mining, while providing gamers with an affordable way to play AAA games, without using latest generation hardware.
HOW IT WORKS.
All game calculations are done on a server (miner), captured as a video and your PC, Smart TV or android dongle will receive the video stream. So you don’t need high-end expensive GPU, CPU, RAM device and can run all new games on any device capable to display a video stream.
A special trade service will be established to connect miners with gamers using smart contracts. Miners will be able to develop their own smart contract terms (such as pricing), or join the recommended terms based on the gaming market demand.
A typical gamer’s workflow will be as follows:
- Register on the playkey.io website and create a PKT wallet;
- Download the Playkey client application;
- Top-up the PKT wallet balance by buying PKT for real currency (USD, EUR, etc.);
- Choose the server to play on with the following filters: location, ping, the cost of playing on that particular server, reputation, etc.;
- Select a server and enter into a smart contract with the miner. Auto-selection of the server based on the parameters set by the gamer, will be implemented in the future.
A typical miner’s workflow will be as follows:
- Register on the playkey.lo website and create a PKT wallet;
- Download Playkey’s server application;
- Install and configure the software;
- Download the desired games and set the price for playing;
- Register this smart contract in the blockchain.
USE CASES.
Gamers.
Gamers will get the following benefits:
- The ability to play AAA titles on obsolete/old/non-gaming (Mac) hardware (min. requirements: CPU >= 1.5 GHz (for Video Adapter with H.264 hardware decoding support)).
- The ability to receive high level SLA with low latency and great picture quality.
- The ability to play anywhere.
- The ability to play on any device - Mac, tablets, Smart TV, etc.
- A plug’n’play solution to purchase playing time with just 1 click, without having to spend hours downloading a game.
- The opportunity to pay 4x as few as they would pay for the gaming hardware, while receiving the same benefits. The price of a gaming PC is $1 500. When purchased using a pay-monthly scheme over a period of 3 years, the price for per month for that same PC is $41. A monthly cloud subscription fee can be one-fourth of that price.
Miners.
Providing hardware to gamers will be:
- 2-3 times more efficient than any altcoin mining add opportunities.
- More stable in the short, medium and long term than cryptocurrency mining.
- Less risky than cryptocurrency mining due to its intrinsic value — the mining return is much more predictable and mostly based on being an alternative to buying one’s own gaming hardware (PC/console).
- A good alternative/hedging option for those private or professional miners who have already bought.
- GPUs and can’t use them effectively due to the increasing competition on the crypto mining market.
Game development and publishing.
The Playkey Ecosystem will support a wide range of initiatives for game developers and publishers to incentivize the creation of new games with the direct support of the gaming community.
- Direct connection between all the publishers and game developers, and the platform.
- Publishing and crowd selling of games inside the Playkey Ecosystem.
- Support for indie developers through donations and stimulation by Playkey Foundation initiatives.
Marketing decentralization.
The Playkey team believes that the next stage of decentralization will be marketing. It will provide a wide range of tools for miners to attract users to their GPU-powered machines (for example. a web service, a mobile application). Overall, these initiatives will provide transparent and fair terms for all market stakeholders.
- Large professional miners or regional miner communities can execute local marketing campaigns independently, including using their own mobile applications.
- CPA networks and YouTube bloggers can issue their smart contracts in which they would be paid for each client that they send to a miner’s server.
- Game selling promotions for publishers via smart contracts.
E-sports and live streams.
The Playkey Ecosystem will develop cyber sports initiatives, providing gamers and teams with a wide range of fair and engaging competitions. Additionally, the team will develop services to support and enhance the game streaming experience for both gamers and streamers.
- Global and local gaming competitions via sponsorship, and additional services inside the Playkey ecosystems.
- Services for E-sport teams, and sponsorship smart contracts.
- Play now button for stream viewers to directly start playing with the streamer.
- Cross-subscription prices - customers buying a stream channel subscription receive a bonus for a cloud gaming subscription, and vice versa.
- Stream now function for gamers to motivate them to stream directly from the cloud.
Gaming content creation.
Playkey will support the creation of content-related services, which will provide fair game reviews and interesting content.
- Game magazines and blogs with different monetization schemes via smart contracts inside the Playkey Ecosystem;
- YouTube streaming support via smart contracts with publishers and gamers;
- Game reviews or other content (video/text).
PKT USES.
Short term.
In the short term, PKT will be used for transactions between miners and gamers, and for purchasing gaming software. During the first stage, Playkey will integrate the PKT wallet into all Playkey accounts and will transfer all current transactions to PKT.
