Player.IO: A Huge Step Forward

Are you into developing multiplayer games? I bet you are! Have you been through the headache of supporting it? I bet you haven’t!

In the beggining there was darkness…

Most developers dream of adding multiplayer games to their portfolio and the less wise or experienced often run to embrace a multiplayer project from any tool that offers a tiny bit of ease of use and more than often they either fail or face the fact that their game is not half of what it could be and already took twice the amount they thought it would take.

A good idea: Nonoba’s MP API

Sometime ago Nonoba offered a great API for multiplayer games. We tried it and technically we loved it. It was easy to implement, server-side code was written in C# (which brought tears of happiness to our eyes) and we did a rather small but entertaining game in a couple of days. Enough to say that from a technical point of view, Nonoba proved its point.

Unfortunately from a commercial point of view this API was not interesting for developers such as us, that want to license games. All multiplayer games powered by Nonoba’s MP API showed Nonoba’s branding, which is only natural: they support the servers, they have the service, so if we want it, we have to stick with it, after all, it’s free! All in all Nonoba’s multiplayer API is amazing for developers that do it simply for the love of it with no commercial interest.

So I must say that for all this time we were on a strange position: we love the technology, we hate the branding! Good thing about Nonoba is that they have people that want to hear from developers and believe me I wasted a lot of their time explaining why that didn’t work for us, hoping Nonoba would understand that if it didn’t work for us, it wouldn’t work for many developers.

Player.IO: A Huge Step Forward

Someone once told me:

Do you know what really works? McDonald’s! Everyone can go home, make a big burger and eat it! But for $1 you can eat the burger, without having to cook it and without having to wash dishes.

Let’s translate this to multiplayer game development…

For a given amount of money I can code multiplayer games without having to setup and maintain infrastructure… makes sense? Good, let me present you Player.IO!

All I’ve mentioned above regarding the technical aspect of Nonoba’s API probably stands. I say probably because we haven’t done any code with it for a long time, but I believe that if it’s any different, it’s because it’s better, not the opposite.

The good part is that no branding is present, at least no portal’s branding. As we speak, the free version (yes, there is a free version) will show Player.IO branding, but that’s not competition for any portal, so it’s ok I guess. Moreover, if you sell a license for your game, you’ll probably should consider a plan.

We haven’t touched Player.IO, we just have an idea of what we’ll get from it because of what we tried from Nonoba’s API. What I really like about all this is not the technical part or the branding being gone, but the great feeling that someone was smart enough to hear from developers and take a huge step forward with a strong commercial offer that can fit pretty much any development need.

Player.IO looks very solid and promising, we’ll try it as soon as possible and hopefully confirm it.