As part of my gamescom 2022 coverage, I got the opportunity to meet and interview two of the people most responsible for Antstream Arcade: CEO Steve Cottam and Studio Head Mike Rouse.
For those not yet in the know, Antstream Arcade is a retro games streaming platform currently available on PC, Mac, Epic Games Store, Android, Nvidia Shield, Amazon Fire and Atari VCS. At the time of writing, there are 1500+ retro games available on the platform, including the likes of Mortal Kombat, Pac-Man and Earthworm Jim 2.
Beyond making the games available, the people at Antstream Arcade are also back-engineering the games to issue out various new challenges that were not part of the original games. One such challenge is called ‘Giant Slayer,’ and involves choosing a game of your liking and setting a high score that is unattainable for the majority of the community. There are also weekly global tournaments to participate in and achievements to chase after.
Unlike some other streaming services, however, Antstream Arcade supports streaming only – meaning that there is no option to download games locally. This means you’ll have to rely on a good internet connection to have a consistent, lag-free experience. I asked Steve Cottam and Mike Rouse about this decision, and more, in the interview below:
Eduard Gafton: Thank you both for sitting down with me for this interview! So, to kick things off, when did you form Antstream and what was its main driving force?
Steve Cottam: The company was formed in 2013 – but we really started to get traction in 2016 [as] we had some support from Microsoft through their ‘Bench’ program. And then, in 2019, we had some investment from Tencent and then were able to launch the product.
As I said, the motivation behind it was the decades of incredible games – some of the best games ever created, in my opinion – that were no longer available. Well, certainly not legally or accessible. People could download emulators and ROMs, but I always felt that experience was quite uncomfortable and tricky. So, my goal really is to get those games and make them accessible for everyone. Whether you are a 5-year-old kid or a 50-year-old man, you can pick them up and play them instantly without worrying about it.
Eduard Gafton: Is there ever a risk of games leaving your Antstream and getting de-listed? How important are services like yours for retro games preservation?
Mike Rouse: We do our best to maintain every single game on the platform. Now, of course, we don’t own the games, so we don’t have full control over those, but we have very long licenses and great relationships. We do a lot of work with the licensors: we spend years tracking down who owns the games. Sometimes, you’ll find that it’s not the original game’s developer that owns it – some bank in Japan acquired it. So, we do a huge amount of work to ensure that we track down licensors [and] build great relationships to build out this catalogue of games.
And game preservation is very important to us. We’re seeing games getting lost to time, and a platform like ours is a great chance for people to experience games they’ve never played before, but also for us to find and discover games that were perhaps cancelled or were not released and bring on new games. We have independent developers who are making games this year, who are releasing games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, for the Mega Drive (aka the Genesis in North America), for the Amiga, and they are bringing them out and releasing them on Antstream as well. Antstream Arcade covers the gamut of gaming from classics that were lost, to ‘AAA’ games of the 16-bit era to brand new indie games for classic consoles.
Eduard Gafton: Are there any games that are exclusively available on Antstream Arcade? Any that you’ve dug deep into the archives and found?
Steve Cottam: Yes, there’s dozens. What’s really interesting is when we approach a licensor because we want to license a game, and they don’t know that they’ve got it. And because of the research we’ve done and the data we’ve built up, we can actually show them the games they’ve got. So, yeah, there are some – I’m struggling to name one now – but there are literally dozens on there that are exclusive to Antstream.
Mike Rouse: I think that one of the really interesting things is that we not only take these games, but we back-engineer them to create this challenge system, which is a really competitive system [which] allows you to experience the game in new ways. And, as we’re back-engineering this, some of our engineers find levels inside the game that were never released. Or things about the game that were never released, and they discover these aspects of the game.
But, we do a lot more than just bring the games and put them on the platform: we also give people new ways to experience [these games] through these challenge systems. And then, we build game modes around it. For example, we’ve got a new game mode called ‘Giant Slayer,’ which is community-based: you can set a challenge, and then you can throw it out to the community, and they’ve all got to try and beat you and take you down.
Eduard Gafton: And this is created by players for other players?
Steve Cottam: Yes.
Eduard Gafton: So, how do the rest of these challenges work? Do you make some? Does the community make some? Is it a mix?
Steve Cottam: We essentially create the core mechanics of a challenge, but then it’s up to the community to go on to [do] that challenge, the best possible score and then basically challenge the community. So you can go in…what’s your favourite retro game?
Eduard Gafton: I like the first Castlevania.
Steve Cottam: Oh, okay. We don’t have Castlevania. But we’ll pick…take something like Smash TV. So, you can go on, and set your score. You can retry until you’ve got the best score that you think you’re ever gonna get, then you submit that to the community and ask the community to try and take it down. And, what we need is a certain percentage of the community to beat your score for the community to win – there’s a threshold point there – and if, obviously, not enough people beat your score, then you’re the king.
Eduard Gafton: To touch on the future, what does the future of Antstream look like? Are you planning on expanding to a USB stick? And/or being available on Smart TVs?
