
He went into computer programming, and he picked it up with his friends. “I made the conscious choice to drop out and start building my skills.” He bounced around, finding places to stay with his sister, her kid, and his father. During his freshman year, he was homeless.

He dropped out of high school when he was 14. This is all pretty heady stuff for Sampson, who grew up near Atlanta. “We believe if you own a game on Steam or the Epic Games Store or Uplay, you should be able to play it across all your favorite screens.” “We started to see a lot of validation for the product we were building,” Sampson said. Its beta test drew more than 36,000 users in the first couple of months, and it launched a 1.0 product in February that ran games on a web browser, even if the game wasn’t installed on the machine they were playing on. The Techstars accelerator program accepted Rainway in early 2018, and last year this Seattle-based startup raised $5.2 million from institutional investors such as Madrona Venture Group and also angels and firms such as GoAhead Ventures. So they started working on an all-in-one gaming service. Then they pivoted away from that because they found everyone was using the service to play video games inside a web browser. In other words, no expensive data centers choked and died to bring you the game.īefore 2016, the founders Sampson and Evan Banyash were living near Atlanta, building a remote desktop administration service. So it isn’t cloud gaming, but it is game streaming and the streams are peer-to-peer. That stream is then sent using low-latency networking to the connected device, which renders the images. Rainway captures the screen in real time and encodes it to a stream. When you launch a game via Rainway, it’s running on your gaming PC at home. Rainway has also launched its Android app.

While free may be good for getting attention, Rainway still has to figure out how to use money. It took Apple a while to approve the app, but it’s finally ready to go. And this service doesn’t use the cloud, which would be very costly, as those other services are likely to find out.

All you have to do is download the Rainway app from the App Store, and you can stream games from services like Steam to your iOS devices. But CEO Andrew Sampson, who once upon a time was homeless, believes he’s got the right price: free.
