Big Fish Launches Cloud Gaming Service

At the largest Casual Connect Seattle 2012 conference that opened on July 24 in Seattle, Big Fish Games announced the launch of the Big Fish Unlimited cloud gaming service.

This happened as part of a speech by its executive director, Paul Allen. Before presenting the company’s new project to the audience, he drew attention to the general situation in the gaming industry, noting that currently there is a wide variety of operating systems, devices, business models, game mechanics. Therefore, truly limitless possibilities open up to developers.

Remaining the leader in the field of downloadable casual games for PC/Mac, Big Fish Games has made serious steps in the mobile direction, especially in terms of games for iPad. According to Paul Thelen, in the total revenue structure of the company, the mobile games business in 2011 amounted to about 30%, and in monetary terms – $ 180 million.

And now a new milestone is the Big Fish Unlimited cloud service. As Paul Thelen and general manager of the project Will O’Brien noted at the Casual Connect Seattle 2012 conference, its most important features are unlimited access to games from the service catalog, their almost instant launch, which does not require installation, and, finally, cross-platform and storage of “saves” in the clouds. Although currently only the Windows PC version works, in the near future it will support other platforms, in particular mobile devices and Smart TV. The functioning of Big Fish Unlimited is somewhat similar to the work of streaming services such as OnLive and Gaikai. Games are run on servers, and the video stream is sent to devices via browsers that support HTML5.

And finally, about the pricing policy. The cost of a monthly premium subscription to services with access to all available games (currently there are about 100, but they promise that their number will soon increase to 1000) is $ 7.99. For those who want to try the service in action before subscribing, there is a trial mode with access to 20 games. Unfortunately, at the moment Big Fish Unlimited is only available to American users.