Just read about PICO-8 games being supported by the new Antstream service!

https://www.timeextension.com/news/2024/08/ps1-net-yaroze-and-pico-8-games-are-coming-to-antstream

The PICO-8 part of the announcement in the video starts around 10:25. They talk about how 2 games are part of the service to start so it kinda sounds like Antstream will choose or curate which PICO8 games get onto the service? I dunno...and it's scant on details if it's running PICO8 somehow or if it's just "games that are made with PICO8" and they're using binaries or what. Dunno...hopefully we'll learn more.

But even then it sounds like Antstream will be another outlet where people can easily get to our games. Antstream looks to be a service on Xbox so that instantly lowers the barrier to play more games.

And congrats to Puzzles of Paladin and Manbomber for getting chosen as a launch title for the PICO8 inclusion.

Huh, I have somehow never heard of this service but having PICO-8 games on the PS 4 mostly collecting dust on my shelf would be kinda cool. Hope some of my favorites make the cut!

Yeah, I'm not a Antstream subscriber (yet) but something like easy PICO8 and other homebrew access would be nice and might sway me. I mean, I love all my old games but to be fair, I have most of them already running on my various machines already. But I'll support PICO8 as much as I can with something like this...or at least give it a try.

And I mean, shoot, of course I'd love to see one of my games get on that platform and in front of folks! Any sort of platform/service that can reduce the fire hose of games is worth a try. It's a good motivator if nothing else.

If they're curating things, I doubt you'd ever see any of mine on there, hahaha. But playing Invader Overload on my big TV with a proper controller would be pretty great!

Antstream has always seemed awkwardly wasteful for bandwidth and data usage; let's take a roughly 50kb game and stream it to users at 650mb(300mb conservative)per hour of streamed game, and whenever I've tried it on my Xbox that's using Ethernet the input lag made stadia and Xbox cloud inputs seem acceptable

Interesting...yeah, I haven't tried Antstream at all, but if it's that poor then that's not fun. Hopefully they'll improve it...but I guess I'd just find it cool to see our P8 as part of the buffet.

They contacted me about including Trial of the Sorcerer, so I guess they chose which ones they want and approach the devs.

(In my case I didn't go ahead, as I preferred not to sign the NDA.)

An NDA for exclusivity?

Where all was your game listed besides here on the BBS? Just wondering where they’re watching.

Oof if that's how that gets games I'll make sure to avoid them going forward if they ever figure out compound lag from input and video

Nobody mentioned exclusivity - they just wanted the NDA before they'd share more information.

I have an itch.io page and post about my stuff on twitter. Twitter is where they contacted me.

You could always try contacting them if you have a game you want to put forward.

@Mot - Thanks for insight. Twitter...figures. I bailed on Twitter for various reasons but I guess that's still where everyone is. Might need to look into it again. I did send them a message asking about how games are found/curated so hopefully they'll provide more info as well.