Steve Cottam: The way that we see ourselves is like Spotify/Netflix. I connect to Spotify on every single device that I own, and that’s how we want Antstream to be. So it will be as accessible and as ubiquitous as Spotify/Netflix.
Eduard Gafton: What do you predict for the future of cloud streaming in general? And what is Antstream’s role in this future?
Steve Cottam: I’ll give you a bit of background: some people often ask me ‘why are you doing cloud streaming for these tiny games I could download in a nanosecond?’ And the reason is that the games are becoming more modern and they get bigger and bigger, and I want a consistent experience. So it doesn’t matter whether I’m playing a PlayStation, PC, or Commodore game – it’s a unified experience across all my devices.
I think, also, when you look at how other mediums have gone – books, music, movies – they’ve all gone on-demand. It’s clearly going to happen to gaming. Suppose you look at the work that Microsoft and Sony are doing in that space. In that case, it seems inevitable that there is going to be a point in time, in the not-too-distant future, where it makes much more sense for them to stream their games directly through the cloud rather than producing, you know, multiple generations of hardware.
Eduard Gafton: Would you ever consider making the games available on Antstream Arcade downloadable as well?
Steve Cottam: I wonder if there’s a need to. Because networks are improving at such a pace now…, particularly with the onset of 5G…what’s the benefit? You know, one of the problems with downloading content, and I have this with my own devices on Netflix…I did download a movie to watch on the plane, which obviously makes some sense, but it’s not downloaded on my other devices. And then, starting to manage lots of content across multiple devices becomes quite tricky. We’re more interested in seeing how the networks evolve and just keeping it as simple as this so we can access anything immediately.
Eduard Gafton: Antstream currently doesn’t feature synchronous multiplayer. Is this something that you are looking to add to the service? What other features can we expect as the platform continues to grow?
Steve Cottam: We’ve got a lot of features coming in the next twelve months, which we can’t reveal yet because some of them are really exciting, and we want to make the announcement at the right time. There are some obvious ones, as you’ve said, like online multiplayer, which of course, are in the pipeline…but, for now, we’ve stuck with asynchronous multiplayer just because it was much more accessible. Because, again, as the platform grows and we get many millions of players onto the platform, having responsive lobby systems makes sense.
When we started out early on, one of the biggest problems was that you’d go to a lobby, and there was no one to play with. So, we will add that [synchronous multiplayer], but asynchronous multiplayer [is] where you can go and play any time…there’s always a challenge, there’s always someone that you can compete with. We do tournaments where we have thousands of players competing in these games at any one time, and that was the first point to tackle.
Eduard Gafton: Will you be looking to back-engineer these games to make them playable online? Especially if online play wasn’t possible originally?
Mike Rouse: Potentially – it depends on the challenge of doing that. What we already do now is give some online functionality. The fact that, with challenges, we can do asynchronous, so you versus me, is a step in the right direction. Doing multiplayer on games that were never multiplayer before poses challenges: not just technically but from a gameplay point of view [too]. It could end up giving a more negative experience…but we’re always open to improving and adding to the platform. I think that, over the next twelve months, the community will be blown away by what we’re doing with Antstream. There’s going to be quite a ‘sea change’ for the platform and with what people can expect, both in terms of features, accessibility, games, interaction…all of that is going to a new level.
Steve Cottam: One thing we can do, though, where you have a multiplayer couch game, like GoldenEye 007 with four players, for example, that obviously we can make remote. So, you won’t need to be in the same room to play a four-player multiplayer game, but we’re not changing the game’s underlying mechanics.
Eduard Gafton: What is one feature or aspect of Anstream Arcade that you’d like to see become a standard across every games streaming platform?
Mike Rouse: I’d love to see the accessibility that we give gamers. You come to Antstream… there are 1500 games for you to enjoy. Pick and choose what you want, and play as much as you like. And that accessibility, I think, is something gamers really enjoy.
There’s big changes happening in the games industry: we’re in the twilight years of consoles – we’re coming to the end of [the] console. And a lot of things are changing – business models are changing. What we’re trying is something very new with games, even though it has obviously been done with music and film, and, I think, it’s a great way to give players accessibility to games they wouldn’t normally have. And, at an absolutely fantastic price: 39.99 GBP (estimated 59.99 CAD) for the entire year is less than a AA-game on a console, and this is 1500 games to play wherever you want, whenever you want. And, you know, every single week, we add about three new games. Every single week, there’s a brand-new tournament. Every single week, there are new challenges. So, I think that’s the thing I’d like to see others try within the industry.
Steve Cottam: If you look at what a lot of the other cloud gaming companies are doing – they’re very same-y with their catalogues of content. Which is great, and they’re making some of these games accessible on different devices. But it would be nice to see them differentiate themselves a bit and have different features. And I think that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re not just a catalogue of content: our goal is to engage players and keep players coming in every day, playing with friends, making friends, and building networks.
Antstream Arcade is fully supported in Europe, USA, South East Asia and Australia and is free to play with ads or available for a premium monthly or yearly fee: 6.99 GBP/9.99 CAD or 39.99 GBP/59.99CAD, respectively. (Prices in CAD are estimated)
