During E3 2017, Rainway Inc. said that its upcoming game streaming service will be made available on the Nintendo Switch, joining Android, iOS, the Xbox consoles, and the PlayStation consoles. The company will provide native apps for these platforms, but the service will be playable in web browsers too on and off those listed platforms.
Slated to go live as a beta on November 25, Rainway will stream games installed on your PC to the devices listed above for free. According to the company, it developed “software techniques” enabling these installed games to stream across the internet at a super-high-quality resolution with “practically” no lag.
“Rainway started as a pivot from our previous venture, Ulterius. We made some really big innovations in bringing real-time desktop streaming to web browsers, and we wanted to shift our focus to our biggest passion: Video games,” Rainway’s Andrew Sampson told Digital Trends. “Using our MSG protocol we’re able to stream video games in real-time to wide array of different devices with minimal latency.”
Despite saying that customers won’t need to purchase additional hardware to run Rainway, users will still need a decent PC to run the games they want to play. PC games have minimum and recommended system requirements, thus Rainway won’t magically make Doom run at an incredible resolution and framerate if the PC can’t handle it on a hardware level.
Currently, there’s no real way to stream installed PC games to mobile devices and consoles. Steam’s In-Home Streaming portion will stream installed games from one PC to another on the same network. Nvidia’s GameStream will stream games from a GeForce-based PC to one of the company’s Shield devices. The open-source Moonlight client expands on that by streaming installed GeForce-powered PC games to Android, Apple’s iOS, Gear VR, the PS Vita, Raspberry Pi, and PCs without a GeForce chip (Windows/Mac/Linux).
That said, the Rainway streaming service won’t be locked down to a specific graphics chip. Instead, it will be compatible will all graphics cards/discrete chips that support DirectX 11. It will also handle the network aspect and secure the connection so that hackers aren’t eavesdropping and invading your PC during gameplay.
Once installed, Rainway will automatically scan your PC for games from Steam, Origin, Uplay, and BattleNET. Users can also make other PC games compatible by piping them through Steam using the “Add a non-Steam game to my library” option under “Games” in the desktop client.
We’re working on a new cross platform features too. You will be too highlight a section of your gameplay and share a clip online instantly.
— Rainway (@RainwayApp) June 13, 2017
The Rainway beta will begin with web browsers and Android following Apple’s iOS platform and the Xbox One. Unfortunately, the company hasn’t indicated when the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch will be included.
“During our beta we will be optimizing Rainway and ensuring it runs at its best across all PC’s and platforms,” Sampson added.
PC gamers wanting to test the upcoming beta can create a free Rainway account here.
