I recently had to chat with Patrick, the founder of Afterplay, along with James, the platform’s Head of Emulation, to talk about one of the more interesting projects I’ve spotted lately in in the retro gaming space specifically.
Afterplay’s a browser-based retro gaming platform that lets you play classic games on desktop and mobile with cloud saves, cross-device syncing, and a focus on making retro gaming accessible.
More recently (and more interestingly to me), it expanded into a storefront where indie developers sell browser-playable games, which I think is an fascinating topic and angle for an article.
In the interview here we talk about how Afterplay began, the technical challenges of browser-based emulation, where the idea of becoming a “Steam for retro games” came from, the new storefront, the future of the platform, and plenty more.
I hope you enjoy the read, and as always I’d love to hear your thoughts here!
https://gardinerbryant.com/afterplay-and-the-push-toward-a-steam-for-retro-games/
It looks nice, but seems to be just another subscription service, where yo know the price increases are coming (I haven’t checked how useful the free tier is). I’d much rather like this to be a self hostable service on your own NAS or something.
I’ve been a long time user of Afterplay, it’s subscription is totally optional and has actually gone down over the years
Yeah I was curious if it did anything more than Romm does, but yeah no subscription service for me thanks.