

Both companies are now extending Parsec's tech into Unity's growth areas beyond game development, like architecture and filmmaking.īoxer is now a full believer in the remote-work future. Earlier this year, Parsec's business attracted the attention of game engine provider Unity, which bought the company for $320 million back in August."It was monthly in case it didn't work out." "For the first nine months, we didn't have an annual contact available," Boxer said. Electronic Arts became a major customer in April 2020, even though Parsec had only the most bare-bones enterprise offering at the time.Companies began using Parsec for everything from play testing to asset building, and it was Parsec's low-latency streaming tech that helped it stand apart from other remote workstation providers. "When COVID happened, rather than competing against the Citrix of the world in terms of security and admin tools, we were competing against, 'I can't do my work, period,'" Boxer said.Accessing such machines remotely requires robust streaming software, much of which is not tailored for creative work. Game development requires programmers and artists to have not only a powerful machine, but also a high upload connection for managing large data files and accessing servers. Parsec became a remote-work lifeline during COVID-19.

"Throughout that time, we always knew about 15 to 20% of our usage was for work and we didn't do anything about it," Boxer said, "until the pandemic happened." Parsec was aware the tech had potential as an enterprise product, but it hadn't felt a need to pivot."They'll be OK with some of the compromises." "You're given them a superpower," he said. Boxer said the trick was not to try to replicate an experience with streaming, but to let people do something they could never do before.It worked best for letting people play co-op and local multiplayer games with friends with one stream from a single PC. Parsec became an early cloud gaming provider by letting users stream the screen of a more powerful desktop machine to multiple devices.If the company could make a good enough streaming platform to support multiplayer gaming for consumers, that product would be good enough for most other industries. Founded in 2016, Parsec began by setting a high bar to validate its low-latency streaming tech.
PARSEC WHITE SCREEN LICENSE
"One of our customers said in April of 2020, 'It's either we don't make games, or we license Parsec.'" "After a month, it became clear this was a business we should be investing in," Boxer told Protocol in an interview. Many of those firms were game developers, which couldn't easily relocate large workstations to employees' homes. But in March 2020, companies started begging Parsec to build it so they could transition to remote work. His company, which specializes in beaming a remote computer to any screen over the internet, didn't yet have an enterprise business. Parsec CEO Benjy Boxer found himself in a peculiar position last year. How streaming platform Parsec prepared for the pandemic on accident
