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NextPlay: An easy Instant Play alternative

NextPlay, a feature rich Instant Play alternative, is a project that hasn’t got the attention it deserves. NextPlay was launched on February 22nd 2009 by Covac Software which is lead by uuf6429 at the GMC. NextPlay has the most features when comparing it to some other Instant Play alternatives as you can see on this chart (created by James Rhodes) that compares various services:

NextPlay is in the lead
NextPlay is in the lead

As you can see from the chart, this cross-browser plug-in is only lacking one thing: the estimated time remaining to launch the game.  It also has the lowest number of clicks needed to run a game. NextPlay is able to embed a game right inside your browser which means unnecessary clicking is eliminated, while the option for a Pop-up window is still optional.

NextPlay is also extremely easy to install. You are able to install the entire plug-in as well as the provided SDK within a few clicks by installing it directly off of the website. The website also provides a few demo games which allow the user to try out the plug-in right after installing it. The SDK provided allows the user to package their game and prepare it for the embedding. It also includes tools to help the user create a perfect set of html tags for embedding their game.

This powerful plug-in is very easy to use and is the most feature-rich Instant Play alternative available. Unfortunately this project was not advertised greatly, allowing for other Instant Play alternatives to jump ahead with their user bases. With YoYo Games planning to enable instant play for websites other then their own website, it is quite possible that all of the Instant Play alternatives will slowly fade away.

What do you think?

8 Comments

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  1. Yeah ok, do you want me to say something?

    I Have tried GMArcade, gmbed and it does not work, and dude, why consider using YAIPP, when a minority of people uses firefox??, hundreds of people want to play my game but o o ! Error: Must have Firefox to run, opps, well let’s go ahead and download it then, I hope it’s worth it! Lol. Why this evil world !

    And dude nextplay does not work it’s more like crashmywebbrowserfornothing.com

    So basically, THERE IS NO INSTANT PLAY FUNCTION FOR GAMEMAKER THAT WORKS OR AT LEAST HAVE THE CAPACITY TO MAKE PEOPLE NOT TO SAY “HMM, THIS WAS UNPROFESSIONAL”.

  2. all this does is crash my internet window. its a shame- i like the interface and the features and the ease of use… i was really hoping it worked, but i cant even play the example games on their website without firefox crashing. :/

  3. The multi-browser support column is really meaningless. Simply supporting more than one browser gets the check-mark. What is meaningful is listing the browsers that are supported.

    I would rather see a column for IE, Fx, Safari, Opera, Chrome, etc

  4. @NPT: Originally YAIPP only supported Firefox, that’s why it’s there.

    In any case, the last time I updated that was back in April, YAIPP is being retired and Fusion will supersede all of the above plugins when it’s released in a few months time (or less). I’ll like include backwards compatibility in Fusion to automatically translate any GMBed, GMArcade, YoYoGames, JrNet or NextPlay embeds to a Fusion Web Embed (YAIPP support will definitely be included).

  5. And it won’t embed into the GMC as it requires an NPAPI plugin 🙂

    Of course, everyone had a bitch when I advertised that as a feature of YAIPP because they wanted to claim that their “links” were just as good.

  6. I always like the concept of Next Play, as well as all their features, but to this day it still will not work on my computer.

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