Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Since version 2 it has been sold as freemium and supports extensibility with plug-ins and skins, and features music visualization, playlist and a media library, supported by a large online community.
Xfire was a proprietary freeware instant messaging service for gamers that also served as a game server browser with various other features. It was available for Microsoft Windows.
Gnash is a media player for playing SWF files. Gnash is available both as a standalone player for desktop computers and embedded devices, as well as a plugin for the browsers still supporting NPAPI. It is part of the GNU Project and is a free and open-source alternative to Adobe Flash Player. It was developed from the gameswf project.
Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe's runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a very small number of browsers. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, later versions supported multimedia, graphics, and animation, and gave support to developers for CLI languages and development tools. Silverlight was one of the two application development platforms for Windows Phone, but web pages using Silverlight did not run on the Windows Phone or Windows Mobile versions of Internet Explorer, as there was no Silverlight plugin for Internet Explorer on those platforms.
Kingdom Under Fire II was a video game set in a high fantasy setting developed by Blueside which merged real-time strategy (RTS), role-playing game (RPG) and massively multiplayer online game (MMO) genres. The game had a single-player and an online multiplayer mode. The game followed on chronologically from Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom, and was the first RTS game set in the Kingdom Under Fire universe to be released since the 2005 Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes. Due to its mass cancellation, most of the 4 platforms were scrapped, and it was Windows-exclusive.
Turbo is a set of software products and services developed by the Code Systems Corporation for application virtualization, portable application creation, and digital distribution. Code Systems Corporation is an American corporation headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and is best known for its Turbo products that include Browser Sandbox, Turbo Studio, TurboServer, and Turbo.
Runes of Magic (RoM) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by the Taiwanese developer Runewaker Entertainment and adapted for the English and German-speaking market by German company Frogster Interactive. Frogster has also opened servers for France, Spain, Poland, Italy, and Australia as well as servers dedicated to the European Union. After going through an open beta phase, the game was launched on March 19, 2009, and Chapter II – The Elven Prophecy was launched on September 15, 2009. The next chapter, Chapter III – The Elder Kingdoms, started April 22, 2010, however all of Chapter III did not become available until August 11, 2010. Chapter IV - Lands of Despair, was released June 16, 2011. The latest Chapter, Chapter V - Fires of Shadowforge, was released on June 12, 2012. The game client is free to download, and no monthly subscription fee is required because the service is funded by real money transactions (RMT) in the Runes of Magic Item Shop.
Gameforge is a video game publisher and video game developer. It represents a group of companies that operates internationally and has its headquarters in Karlsruhe, Germany. It distributes roughly 20 games, translated into over 50 languages. Their portfolio contains client-based massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) such as TERA, Metin2, Runes of Magic, and SOLO, as well as browser-based online games such as OGame, Gladiatus, BiteFight, and Ikariam. They also operate mobile games. Gameforge employs a staff of over 300 and was founded by its Chief Executive Officer Alexander Rösner and former CEO Klaas Kersting in 2003.
OnLive was a Mountain View, California-based provider of cloud virtualization technologies. OnLive's flagship product was its cloud gaming service, which allowed subscribers to rent or demo computer games without installing them on their device. Games were delivered to OnLive's client software as streaming video rendered by the service's servers, rather than rendered locally by the device.
Gaikai is an American company which provides technology for the streaming of high-end video games. Its technology has multiple applications, including in-home streaming over a local wired or wireless network, as well as cloud-based gaming where video games are rendered on remote servers and delivered to end users via internet streaming
Cloud gaming, sometimes called gaming on demand or gaming-as-a-service or game streaming, is a type of online gaming that runs video games on remote servers and streams them directly to a user's device, or more colloquially, playing a game remotely from a cloud. It contrasts with traditional means of gaming, wherein a game runs locally on a user's video game console, personal computer, or mobile device.
Desura was a digital distribution platform for the Microsoft Windows, Linux and OS X platforms. The service distributed games and related media online, with a primary focus on small independent game developers rather than larger companies. Desura contained automated game updates, community features, and developer resources. The client allowed users to create and distribute game mods as well.
BlueStacks is an American technology company known for the BlueStacks App Player and other cloud-based cross-platform products. The BlueStacks App Player allows Android applications to run on PCs running Microsoft Windows and macOS. The company was founded in 2009 by Jay Vaishnav, Suman Saraf, and Rosen Sharma, former CTO at McAfee and a board member of Cloud.com.
Construct is an HTML5-based 2D video game engine developed by Scirra Ltd. It is aimed primarily at non-programmers, allowing quick creation of games through visual programming. First released as a GPL-licensed DirectX 9 game engine for Microsoft Windows with Python programming on October 27, 2007, it later became proprietary software with Construct 2, as well as switching its API technology from DirectX to NW.js and HTML5, as well as removing Python and adding JavaScript support and its plugin SDK in 2012, and eventually switched to a subscription-based model as a web app.
Microsoft mobile services are a set of proprietary mobile services created specifically for mobile devices, they are typically offered through mobile applications and mobile browser for Windows Phone, | platforms, BREW, and Java. Microsoft's mobile services are typically connected with a Microsoft account and often come preinstalled on Microsoft's own mobile operating systems while they are offered via various means for other platforms. Microsoft started to develop for mobile computing platforms with the launch of Windows CE in 1996 and later added Microsoft's Pocket Office suite to their Handheld PC line of PDAs in April 2000. From December 2014 to June 2015, Microsoft made a number of corporate acquisitions, buying several of the top applications listed in Google Play and the App Store including Acompli, Sunrise Calendar, Datazen, Wunderlist, Echo Notification Lockscreen, and MileIQ.
PlayStation Now, was a standalone video game subscription service the first on consoles developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The service offered cloud gaming for PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 4 games that could be played on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Windows computers. In addition, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 4 games could be downloaded to play locally on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. With the expansion of the PlayStation Plus service to offer additional tiers in May-June 2022, the standalone PlayStation Now subscription was shut down, but its services were incorporated into the PlayStation Plus Premium tier.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube. Alongside a set of management tools, it provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics and machine learning. Registration requires a credit card or bank account details.
Curse is a network of gaming websites. The company is headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama, and has offices in San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, Brighton, and Berlin.
GeForce Now is the brand used by Nvidia for its cloud gaming service. The Nvidia Shield version of GeForce Now, formerly known as Nvidia Grid, launched in beta in 2013, with Nvidia officially unveiling its name on September 30, 2015. The subscription service provided users with unlimited access to a library of games hosted on Nvidia servers for the life of the subscription, being delivered to subscribers through streaming video. Certain titles were also available via a "Buy & Play" model. This version was discontinued in 2019, and transitioned to a new version of the service that enabled Shield users to play their own games.
Stadia is a cloud gaming service developed and operated by Google. It is accessible through Chromecast Ultra and Android TV devices, on personal computers via the Google Chrome web browser and other Chromium-based browsers, Chromebooks and tablets running Chrome OS, and the Stadia mobile app on supported Android smartphones as long as the latest version of the Chrome browser and the latest version of the Stadia app are installed. There is also an experimental mode with support for all Android devices capable of installing the Stadia mobile app. In December 2020, Google released an iOS browser-based progressive web application for Stadia, enabling gameplay in the Safari browser.
