Last week saw the launch of Would You Rather, a fast-paced quiz-race game made by dot big bang in collaboration with Youtube star Preston. To celebrate the release, Preston streamed the game on his PrestonPlayz channel. Thousands of viewers clicked a link to instantly hop into the game with him, bringing one of the core visions behind dot big bang to fruition.
“Dot big bang has always been aiming towards a new kind of game experience,” says dbb’s CEO, Robert Anderberg. “People watch YouTubers and play games every day, but there hasn’t been something that ties it all together. Now, anyone watching a stream can click through and play alongside the streamer, with no install, on any device.”
A week later, the game has over 100,000 plays, and the launch video has passed 1.4m views, and counting. “We’ve been imagining this for five years, and building the infrastructure, the tools, and the engine,” says Anderberg. “Seeing floods of players running through the game was kind of mindblowing. Preston posted a link, and thousands of people were playing together within seconds. It was amazing to watch. It’s a fundamentally different kind of gaming experience to what we’ve seen before.”
It was also a test for dot big bang’s backend systems, which the dev team had been preparing over the months leading up to this stream. “We’d done a whole bunch of load testing ahead of time, and it all worked great, even during maximum load,” Anderberg says. “Players were pretty evenly split across desktop and mobile, with crossplay between iOS, MacOS, Windows and Android, with no issues that we could see.”
The success of this experiment opens up new doors for how streamers can bring their audience into a seamlessly shared gaming experience. Anderberg credits Preston for seeing the possibilities of dot big bang. “Preston is leading the way in understanding the project’s potential,” he says. “It opens up a lot of options for YouTubers and streamers. Their audience can now join them instantly in any kind of game they can dream up. Our goal in the future is to do something truly epic in terms of scale. We want to put a million players in a game. And this is a big step towards realizing that.”
Play the game now at dotbigbang.com.