Highscore is the most exciting new cloud gaming service to launch in years.
Highscore cloud gaming is a brand new service that is set to launch in alpha in the very near future. We’ve covered it a few times on the site before, including a Q&A with the founder. For full transparency, Highscore is also a sponsor of our site, but we’d be just as excited about it if it wasn’t.
The service is similar in spirit to GeForce NOW and Boosteroid, where you bring games you already own on Steam to the service. Unlike those two services however, Highscore supports your entire steam library! Yes! Every… single… game! Even games that require kernel-level anti-cheat support are able to be played on Highscore. And, yes, even games that aren’t available on GeForce NOW are available on Highscore.
The service also boasts some novel features like a virtual couch mode and a near immediate suspend/resume capability that allows you to suspend a game and resume it hours later in an experience that is like closing and opening the lid of your laptop. Except, you can resume the game on any device you want!
Highscore Office Visit
I had a chance to visit Highscore offices in San Francisco. I want to thank Ian and Marianne for hosting. I had a chance to ask them lots of questions and to chat about cloud gaming technology and the industry!
And! I was able to go hands on with the service! Here’s of picture of me playing Cyberpunk 2077. I also got a chance to test out Tony Hawk and Doom Eternal.
The games universally looked and played great on the Mac I was using. A number of stream statistics were available that showed some of the best round-trip times, encode/decode times and lowest jitter we’ve seen. The service is set to support h.264, h.265 and AV1 encoding on release. I was playing with h.265 (HEVC) encoding at about 30 mbps. The visuals looked crisp – essentially flawless. AV1 encoding/decoding should look even better for the same bitrate (or allow for lower bitrates at the same fidelity).
It’s telling that, at one point, Ian pointed out that the latency from the Xbox controller to the computer over bluetooth was more than the latency that the entire Highscore infrastructure added.
Impressive Experience
The web-interface for the service looked fully fleshed out, clean, and optimized. I got to see how linking a Steam account worked as well as browsing a game library. The experience was notably more complete than in the screenshots from December. The team’s goal is to have a well-crafted/intuitive UX and UI for the devices you are actually playing on. You shouldn’t see the rough edges we see in other PC based cloud gaming services.
Like you typically do with Xcloud, Amazon Luna, GeForce NOW and Boosteroid, I was playing in a web-browser (Chrome). Highscore, though, has some secret-sauce to make the streaming experience in the browser even better than those existing services.
Put all this together, and the gameplay offered the best fidelity and responsiveness I’ve experienced in a cloud gaming service – equal to or even better than that of GeForce NOW (thought admittedly this was a fairly controlled environment). The hardware and software stack is entirely built from the ground up for their service, rather than relying on open-source streaming tools like Moonlight. And, it clearly shines.
Highscore has a capable and knowledgeable team in place. The service isn’t yet ready to spill all the details on the hardware architecture they are using. But, I was impressed by the amount of expertise Ian and Marianne (as well as the dev. team) demonstrated.
They’ve thought a lot about the key challenges in running a sustainable cloud gaming infrastructure. For example, Ian promises storage isn’t going to be an issue for the service, even as they provide access to the entirety of Steam’s game library – tens of thousands of titles strong.
All in all, Highscore appears ready to deploy technologies that will take the cloud gaming space to the next level. And, we are excited to watch. And to play, of course!