It is expected that PKT tokens will be bought by gamers on cryptocurrency exchanges, or on Playkey’s official website. Gamers pay tokens to miners for playing. Miners share revenue with the Playkey Foundation, which supports the software, organizes relationships with publishers, marketing and ecosystem development.
Initially, Playkey will be offering packages that can be used in smart contracts between miners and gamers fixing gaming time (hour, monthly, weekly, others) and quality preferences (HD, Full HD, Ultra). A smart contract monitors the specified conditions of achievement or violation of the contract’s clauses, and makes independent decisions based on the conditions that have been programmed. The smart contract ensures full automation and reliability of contractual relations between people.
The Playkey Foundation will be working closely with the miner community to recommend the most mutually-beneficial pricing. However, the final pricing decision will be left to the miners themselves. The Foundation’s goal is to build a sustainable business model so that gamers who are unfamiliar with blockchain technologies can experience good quality gaming easily.
Special SLA (service level agreements) requirements will be developed for miners to ensure that they provide an outstanding level of gaming quality to the user. The SLA will include the minimum requirements for hardware, broadband channel bandwidth, and uptime.
Medium term.
In the medium term, Playkey will decentralize the infrastructure. Servers purchased by the Development Fund after the ICO will be put on open auction, and every PKT holder will have the chance to purchase computing capacity that will generate revenue for its owner. Additionally, every miner will be able to create their own smart contracts to attract money from PKT holders and provide gamers/communities with the opportunity to fund their local regional professional miners so as to minimize latency and maximize the quality of the streaming service.
Long term.
In the long term, the Playkey Foundation will expand the ecosystem to cover R&D, marketing, game development and publishing, in-game currencies, e-sport and live streams, apps and content creation. The primary goal of the Playkey Ecosystem is to provide advantages and benefits to all participants, which will fuel growth in the number of service providers and platform users. The key initial driver of the ecosystem growth will be the cloud gaming services, which will provide high value both for miners and gainers.
ROADMAP.
HOW ADVANCED IS IT?
Playkey is based on proven working technology. The team of 45 experienced R&D specialists, collaborate with leading game publishers including Ubisoft, Bethesda and Wargaming. Playkey has a network of 120 Nvidia Grid powered servers based in London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Moscow, and is backed by a large European VC fund.
SIMILAR PROJECTS.
Utomik.
Utomik downloads a bite-size chunk of the actual game to your computer, via its client, and lets you start playing. The rest of the game is then streamed in further chunks as needed. It promises “the real game, unchanged and 100 percent original quality”. As the game is on your computer rather than in the cloud, it should all be lag-free, a problem that plagued earlier players in the game streaming sector. Of course that does mean you have to have a computer decent enough to run it.
HOW IS IT DIFFERENT FROM OTHER PROJECTS IN THE SPACE?
One of the key differences between Playkey and failed cloud gaming competitors of the past, is their optimized server runtime (thus lowering operating costs). Playkey can run different 20 game sessions (or users), simultaneously on the same server with multiplayer support.
USER REVIEWS.
[So if i got this right, you want us to run games on our GPU’s?]
[Almost right. Currently, we are using enterprise servers (mostly Supermicro, Gigabyte) in professional data centers. And we are looking forward to decentralizing infrastructure and provide ability for anyone to provide its computer or server on a smart contract basis to the gamers, earning Playkey tokens.]
[So basically you’ll pay for these tokens to run your games on a higher performance. But long-term, surely it would be more beneficial in terms of price just to buy the GPUs yourself?]
[What a nice project. All you need is a good internet connexion, right ?]
[10-15 mbps works fine, 25 mbps + are awesome with Full HD and 60 FPS.]
[Hello,
Can you explain why you need 540,000 ETH for a cloud gaming platform?]
[Yeah that’s kinda mystery to me too. The whole point of making p2p cloud gaming platform is to cut the costs of maintaining the system. $160 million is a bit funny numbers for the company which core idea is to save their money.
By the way, I didn’t even find any info about how they’re going to deal with the miners whose computer is shutting down during the session or having bad internet connection.
Furthermore, I would like to know how their software is going to control the game client making the miner to send save data to the Playkey’s server. What if miner disappears suddenly destroying the player’s progress?]
