Social distance

Jam.gg rebrands its mission to inject a local multiplayer feel into online gaming.

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Less than a minute after typing in the URL ‘jam.gg’, Metal Slug is running in our browser. We have to admit it’s a very convenient way to revisit SNK’s run-and gunner, and the only thing that feels a bit off at this point is the presence of our webcam feed in the top-right corner, pushing the game display leftwards. If our instinct is to minimise it, though, that would be missing the point, as soon becomes clear when another player joins our game. Their cam feed (showing a masked avatar) slots under ours, and we can now communicate with them via video, chat or text in one browser tab. It’s an arrangement that, with a group of friends, turns a simple cloud gaming service into a kind of virtual couch.

Jam.gg has already been with us for two years, going until recently by the name Piepacker. And it’s been a successful venture, according to Benjamin Devienne, CEO of the Bordeaux-based company, attracting 2.8 million users in that period. So why the rebrand? Devienne explains that Piepacker was always something of a placeholder, referring to the tech his team created to reduce bandwidth use. “We were like, ‘OK, let’s just call this Piepacker. It’s not going to survive anyway’,” he laughs. But once it gathered momentum, they needed something catchier. “Jam felt right in the sense of jamming together,” he says. “Like people playing videogames together. I love this idea.”

With that in mind, it’s no surprise that many titles in jam.gg’s modest catalogue share a common trait: single-screen multiplayer. The selection boasts retro favourites from SNK’s Metal Slug and The King Of Fighters ’98 to the likes of Worms World Party and