We’re proud to announce our new partnership with Xsolla, a leading platform for direct-to-consumer game distribution and monetization. Together, we have integrated ROCKITPLAY FastStart technology into the Xsolla Publisher Suite to eliminate friction to play. With FastStart, Xsolla honors gamers’ time by cutting download wait times and patching timeouts from hours to seconds. The smart download manager keeps shuffling data in the background while playing. No more scheduling downloads, preloading games for release day or giant day one patches. For the first time jumping into games becomes as convenient as streaming media, but with the full performance of local play.

“We believe in equipping studios with the tools they need to succeed. FastStart offers a truly frictionless experience for gamers,” said Chris Hewish, Chief Strategy Officer at Xsolla. “By bringing instant, streaming-like access to games, we’re giving developers and publishers the best possible chance to attract and retain players.”

This collaboration removes the biggest hurdles players face on the road to becoming players and paying customers – long downloads and massive patch updates – by replacing them with a streaming-like experience that starts gameplay in seconds. With ROCKITPLAY FastStart, games can start with as little as 1% downloaded, bringing unprecedented convenience to gamers.

Competition for visibility often leaves game publishers with limited opportunities to tell their story or engage potential players effectively. By going direct to consumers, publishers can own customer relationships, reinforce social and online connections, and market future content to their audience. Beyond improving the player experience, the integration of ROCKITPLAY FastStart offers significant business advantages:

Feel free to reach out to learn how Xsolla + FastStart transforms game delivery and user engagement. Read the announcement from Xsolla online.

Xsolla Announcement: https://xsolla.com/blog/xsolla-and-dacslabs-join-forces-to-speed-up-game-delivery-with-launcher-and-rockitplay-faststart

We’ve all been there. You’re eager to dive into a new game, but first you wrestle with limited hard drive space, deciding which favorites to uninstall. Then comes the long wait for downloads and updates, watching progress bars creep forward while your excitement wanes. If you’re exploring new titles or using subscription services, massive game sizes turn what should be an adventure into a test of patience. ROCKITPLAY FastStart transforms game distribution by addressing these pain points – easing storage woes, eliminating long waits, and providing click-to-play access to trials and subscriptions.

Managing Hard Drive Space

With new AAA titles easily occupying 100GB or more, gamers need to constantly assess their game library and decide which games to uninstall before adding a new title. With FastStart, this pain is gone.  When the urge to revisit strikes, FastStart enables players to jump right back into the action almost instantly, without waiting for a massive re-download, because gameplay starts in seconds or minutes after the download starts.

Long Downloads and Patches

Nothing kills excitement faster than staring at a download bar creeping slowly toward completion. Gamers are eager to dive into new worlds, not wait hours for downloads and patches to finish. With FastStart technology, gameplay starts  with as little as 1% of the total game data downloaded. Additionally, FastPatch reduces the size of game updates, so you spend less time waiting and more time playing.

DACSLABS has developed ROCKITPLAY, a groundbreaking technology that transforms digital game distribution by offering a streaming-like, click-to-play experience for any PC game. This patented, Microsoft-certified solution eliminates long download times and enhances user engagement without requiring any game source code changes or developer support.

10 out of 10 people hate waiting! Users encounter friction to play every time they find a new game online, often waiting hours from the moment of discovery to the first seconds of gameplay. Waiting for long downloads and patches – the biggest contributors to wait time – kills the momentum of any successful engagement campaign. EVERY SECOND COUNTS!

Masahiro Sakurai, creator of the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. recently reminisced about coin op games, observing how friction to play has increased since the days of arcades.

“Rather than just tossing in a coin and getting into the game immediately, you must click an icon, wait for the logo, wait for the title, look at the instructions screen, wait until everything loads, and then you’re finally at the main screen, after which you can start playing,”

But, what if, just like in Ready Player One – we really could “go back – all the way back,” to a time when playing was immediate, easy, and pain free? That is why we created ROCKIT instantPLAY, to instantly inject users into gameplay, with technology that works from anywhere on the web, and with any game. Check out how it works in our new trailer:

Publishers may only get one chance to convert interest into players. Game advertising is harder than ever and efficiency has plummeted. Game publishers can now win the attention of gamers at the first opportunity, wherever they are most active, be it on social media, watching influencer streams, or reading emails. This targeted approach not only enhances discoverability but also ensures that marketing efforts are more effective and efficient.

ROCKIT instantPLAY addresses the critical challenges of discoverability and user acquisition. Game publishers and Indie developers now have a powerful tool to enhance their marketing strategies, lower average user acquisition costs, and build a direct to consumer relationship.

