Achievement Unlocked: 10,000 Hours Played
“Celebrate your successes” goes the well-known startup saying. The reasoning behind it is not lavish bragging, but rather that investing your life in building a hyper growth startup is extremely taxing. This quest is literally one of the hardest feats one could pursue, characterised by an alarmingly low chance for success. But it’s more than hardship — this quest brings with it a rather volatile lifestyle. The lives of startup founders are eventful roller coasters of ups and downs, epic Eureka moments and heart breaking WFIO crises. It takes a lot to endure, and it’s definitely not for the faint-hearted. The down-turns and blows you’d encounter would pull you down, showing up unsolicited when you expect them the least. To get by in one piece, and to retain most of your sanity — you must celebrate the up-takes. Don’t do it half-heartedly — appreciate hard-earned and note-worthy achievements and go all out.
Celebrate your successes indeed. Today, we’re glad to share a significant feat of strength for the team.
A Year in the Making
We started building Simplay alpha just over a year ago. We hacked together a quick MVP and released it to our early supporters. Luckily, they loved it. There was still a lot of work to be put into the product, but we were on to something!
The early feedback we got bolstered our resolve and invigorated us. It wasn’t the fact that people liked our initial product well enough to recommend it to their friends — it was how badly they felt they needed our solution. We were always “in it for the big picture”, trying to make a dent in the gaming universe — so this single insight inspired us to work harder (and mostly, faster).
5 months later we released Simplay beta, the backbone of the product you know and use today. Another famous startup saying posits that you should be somewhat embarrassed by your first product version — if you’re not, it means you shipped it too late. And trust us, our detail oriented ADHD perfectionism flooded us with embarrassment with that fist product version. Upon launch, Simplay only supported 30 FPS, delivered poor video quality, and was riddled with bugs and connection errors.
But time passed on. We channeled our feedback-powered conviction and resolve to the product. We asked our community what should we build next, and quickly acted on their insights. And lo and behold, a few months later we already matched the industry standard for both stream quality and features. We even achieved industry-leading performance in overhead latency and other metrics. Our current 60 FPS, 1080p real-time game streamer is on par with the best solutions available today, and hey, we’re just getting started!
10,000 Hours Played
In her now famous TED talk, the wonderful Dr. Jane McGonigal outlines the great meaning of spending 10,000 hours mastering a task or venture, specifically in the context of hours spent playing online games. She mentions Malcom Gladwell’s book “Outliers”, positing that spending 10,000 hours on effortful study of anything would result it exceptional excellence in that activity. Accumulating 10,000 hours played on the Simplay platform doesn’t make us feel virtuoso just yet, but it was a significant milestone to meet.
We’re super glad to announce we’ve just passed that challenging milestone! Our awesome gamers have played for over 10,000 hours so far on the Simplay platform.
We’re eager to funnel our renewed drive and conviction into designing new product features and creating new partnerships. There are many more goals to pursue, and much still left to do, but today we stop and celebrate. This achievement was hard earned, and definitely warrants a proper celebration!
On to 100,000!
Festive and merry onwards we go, off to continue doing what we love — building the best real-time game streamer the (gaming) world has ever seen.
Thank you all for sticking with us, and for being a part of this amazing ride.
If you haven’t experienced gaming on Simplay yet, be sure to try out free trial today at: www.simplay.io