[about 540,000 ETH..
here everything is simple: the more budget we have - the more opportunities to attract customers - the faster we scale. The more money we attract, the more markets we can reach.
about miners whose computer is shutting down during the session or destroying the player’s progress.. Gaming time (session) will be recounted not only in the beginning and in the end, so 1) if the session fails - miner gets less money and 2) his rating in the system goes down, next time users will choose another miner]
[How can this startup compete with such a successful giant as NVIDIA on their own field?..
Nvidia have released a Cloud Gaming platform built upon their GPUs. And those guys, they’re kind of manufacturing those GPUs themselves..]
[The direction they are taking, eventually, will allow those with high end gaming rigs to rent them out when not gaming. You own a nice gaming rig, when you’re not using it you load their virtual machine and let the rig “mine” Playkey tokens by letting others use your rig. Nvidia is going the centralized route which is probably why Playkey is changing things up going decentralized, taking idle rigs and putting them to work for others.]
[After reading the whitepaper I’m going to go ahead and call it a scam (not that in 7 pages anyone seem to care if this project could even work, people just seem to just blindly trust the project showing exactly what’s wrong with ICOs).
You can’t possibly run already existing games in a decentralized manner. Running interactive games is not just 3D rendering, the game has to practically fully run on the “mining” machine including resources like CPU/RAM/storage.
Streaming like Nvidia Shield or Steam Link works because they do so locally. The NVidia shield for example requires “50 Megabits per second – Recommended for 1080p 60 FPS quality” (source) which is easy to get on your local Wi-Fi which probably have 70-100 Mbps speeds. Now players would need 50Mbps internet connection and miners would require 50Mbps per game they “mine”. You could say 720p 30fps is enough but even old hardware can achieve that without latency and having to pay for it. And don’t even dream about 4k…
The whitepaper argues that most people can’t play games with the highest settings but most people also doesn’t have a stable 50Mbps internet connection. So the video feed would have to be compressed which means a maxed out game will look like it’s on low settings. An uncompressed video feed would require very fast (as in high bandwidth) internet. Steam’s average download rate is 33.6 Mbps currently in the US including gamers with their own gaming PCs who also tend to afford faster internet.]
[Yes, you right. We have more requirements for miners, like CPU, RAM, HDD, Network. But if you want to earn more money, you can upgrade your farm and work with us.
Nvidia our competitor in this, so it proved that this technology is a future for gaming. Yes, miner need a good internet connection, we have Terabits/s connection for our mining rigs.
Try our service at Playkey.net for free on Demo, I hope you will be excited.
The Playkey Foundation will spend ICO funds to develop the miners’ ecosystem, provide support for early miners, help miners to pass SLA tests, and be equipped to offer a high level of service.]
[Don’t you think Ethereum smart contracts is too slow for a game mechanics ?]
[Playkey will temporary use offchain solution to speed up transactions inside the blockchain. PKT is only for payment between users and service providers, and doesn’t affect gaming experience at all.]
[With 15mbs I would be able to play smothly with high frame rates in a high resolution, or would it be needed to go even higher for high end graphics? ]
[30+ for stable 1080p 60 FPS. There will be 4K after the ICO, but it would require 100mbs+ connection. The team will work to decrease that requirement and followed with the development of high-speed broadband connections 4K will be available for many users.]
[I also like the idea of using the hardware of someone else to play via Cloud gaming. In this way don’t have to upgrade the PC every half a year to be able to play the lasted games. Also there won’t be issues with platform-exclusive titles anymore!]
[Not to play the devil’s advocate but how can we verify this partnership cos I can’t find anything on twitter or Facebook. sorry that’s where I get my news. yes am ashamed:) Anyway, this will be a good investment, if this info is verifiable. Nothing against the Playkey team but I been feed so much bus in the crypto space that I have proudly turned into Judas. I need to be able to verify things before believing and shilling it.]
[This idea is not new. A lot companies already tried cloud gaming … and in the end, all had to close their service, because it wasn’t profitable.]
[So it does seem true that this platform is simply unplayable with anything less than 15 mbps connection. I hope the project realizes that the largest gaming population lives in Asia, where the average connection is much less than that even in developed urban areas. You can ignore them and focus on the West and America, but there you have it.
P.S. I have been to Europe and not everyone afford high speed internet too.]
[Speed really isn’t the only thing. The bigger issues is latency (delay). You can have huge speeds (like satellite download) but really big delay on those links.
For gaming delay is a big big no go.
IF they want to be successful in the gaming market Playkey will need to have server farms all over the world, all with good decent internet connections.]
