Artie continues to develop a platform for instant games with support for not only JavaScript and HTML5, but also Unity. The startup has raised $10 million from investors, including the founders of Zynga and Shutterstock. The developers also plan to release the SDK.Investors include Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Shutterstock founder Jon Oringer, YouTube co—founder Chad Hurley, and Thirty Five Ventures, co-founded by basketball player Kevin Durant.
Artie allows you to launch instant games directly from the browser, messengers and social networks without installing applications. The creators of the project hope that this will allow developers to distribute their titles bypassing the stores and not pay a high commission to the same Apple.
CEO of the company Ryan Horrigan (Ryan Horrigan) notes that the main difference between Artie and other services for instant games is Unity support. This allows you to create not only hyper-casual, but also more complex projects.
Artie uses cloud technologies, while trying to solve the main problems of such services — high costs for server infrastructure and possible delays.
“Like cloud games, we run Unity games on our cloud and stream videos to players. However, we don’t render all the graphics completely — we stream individual assets and animations, which are rendered in real time in the browser,“ Horrigan explains.
Artie started her journey by creating avatars for augmented reality. At some point, the developers decided to rebuild and focus on creating instant games, at the same time coming up with technology for the distribution of such projects.
Artie is currently developing several of its own titles, among which there is a project on “Alice in Wonderland” and the famous superhero IP. The company also plans to release its own instant MMO by 2022.
All Artie instant titles will be free-duplicated, and monetization will be carried out using in-game purchases. In the future, the company will also release an SDK with which third-party developers will also be able to distribute their games on the Artie platform.