Artie sidesteps the app stores by putting high-quality games in your browser

When you play a game, how do you play it? Monopoly or Settlers of Catan around the dining table? Mario Kart on your Nintendo Switch? Assassin’s Creed on your Xbox? Among Us on your phone? Usually, they are games with a physical form, a console or an app. Artie is gearing up to shake up the games industry with another option, bringing high-end games back to the browser. The advantages are obvious: No apps to download, and you can launch straight into a game from a link-in-bio, whether from TikTok, Instagram or, well, wherever you can find links. Also: Sidestepping the apps means not paying Apple the in-app purchase finder's fee for transactions.

“We realized that with 5G, device maturity and the GPUs we could access through the browser, you don’t actually need to download a game to run a high-quality game anymore,” explains Ryan Horrigan, Artie’s co-founder and CEO, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We thought, is there a way to do something that isn't pure client side… is there a way we can leverage Unreal or Unity, and do some sort of elegant asset streaming and optimization where we're kind of streaming data from the cloud, but we're rendering locally on your device?”

Yes, there is a way of doing it, it turns out, and that's the market Artie is taking a leap into. The company refers to it as “over-the-top game streaming.”

“The idea being I’m in my TikTok feed where I see an influencer or an ad, and I click a link. I play the game instantly in the pop-up browser and TikTok, but then I have two choices,” says Horrigan. “I can either follow the game there and return (akin to Farmville back in the day and Facebook) and go back to social to play, or I can save a bookmark or a progressive web app to my phone screen and have a pseudo-app at my finger tips.”