There is no second chance for a first impression. Especially for F2P and Try-Before-You-Buy business models, converting interest into players, and players into payers, is critical. Every click, every hoop a user may need to jump through and every minute that separates interest from gameplay counts. Conversion rates for F2P commonly shared range anywhere between 1% to 10%. We estimate that up to 40% of gamers are dropping out just during the download. From surveying 2,000 gamers, we learned that download times are an important factor when deciding to try news games. Here is what they say:

ROCKIT instantPLAY is designed to slash average user acquisition costs simply by delivering immediate gameplay, eliminating download dropouts. So you get more bang for the buck. And higher conversion rates translate into more revenues. In addition ROCKIT instantPLAY maximizes the value of direct-to-consumer marketing by eliminating friction to play – no game store in the middle, no data-wall between you and your players.

Competition for visibility often leaves game publishers with limited opportunities to tell their story or engage potential players effectively. What once was a market with a few thousand titles now boasts tens of thousands, all vying for the attention of gamers. Over time, the top titles have increasingly absorbed game store revenue. Each year, new game releases face stiff competition from the top 10 titles. In less than a decade the top 10 titles increased their share of total revenue from 37% to 61%.

Annual Game Releases on Steam Over Game Sales for Top 10 New Release

Data Source: Video Game Insights, 2024

Today, with over 99% of new games competing for less than 40% of new release revenue, getting users acquired and into the game is harder than ever – and the technology enabling discovery has failed to keep pace. At the same time the total number of game releases per year has tripled from 4k in 2016 to over 12k in 2023.

Zooming into 2023, out of $9B in total Steam revenue, $6B went to existing titles released in prior years, $1.85B went to the top 10 NEW releases in 2023, which left less than $1.2B to all other NEW releases that year. So effectively 99% of new releases – which was over 12,000 new games in 2023 on Steam – fought over just 13% of total Steam revenue.

Data Sources: Video Game Insights, 2024, Statista

Here is the good news: You can beat the odds with ROCKIT instantPLAY, a powerful marketing tool that provides a click-to-play experience to any game, eliminating friction-to-play like download dropouts while increasing user engagement, conversion and revenues. Users jump straight into gameplay and play while downloading.

Since ROCKIT instantPLAY relies on a simple online link, it can be embedded in any ad or social post, rocketing the users straight into the game from anywhere online. Gameplay starts with as little as 1% downloaded and while playing the rest of the download continues in the background. The patented aftermarket solution works with any PC game and does not require game code changes or developer support.

In a universe of content, you want players to discover your game!

Unfortunately, discoverability has become insanely difficult, especially for games from smaller publishers and Indie developers. The number of new games has exploded – Steam now boasts a dizzying 75,000 games, up from just 3,000 a decade ago – making it harder than ever to win visibility and capture users.

While game stores have introduced search tools like filters, tags, curated collections, the system seems to favor the top few titles. This means that smaller publishers cannot rely on organic game store traffic – they need to promote their game and create demand on their own.

After all, no one is in a better position to tell your game’s story than yourself. And for once social media is the perfect outlet to connect to your community directly. But how can publishers turn those interactions into new, paying players?

Today, DACS LABS GmbH is introducing ROCKIT instantPLAY, a powerful marketing tool that provides a click-to-play experience for any game, eliminating friction-to-play and increasing user engagement, conversion and revenues. Users jump straight into gameplay from links placed in ads, social feeds, or shares, and play while downloading. This also effectively eliminates dropouts due to long downloads. But the real winners are the gamers, who can play in seconds and decide for themselves if a game is as it sounds!

ROCKIT instantPLAY uses FastStart technology to offer immediate play for PC games, game trials or demos with a streamlined installer designed to minimize friction. In the past, an ad might point to more information, or a video, and link to a game store. Now, an ad or post is a magic portal straight into gameplay. With ROCKIT instantPLAY, it has never been easier to build your direct-to-consumer relationship, powered by almost frictionless conversion from marketing to gameplay.

Robot Cache, a videogame marketplace disrupting game distribution, has started releasing game titles using ROCKITPLAY FastStart. Now gamers can start playing in seconds or minutes after purchase and play while downloading.

The wait is over. Gamers don’t have to experience the frustration of waiting hours for game downloads any more. Instead, they can head over to Robot Cache where games powered by ROCKITPLAY FastStart eliminate up to 99% of waiting time. Games start almost instantly after clicking to download. And while gamers enjoy playing, the rest of the download is silently being taken care of in the background. To maximize performance, Akamai’s low-latency content delivery network is used, ensuring the technology achieves the fastest possible start time.

Robot Cache, the game store that lets players trade games and earn iron to get free stuff, is the first major game store to deploy ROCKITPLAY FastStart. This innovative approach to game delivery works on any game with no code changes or developer support. And the technology doesn’t just shave off a few minutes of start time – it can reduce wait time by up to 99%.

But don’t just take our word for it – try it out yourself with the game Darksiders Genesis at Robot Cache online.

Over the years of developing a breakthrough technology that can start any game in minutes or seconds compared to hours, we have seen faces turn from disbelief to excitement. We asked gamers whether they prefer waiting for many hours for a download to complete or to start playing almost instantly, and play while downloading. We also listened carefully to game stores, publishers and CDN providers. The result: a solution that runs fully automated in any existing environment, and flips an entire game store the size of Steam to FastStart in a day without requiring game code changes or developer support. ROCKITPLAY FastStart also delivers on society’s expectation that companies utilize technology to improve energy efficiency and fight climate change, expecting all of us to responsibly reduce energy consumption wherever possible.

