LiquidSky is a New York City-based provider of cloud visualisation. The company's flagship product is their cloud gaming service of the same name, launched on March 24, 2017. Announced at Consumer Electronics Show 2017, the service aims to tackle issues that other providers struggle with, including latency and input lag. Its major competitors include Sony's PlayStation Now and NVIDIA's GeForce NOW for PC and Mac
Video LiquidSky
History
The company was founded in 2014, by Ian McLoughlin and Scott Johnson as LiquidSky Software Inc. Prior to founding LiquidSky, McLoughlin had expressed displeasure of how existing cloud gaming solutions handled latency and input lag, especially OnLive. Ian stated that his goal when founding LiquidSky was to offer a service with minimal latency and input lag, thus offering a cleaner experience for gamers.
Testing began sometime around late 2014, with the company quietly bringing in waves of testers to try out the service. The company found success, raising almost $12 million in funding for the service.
At the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show, after roughly two years of testing, McLoughlin and the company announced that the service would be launching in Q1 2017, with an ad-supported plan, upgraded datacenter hardware, and a brand new client. Other features shown off included concepts for standalone hardware and demo footage of Battlefield 1 running at 60 FPS. Originally slated for release on March 14, 2017, it was delayed to March 24, 2017, due to server issues and launched with support for Microsoft Windows. On July 11, 2017, LiquidSky updated their Android client to reflect the launch of the service. The company has stated that support for macOS and iOS is in development.
Maps LiquidSky
Features
Users connect to the service through the LiquidSky client. The client allows users to pay for plans, manage their account, record gameplay, among other features. As of October 2017, the client is only available for Microsoft Windows and Android.
Two plans are currently available: "Pay-as-you-go" and "Monthly".
The service delivers users a virtual computer running a customized version of Windows Server 2016, which has been preloaded with essential apps such as a web browser. The computer also comes preloaded with major game distribution platforms such as Steam, Origin, and the Blizzard App.
LiquidSky's key features include:
- 30ms minimum latency (depends on ISP and user distance from data center)
- The ability to install any games the user has purchased.
- State of the art technology to keep up with the latest games.
- Lightning fast internet speeds, with 10 GB per second downloads and 100 MB per second uploads.
- Secure storage solutions, which the company dubs "SkyStorage"
Removed features
In September 2017, LiquidSky announced that the ad-supported plan would be discontinued, due to users abusing the feature.
In January 2018, LiquidSky discontinued the "Trial" feature, which allowed a user to demo the service for a 20-minute period. The feature was subject to abuse and contributed to unnecessary server load.
Datacenters
As of October 2017, LiquidSky has 6 datacenters worldwide. Locations are as followed:
- San Jose, California
- Dallas, Texas
- Washington, DC
- London, England
- Frankfurt, Germany
- Hong Kong
Datacenters in Chennai, India, Tokyo, Japan, Seoul, South Korea, Sydney, Australia, and Mexico were available at launch, but were discontinued due to lack of user adoption compared to major countries. Additionally, the platform lacked local language translation, faced VAT taxes, and payment processing fees for the centers.
Reception
LiquidSky has received attention from various online news outlets, including Engadget, VentureBeat, Time, IGN, PCGamer, and PCGamesN, with many claiming that the service succeeded where previous services such as OnLive failed.
References
External links
- Official website
- Techverseblog
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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