Your Simplay PC now fully supports Parsec!
Gaming on Simplay PCs has so far required using Photon, Simplay’s proprietary streamer. Photon has been our main area of focus in recent months, and we’re glad to say we were able to make amazing progress with it. But Photon is not the only great streamer out there. Cloud gaming enthusiasts are well familiar with another great example — New York based Parsec.
Parsec is an amazing real-time gaming streamer. It easily handles high resolution streams at over 60 FPS, and is accessible from many client-side platforms, including Macs and Android devices.
In recent weeks we’ve been getting feedback from users requesting we’d officially support using Parsec on Simplay PCs. And we’re glad to announce that we’ve done just that! We tweaked our inactivity bots to treat actions coming from external streamers as valid activities. That means you could now use Parsec on your Simplay PC without getting disconnected for inactivity.
We recently released this teaser pic about it on our Discord server, referencing Parsec’s Blog cover (and twitter cover) of course.
Not an easy decision
Fully supporting Parsec (and other external streamers) was not an easy decision to make. It sort-of goes against business intuition, that having gamers use our own tech is a super important asset. It could also be interpreted as a signal that we’re not 100% confident in our own streaming tech. If we go forward with doing this, would that imply we’re not the best streamer out there?
Well, we aren’t. Not yet anyway. Yes, a lot of love and care has gone into Photon (and we intend to keep investing in it to make it amazing), but it’s not world-class just yet. And if Photon really isn’t the best streamer out there, are we truly delivering the best value we can to our users?
We had to ask ourselves — what if a $20/mo Simplay PC is an “OK” offering with Photon, but a kickass “holy crap where do I sign up??” deal with Parsec?
Our gamers come first
We set out building Simplay with one clear goal in mind — to make the gaming on ultra graphics accessible to more people. We thought it sucks that you have to spend hundreds of dollars on hardware before you could enjoy a AAA game properly, and that any gamer deserves to experience gaming to the fullest — in ultra graphics.
Our offering in the market is truly unique — no one else is offering unlimited plans that are as affordable as ours. The way we see it, it makes a lot of sense to package good value-for-money performance in our plans, because it fits perfectly with our quest of making top graphics gaming accessible and affordable.
That vision resonated with a lot of people who felt a $20/mo cloud gaming PC is a great deal and signed up. We can now trully make a difference in how our users enjoy the games they love. But to make that vision a reality, we must deliver the absolutely best cloud gaming experience out there. To put it differently, we feel we owe our users a true “can’t tell the difference” quality of streaming, where streaming is indistinguishable from running games locally. This is where Parsec comes in.
Parsec is the world’s best real-time streamer, specifically designed to stream 60+ FPS games. Coupled with Simplay’s high-end game servers and affordable plans, it offers an incredible way to play on any device.
Setting up Parsec on your Simplay PC
Installing and using Parsec is intuitive and easy. Simply follow this quick guide to set up Parsec on your Simplay PC.
For now, you’ll have to use the Simplay client to turn your Simplay PC on. But we’ll soon support turning on your Simplay PC from our web-app, so you could use Parsec as your only streamer.
More to come
Supporting Parsec made a lot of sense for us. It lets us offer our gamers the absolutely best offering available today, in both quality of stream and value-for-money. We see value in developing our partnership with Parsec even further. We’ll have more to announce soon, so stay tuned!
Not a Simplay user yet? Be sure to check out our affordable gaming plans and start playing today!