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Game stores and game publishers stand to benefit from lower content delivery or CDN costs, making this a win-win solution. The gaming industry is poised to take a big leap forward in sustainability. Let’s seize this opportunity to lead the change in carbon-efficient entertainment.

With ROCKITPLAY FastStart, gamers never need to endure long waiting times for downloads – they just click to play and start playing in minutes or even seconds. ROCKITPLAY reduces data transportation and costs by up to 80% by

Thanks to its patented technology ROCKITPLAY always delivers the smallest initial data package to start gameplay. Once in the game, any data not yet downloaded that is needed for game execution is fetched in milliseconds unnoticeable to users to ensure an uninterrupted, seamless gameplay. 

Around 40 billion tons of CO2 are emitted around the world annually. It is estimated that the carbon footprint of all internet usage accounts for about 3.7% or 1.5bn tons of CO2 each year. And these emissions are predicted to double by 2025. The Internet’s emissions of 3.7% are now even surpassing the whole aviation sector, which is estimated at 2.8% of global carbon emissions. If the internet was a country, it would come in 6th place, in between Japan (1.1bn tons) and Russia (1.9bn tons).

It’s no secret that gamers hate waiting. Previously we discussed what strategies gamers, publishers and game stores use to enjoy a game at Launch Day. Most strategies involve avoidable preload routines and huge Day One patches. With ROCKITPLAY FastStart preloading games prior to release becomes redundant, saving data bandwidth and costs. But perhaps most importantly, by slashing redundant bandwidth, FastStart also significantly reduces the environmental impact of game delivery. 

That may seem impossible, but we don’t think it is. ROCKITPLAY FastStart is game delivery technology that allows games to start almost instantly, reducing the need for large pre-loads on launch day. This also makes Day One patches redundant, saving significant bandwidth. Further, the technology reduces patch sizes by approximately 50% compared to standard, saving 50% of data traffic and costs. Additionally, ROCKITPLAY allows for the delivery of game builds in stages, or progressively. This effectively reduces about 75% to 90% of data delivery for try-before-you-buy or F2P games. Instead of delivering the full download at once, install just enough content for game tryouts. Continue playing? No need to restart or exit the game to proceed. 

In an independent study, goetzpartners found that in 2022 on average 70% of game content is being played, while 30% is not even touched. This ratio is expected to change to 65% played and 35% unused by 2025. This opens additional potential to save costs and energy, by reducing unnecessary data transportation. 

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The gaming industry stands at a crossroads. We can either continue down the path of ever increasing power consumption and larger carbon footprints as games explode in size, or we can take a new path, innovating ways to make gaming more sustainable or at least eliminate redundant data delivery. ROCKITPLAY is the only universal aftermarket technology that can be used with any game and that doesn’t require any game code changes or developer support. It works at scale and can flip an entire library the size of Steam. 

There’s an epic battle being waged every day. It’s not a fight against alien invaders. It’s a face-off between gamers who want to enjoy playing directly after purchase and the brutal reality of long download wait times. As games become incredibly large, gamers have devised cunning strategies to fight boredom while waiting. Here are our Top 5 strategies to fight waiting for massive downloads:

1. Time Travel: By purchasing and pre-loading games in advance, gamers bypass the linearity of time, no Delorean required. This sometimes backfires – large day one patches can yank our time travelers into a time loop creating hours of waiting time. 

2. Appetizers:  While waiting for their main course to its complete download, gamers snack on smaller games, a testament to the power of distraction. Yes, some gamers choose to download and install a smaller game first to fight the boredom of waiting for the big rig to land. 

3. The Mad Scientist: Some gamers, unsatisfied with the speed of their connection, have resorted to multiple wired and wireless connections. Using multiple broadband connections, gamers try to warp speed their download. 

4. The Return of the Cartridge: You thought game cartridges were only for consoles? With the sheer size of modern games, gamers are now hoarding SD cards so that even if they run low on hard drive space, they don’t need to delete and re-download a complete game to play. 

5. Pass out: Yes it’s true. Some gamers report to simply fall asleep while waiting, hypnotized by the slow moving progress bar for download completion. And if they pass out long enough the game may already have downloaded more than 50%.

With ROCKITPLAY FastStart, gamers never need to endure long waiting times for downloads – they just click to play and start playing in minutes or even seconds. FastStart powers near-instant play after downloading only a small portion of the game. Players enjoy playing while the download continues in the background. 

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Source: goetzpartners

In an independent study, goetzpartners found a significant preference for FastStart among gamers, with 91% expressing their satisfaction and their desire to see this technology implemented more broadly, 83% of gamers indicating that FastStart would positively influence their download decisions, and 84% expressing willingness to switch game stores for the same game offered with a FastStart feature.