Utomik Leaves Beta With 760 Games in Tow
Utomik, the game rental service that prides itself on progressive download techniques, of all things, has left beta. The official launch sees the service’s library at 760 games, all of which you can start playing for a monthly fee of $7. They’re going to keep adding stuff, but if you’re interested, give the existing library a look. They’re offering a 14 day free trial, if it seems like something you’d enjoy.
Don’t let the number fool you – most of the stuff is hidden object games and old things. Stuff like Marie-Antoinette and the Disciples of Loki, the first Borderlands and a bunch of Irem arcade ports. To be fair, there are good games on offer – games like Arkham City, Alpha Protocol, Defense Grid, Shadow Tactics, Risen, the old Star Wars games, Space Rangers. It’s just that most of it is Twilight City: Love As A Cure. Caveat emptor and all that.
At first it seems like Utomik is just the latest in the long line of doomed-to-fail cloud gaming services. On closer inspection, it turns out they’re not. Not cloud gaming, I mean. The jury’s still out on the doomed-to-fail part. What Utomik actually does is literally let you rent their whole library for a whole monthly fee. You still need to download the games, and your PC still needs to be able to run them.
As far as I can tell, the crux of their pitch seems to be “being able to play games without long downloads and installations”. With Utomik, you’ll be allowed to start playing as soon as the bare minimum required to run the game has been downloaded. The rest will be delivered in the background, while you play. I’ve never felt like that was much of a problem, especially with a little basic planning, but hey, you might feel different. The downloads, patches and installations mostly hurt folks with data caps, and Utomik isn’t going to solve that.
Thank you for the Article!
Overall really like how you represent Utomik, just two things I like to comment on.
“Don’t let the number fool you – most of the stuff is hidden object games and old things. Stuff like Marie-Antoinette and the Disciples of Loki, the first Borderlands and a bunch of Irem arcade ports.”
I understand how you are looking at this, but even though we have a lot of casual games, since we have a strong growing group of casual gamers, I can guarantee you that casual games are a relative minority on our platform. Same goes for the arcade ports of Irem, there are only a dozen of them en seen our 760 games live, that’s not even enough to give them an arcade genre. And perhaps you might not agree with arcade games like those, we ourselves re actually working on it to bring many of the 90’s classic arcades to our platform.
But at the end the vast majority(or in your words ‘most’) of games are modern not casual Indie and AAA games (you can check the complete list at utomik.com/games), but we still see a lot of in classic and retro games in the same way Nintendo does. So you yourself(like me as a gamer personally) might not look positively towards casual games, we are simply trying to bring the quality titles among that genre, since there are a lot of people who do enjoy those kinds of games and who are we to decide what genres people can or can not enjoy? But we will be just as critical to those games as in the other genres, that they are up to quality standards that that audience appreciates.
In the same way as we do so with the arcade/retro games(where I myself am a fan of to be honest), we are talking to some very renowned for their classic arcade titles publishers/developers, to get there titles on board.
But our goal is absolutely to keep our prime focus on modern games and for ‘all’ games we will be hawkish about the quality.
“As far as I can tell, the crux of their pitch seems to be “being able to play games without long downloads and installations”. ”
For many people, especially the former gamers who due to work and kids have less time, time is one of the biggest values. So if they even with planning try a game that is not to their taste, they can way more easily ‘without needing to ask for a refund’ skip to another game which will also be started relatively fast (often around 10% or less needed with games that are 5GB or bigger, in many cases just 300-400MB out of the 10GB overall size).
Like how we used to grab a cup of coffee while starting up the PC and used to say ‘ah with some planning’, we now would not agree with such an excuse and that’s where we apply that same logic to our fast service. The fact that we almost all now run our OS from an SSD says it all I think.