Maximum Play

About Maximum Play

Maximum Play, Inc., known as MaxPlay, was a game technology and services company founded in 2014 with headquarters in San Francisco, California. The company was founded by Adam Chapman, who assembled the initial team, secured funding, and led the product strategy. The concept for MaxPlay originated when Chapman, then Director of Interactive Technology at MPC/Technicolor, identified technology during an R&D roadshow that could be productized into a cross-platform game engine. This led to a spin-out from MPC/Technicolor, aiming to modernize game development workflows. The company attracted a team of veterans from the game development, enterprise software, and data science industries.

MaxPlay's core offering was the Game Development Suite (GDS), a cloud-based platform designed to accelerate the creation, publishing, and operation of video games. This suite was built on a service-oriented architecture, which allowed development teams to collaborate in real-time on the same scene from different locations, a feature likened to "Google Docs for game development". A key component was the proprietary MaxCore runtime engine, engineered for high performance on modern multi-core devices, including those for virtual and augmented reality. The platform was designed to give developers significant control, allowing them to customize the front-end, modify business logic, or replace entire systems. It integrated established technologies like NVIDIA's PhysX for physics simulation and EmotionFX for character animation.

The business aimed to serve game developers of all sizes by providing tools to improve productivity and manage the complexities of multi-platform development. By offering a unified and integrated toolset, MaxPlay sought to reduce the inefficient, sequential processes that were common in the industry. Its platform enabled rapid iteration by allowing developers to push changes to a game and instantly preview them on target devices like PCs, consoles, or tablets without needing to compile a new build. Over its active years, MaxPlay secured significant venture capital, including a $5.5M Series AA round in November 2014 and a Series A round in May 2015, with total funding reaching over $11 million. Despite its efforts, PitchBook lists the company as "Out of Business" as of October 13, 2016.