In the early days of broadband Internet, downloading of multi-gigabyte online games was an excruciating experience. In 2005 our founding team knew a thing or two about download technologies, content delivery networks (CDNs), and game development. We also knew that this was a problem that shouldn’t have to be solved many times over by every game studio, especially if it meant diverting precious development resources that from working on creating the next great game. We searched for every way possible to optimize the player onboarding process for the benefit of game developers, online publishers, and players. Our goal was to eliminate as much of the friction that stands between the player and their gameplay as possible.
Along the way, we have had the great fortune of working with some of the industry’s top game studios, as well as major software publishers, that needed a solution to this problem. These valuable relationships helped to drive our technology development and feature roadmap. As we helped our customers deploy their software applications to hundreds of millions of systems worldwide, our technology hardened, the addressable use cases expanded. We stopped keeping track of our aggregate when we reached over 100 billion software downloads and updates.
In 2016, we added the scalability of AWS global cloud infrastructure to bring on-demand compute and automated workflows to our customers to speed their deployment pipeline and eliminate CapEx costs. In 2017, as enterprise companies began embracing game technologies for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (XR) in business, we added enterprise features and security to the DIRECT platform.
Today, our mission is to enable continuous delivery practices beyond the edge into corporate, educational, and last-mile networks. Our commitment to innovation ensures our customers that they have solutions needed today and the peace of mind to know we will grow with them, even as technology advances to create new opportunities for their business.
– Rick Buonincontri, CEO & founder
Location
Solid State Networks
1 N. 1st Street, Suite 654
Phoenix, AZ 85004
Phone: (602) 889-3074
General Mailing Address:
P.O. Box 33483
Phoenix, AZ 85067
Contact Us
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Our History
2006
2006 Solid State Networks was founded to make high-performance content delivery solutions. We launched the industry’s first commercially available solution that combined HTTP delivery via CDN with the BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol.
2007
Our first paying customer is Acclaim Games! Howard Marks, the forward-looking industry veteran and CEO of Acclaim, was an early proponent of the free-to-play (F2P) business model. DIRECT, our hybrid HTTP and peer-to-peer delivery solution, cut Acclaim’s delivery costs by more than 50%.
2008
Our first AAA game title! The highly anticipated Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures MMO by Funcom (AoC)weighed in at a then staggering 12 GB at a time when average US internet connectivity was just 4 Mbps. One of the most anticipated games launched that year, and the download time was sometimes measured by AoC players in days. Our DIRECT download manager took full advantage of all available bandwidth to provide the fastest download possible and ensured that game delivery was byte-level perfect for every player while significantly reducing CDN costs for Funcom with P2P delivery.
2009
When we began working with Riot Games pre-launch in 2008, we had no idea we were boarding a rocket ship. Riot’s League of Legends (LoL) grew to over 60 million active players by 2014. We released DIRECT 2 during the LoL beta, which added game client update capabilities. Riot deployed thousands of game updates to millions of LoL game clients which added up to billions of file downloaded using DIRECT 2.
2010
What could possibly be better for a startup than working with Bioware, voted Game Studio of the Year in 2010 by its industry peers? Working with Bioware during the development and launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic! Bioware’s exceptional team helped drive many of the requirements for DIRECT 3 which included its early pipeline automation capabilities.
2012
We partnered with Digital River to power their customers’ paid software downloads and free trials, including Microsoft, Nuance, and Electronic Arts. As a result, a whole new set of features to support the eCommerce were added to DIRECT 3.
2012
Adobe’s Flash was the most downloaded application in the world when Adobe chose DIRECT as the download technology for Flash, Reader, and Acrobat. We introduced the Workflow Engine into DIRECT 3.6 driven in part by Adobe’s needs in supporting its partnership with Google to distribute the Chrome browser bundled with Adobe’s software.
2014
Zenimax Online Studios’ Elder Scrolls Online was not only one of the most anticipated games of the year; it was the biggest at almost 50 GB in size. We added additional pipeline automation into a custom DIRECT launcher specifically for the Elder Scrolls development and operations team to make their internal deployment process more efficient, which involved deploying extremely large files throughout the day.
2014
DIRECT 4 was released with a top priority to reduce the “time-to-play,” which is the time that players must endure to download, install and/or update the game they want to play. We increased the download speed by 800%, added new features such as single-step updates, multi-stage download, and an integrated installer for low-friction user onboarding.
2016
DIRECT 5 automated the deployment pipeline, including delta compression, environment promotion, and egress to CDN. We eliminated the need to buy or rent servers and any manual steps in the deployment process. Compute resources became available on-demand and at a very low cost. Delta update files that previously took 8-12 hours to generate are now available in just 15-20 minutes.
2016
DIRECT 5 added in-game updating capabilities, with reference integrations available for Unity, Unreal Engine, Lumberyard, and CryEngine.
2017
Wolfram Research, headed by the legendary Stephen Wolfram, selected DIRECT 5 as the download technology for Mathematica and other products for their online store.
2017
DIRECT 5.1 added full pipeline automation for Continuous Delivery and DevOps, support for multi-game launchers, Linux OS support, and more (beta).
2018
DIRECT EXR was introduced to meet the needs of enterprise XR applications made with game engine technologies. Fully automated deployment to remote systems, enterprise-grade security, and enhanced support for protected corporate environments.
2018
Akamai announced the end of life for the Akamai Netsession Interface download manager and made DIRECT 5 the recommended replacement solution for their customers. Akamai and Solid State had competed since 2009 in client-side delivery solutions and formed a partnership in 2015.
2019
The DIRECT Dynamic Delivery Platform (DDP) makes global deployment of software applications to corporate and last-mile networks easy. Our globally distributed REST API delivers a dynamically configured client agent for securely managing the download and install of any software application on Windows, Mac. Linux (beta) is also available.
2019
DIRECT 5 Enterprise App Manager enables publishers to easily deploy a large number of applications from many different developers into last-mile and corporate networks.
2019
DIRECT DDP is now available on Amazon Marketplace. Buying is as easy as adding to your AWS bill.
2020
DIRECT 5.2 adds enhanced security for enterprise, ingest from anywhere, on-premise, or cloud deployment.
