LiquidSky is a new cloud-based gaming platform that allows Steam, Uplay and Battle.net users to play virtually any PC video game on Android, Windows, Mac or Linux devices. The company recruited Silicon Valley legend, Scott McNealy, to be on the company’s advisory board. McNealy saw the future of the cloud decades ago.
“I’ve been a believer in thin client computing since the ‘80s,” McNealy told [a]listdaily. “We said ‘the network is the computer,’ which became one of the more famous slogans in the world. Today it’s been co-opted by one word: cloud. We were a verbose way of saying what cloud computing was before the cloud.”
McNealy said the cloud has always been a personal passion of his. When Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, bought Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion in 2009, McNealy said Ellison killed the company’s thin client product called Sun Ray.
“Larry’s now on the cloud bandwagon, but he hasn’t really been building the client environment,” McNealy said. “I’ve always felt this [cloud technology] is something I’d like to see happen. My goal is to keep driving [the notion] that the network is the computer.”
While still in stealth mode, LiquidSky was able to attract 400,000 gamers to its cross-platform, cloud-based service.
“Look how many sign-ups they’ve gotten and they haven’t even launched,” McNealy said. “This is what a lot of VCs call ‘going viral.’”
Ian McLoughlin, founder and CEO of LiquidSky, said the company went viral on reddit over a year ago through a small promotion on the PCMasterRace subreddit.
“People loved our product because we solve a major pain point for PC gamers,” McLoughlin said. “Before LiquidSky, gamers needed expensive hardware that had to be upgraded on a regular basis to keep up with the ever more demanding game requirements. With LiquidSky, users don’t have to keep upgrading their hardware, yet they can still play their favorite PC games on low-spec and mobile devices. Early adopters embraced this and spread the word, often through our referral program. No formal marketing or PR has been done until now.”
While past cloud-based gaming ventures like OnLive have failed, the key to success in this industry is all about timing.
“We were early at Sun with a lot of things,” McNealy said. “We did Google Glasses a long time ago, wearable computing, cloud computing, and an enormous number of Internet of Things. Our future vision was spot-on. What’s different here with LiquidSky is Ian [McLoughlin] and the team have done very good technology engineering in the network and dealing with latency and cloud architecture that is very special.”
McNealy said the focus of the team has been making sure the experience is PC game machine caliber.
“Gamers are very particular about their experience,” McNealy said. “If it doesn’t feel like you have your own game machine, it’s not going to work. You also need a pricing model that works. It’s hard, or else everybody would do it. It takes a lot of engineering to give you a personal console experience and provide a pricing model that pays for the cloud and is palatable to the gamer.”
LiquidSky is employing multiple business models, allowing gamers to pay as they play through SkyCredits (about an hour for $0.50) or commit to Gamer ($14.99 per month with 500GB of storage) or Unlimited ($39.99 with 1TB of storage) subscription packages.
Scott Johnston, co-founder and board member of LiquidSky, said the company plans to use many different channels to increase its touchpoint frequency, targeting PC gamers across North America and Europe.
“Some channels include influencer marketing campaigns, affiliate marketing, developer partnerships, social outreach to different forums and groups targeting PC gamers, and traditional social ad buys on Facebook and YouTube,” Jason Kirby, head of marketing, said. “We also plan to use engaging remarketing ads, automated marketing and social campaigns to convert existing traffic/users into paying customers. We’re also attending events like PAX West and TwitchCon to explore partnerships with content creators, streamers and video game developers and publishers.”
McNealy believes there’s a lot of innovation that can be done in this space. The company is rolling out internationally in a capital-efficient way. And the product opens up the entire world to gaming.
“We’re a thin client, so our cloud can project to a fat, thin or absolutely stateless dataless environment with no change,” McNealy said. “The client can be a set top box or a super thin tablet with a radio. TCP/IP is available to everybody, whether it’s a mainframe, a security camera or a JumboTron. It doesn’t matter to us. Everything is happening in the cloud and we’re delivering the display bits down to whoever and wherever.”
Although LiquidSky is taking small steps, McNealy said longer-term after the company has established volume through gamers, it will have consumer-grade scale.
“What LiquidSky is doing has longer-term far-reaching tentacles into everyday life beyond gaming,” McNealy said. “My interest is more on the architectural and tech component side, and the future enterprise and commercial aspects of what this can do.”
