Google I/O 2012 has come and gone, but one thing that has gotten far less press attention than it should have is the SeeMeGaming technology developed by the borderline reclusive company LunarG. The reason there has been a lack of press is not only because the technology’s advantages aren’t understood, but even more so because so many people lack the knowledge to understand its profitability potential.
So what exactly is this mysterious technology, and what went down at I/O 2012? Read on amigos, this is going to be big…
The Video
This is an hour long video, and if you really want to understand all of this you can watch it all. However, for most normal people I’ve summed up the takeaways below the jump.
- The money potential: Minutes 3:30-5:30
Understand that a view on YouTube is worth something if the video is monetized. By monetized—this is important—I mean the video has ads displaying. Most video games contain copyrighted material, and are eligible for automatic digital fingerprint detection—and in turn easy monetization by game publishers. In other words, YouTube splits ad revenue with the owner of the copyrighted material (not the person who made the video). Imagine an advertising market that consists of 1 billion views per day by 15-25 year old men. These guys impulse buy and spend recklessly; their CPM (cost per thousand ad impressions) is unreal. If you aren’t barfing dollar signs, then go ask your nephew the last thing he spent money on. You won’t understand his choice, but the stock market will. - The “ho-hum” technology demo: Minutes 49:00-55:00
Enter LunarG. This is a cool group of smart guys hanging out in Fort Collins, CO, doing what they love for a living. Here in the video, one of their founders, Jens Owen, starts to talk about their extremely smart screen capture system for mobile. Jens starts by saying “We’re 3D driver guys.” Yep, you are all technically brilliant but do you realize what you have done? Listen to him explain their way of capturing the rendered output of a mobile device. They literally capture the code being sent to Unity, and render it in the cloud. Think back to how much money there is in this gig. Now, ask yourself why they are so “eh” about this technology. In my mind, they should be patent whoring and marketing/developing with aggression for every mobile platform. Instead, it’s like they have the attitude of “Hey, look at this cool thing we did. Well, back to driver development and snow sports.”
Why this is technically incredible
First, take a step back, because in all likelihood you don’t know how screen capture for video games works—and if you are reading this, you for the most part play games on your PC. Let’s explain.
Take your standard PC game capturing program. Nowadays this is something like FRAPS, Camtasia, or Dxtory, or a hardware device like the Hauppage. Now assume you are playing a full screen, modern, DirectX-based game. These games, unless you tell them to do otherwise, run in exclusive fullscreen mode and use your GPU’s memory buffer to store frames. While you are playing your game, the frames you are about to see 1ms in the future have already been rendered by your video card and they are sitting in the card’s memory.
Now think back to the capture programs like FRAPS. These work by hooking themselves in to your game and tricking the game in to thinking that they have access to the video card’s RAM, which is normally exclusively made available to the game itself. After that, they copy the frames out of your video card’s memory buffer and in to memory where they are encoded using a lossless codec to reduce the final video’s file size. Finally, these encoded frames are written to a video container such as AVI or MPG. This is all done while you play the game.
Sound complicated? It is. Does it sound memory, IO, and processor intensive? It is. Recording a 1080p video game at 30fps requires extremely fast hard drives and processors, for a start. The more resources games require, the more resources the capture program requires. Now imagine doing this on a mobile platform, where hardware resources are limited by nature.
So where’s the money?
Now for the real good stuff: First take a bigger step back, because if you are reading this then you may not know how modern digital monetization works. Don’t worry, neither does LunarG, otherwise they would be whoring their new tech like crazy (maybe).
When people upload videos to YouTube, the visual and audio content of those videos is analyzed to see if it contains copyrighted material. If the owner of that copyright is partnered with YouTube, they will be notified immediately of the video’s existence. They are given a choice to automatically monetize the video, or have it removed. Some companies, like Warner Music Group, remove this content. Other, smart companies, monetize this content and develop steady cash flows for years to come.
Imagine you are a game developer, and you could monetize every video that someone makes of your game because it contains visuals that you own the copyright to. Wouldn’t you want to enable screen capture in your game so that people would upload videos and share their gameplay? Of course you would. However, grabbing frames from a GPU buffer on a mobile device is a hell of a task, requires client side processing, and ultimately is not reliable. What if you could just sacrifice a small portion of your cash flow to “outsource” this processing to the cloud? Well you can … with SeeMeGaming by LunarG. It makes perfect sense, and any mobile game developer that attended or watched the Google I/O video about this should be anxious to do so.
LunarG’s goldmine
Look at LunarG’s website for SeeMeGaming. This is, at best, marketed as an odd off-shoot or a fun project put together by a bunch of guys who primarily are interested in doing other stuff. In other words, they market it like an afterthought, when in fact this should be an entire new corporation and brand marketed as if it is the savior or enabler of brand new revenue streams. Nope, just a single page with a little video demo. They’re sitting on a goldmine, and they haven’t even ordered a set of pick axes.
LunarG has the potential to be the go-to company for mobile game screen capture. That’s a big deal when a billion views per day are involved. Certainly they would have expenses with a content delivery network to handle the cloud processing, but these could easily be leveraged if they patent their technology and force companies to use their processing for the next twenty years. Bandwidth and processing expense are going down, while bandwidth and processing available to mobile devices are scarce. This comes down to economics, and LunarG has solved the supply and demand curve to optimize profits in the unfathomably large and growing mobile game and media market. They could profit off of every developer and become the standard technology that enables advertising revenue among the mobile publishers.
Yet here we sit, and none of you have heard of them until now.
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