About Splitscreen
Splitscreen turns cloud gaming into something people do together. A host opens a lobby, puts players on the stage, and each player gets a cloud gaming machine of their own. Everyone else in the lobby watches every player's screen at once and talks in the chat.
Who does what
- Host
- Opens the lobby, picks the region and the number of seats, launches the machines and decides who goes on the stage. Pays for the machine time.
- Director
- A helper the host trusts: hands seats over, answers stage requests and picks the main feed.
- Player
- Holds a seat on the stage and plays on its machine from a browser tab, with keyboard and mouse.
- Viewer
- Watches the main feed and every other player's tile, pins whichever screen they like, chats, and can ask to join the stage.
- Guest
- Anyone who arrives from an invite link and only types a name. Guests can play and chat, and are marked as guests. They can keep the account later.
What runs where
- Every seat is a GPU machine in the cloud, launched in the lobby's region for that seat alone and wiped between players.
- The player's game reaches their browser as a low-latency stream, and their keyboard and mouse go straight back to the machine.
- Viewers get each player's screen as a standard web video stream, with an optional delay the host sets.
- The host can connect to a seat first, sign in to the game and join the party, then hand the seat over to the player.
- Machines are billed by the minute from the host's credit balance and stop when the lobby closes.
Built on Respawn
The machines, streams and the control plane behind them are Respawn, a cloud gaming fleet that launches and streams game machines on demand. Splitscreen is the social layer on top: lobbies, the stage, invites, guests and chat.