Technology

Co-op video games are wonderful.

Alas, itnot always possible to get everyone in front of the same TV — and not all co-op games have online play, so playing across the internet is out.

With that in mind, Valve has been working on something it calls &Remote Play Together& that itplanning on rolling into its Steam game launcher later this month. By more or less tricking the game into thinking all players are in the same room, it&ll let you remotely play with your friends generally local-only multiplayer games.

Valve published on its developers-only Steamworks site a note about the upcoming feature, first noticed by PCGamer. The note quickly made its way to the Unity developer forums.

&Your local multiplayer games will soon be improved with automatic support forRemote Play Togetheron Steam,& it reads. &All local multiplayer, local co-op, and split-screen games will be automatically included in the Remote Play Together beta, which we plan to launch the week of October 21.&

The pending launch was later confirmed by ValveAlden Kroll:

So how does it work? If you&ve ever used PS4remote play (which lets you push PS4 games to your smartphone) or cast a game from your PC to an Nvidia SHIELD, ita bit like that… just tweaked for multiplayer. One player hosts the game on their computer; Steam sends a stream of the visuals to everyone else, capturing controller/keyboard input and sending it back to player one. As far as the game knows, everyone is sitting around the same screen.

Itimportant to note, of course, that some games will almost certainly fare better than others here. While streaming tech is only getting better, it inherently introduces latency — and in plenty of games, latency kills. Hopefully Valve makes it clear to players that this is all pretty unofficial; if a game isn&t playable because of latency or anything else remote play brings into the mix, itnot really the developerfault. Valve says developers can opt out of the beta feature if they see fit.

Valve says Remote Play Together will officially support up to four players in one game, and notes that the experience will only be as good as the connections of everyone involved.

Rocket Lab has received a new five-year Launch Operator License from the Federal Aviation Administration, which grants it permission to do multiple launches of its Electron rocket from its LC-1 launch site in New Zealand without having to seek individual clearance for each one. While not the only limiting factor, this should help Rocket Lab increase the frequency of its launches from LC-1, servicing more customers more often for commercial small satellite customers.

Until now, Rocket Lab has had to obtain a license (or multiple licenses) from the FAA for each individual rocket it flew — the company has seemingly managed that process just fine to date, but itan added process that probably adds a lot of time and effort to each launch attempt, even if it hasn&t directly flummoxed any mission to date.

Rocket Lab says this will provide a &streamlined path to orbit& for its customers, however, which should make it easier for the company to operate its flexible model that is designed to work better with the shifting timelines of small sat startups and younger commercial space companies, while still ensuring that Rocket Lablaunch capacity is used to maximum effect. Rocket Lab just recently swapped one payload for another for an upcoming launch, for example.

Rocket Lab is part of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry consortium that also includes SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Relativity Space and others that is petitioning the FAA for reforms to regulations that would update them to better suit the current state of the commercial space business. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently praised the FAA as a partner that it has been able to work with very efficiently, speaking specifically about the licensing process regarding its ongoing Starship test program.

This license isn&t tied to the agencyoverall process for licensing U.S.-based launches (LC-1 is in New Zealand, after all) but it is another indication that the current FAA is more than willing to work with younger commercial space companies to ensure they can do business in an efficient manner.

Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, we hosted a panel on the Extra Crunch stage on &How to build a billion-dollar SaaS company.& A better title probably would have been &How to build a successful SaaS company.&

We spoke to Whitney Bouck, COO at HelloSign; Jyoti Bansal, CEO and founder at Harness, and Neeraj Agrawal, a partner at Battery Ventures to get their view on how to move through the various stages to build that successful SaaS company.

While there is no magic formula, we covered a lot of ground, including finding a product-market fit, generating early revenue, the importance of building a team, what to do when growth slows and finally, how to resolve the tension between growth and profitability.

Finding product-market fit

Neeraj Agrawal: When we&re talking to the market, what we&re really looking for is a repeatable pattern of use cases. So when we&re talking to prospects — the words they use, the pain point they use — are very similar from call to call to call? Once we see that pattern, we know we have product-market fit, and then we can replicate that.

Jyoti Bansal: Revenue is one measure of product-market fit. Are customers adopting it and getting value out of it and renewing? Until you start getting a first set of renewals and a first set of expansions and happy successful customers, you don&t really have product-market fit. So thatthe only way you can know if the product is really working or not.

Whitney Bouck: It isn&t just about revenue — the measures of success at all phases have to somewhat morph. You&ve got to be looking at usage, at adoption, value renewals, expansion, and of course, the corollary, churn, to give you good health indicators about how you&re doing with product-market fit.

Generating early revenue

Jyoti Bansal: As founders we&ve realized, getting from idea to early revenue is one of the hardest things to do. The first million in revenue is all about street fighting. Founders have to go out there and win business and do whatever it takes to get to revenue.

As your revenue grows, what you focus on as a company changes. Zero to $1 million, your goal is to find the product-market fit, do whatever it takes to get early customers. One million to $10 million, you start scaling it. Ten million to $75 million is all about sales, execution, and [at] $75 million plus, the story changes to how do you go into new markets and things like that.

Whitney Bouck: You really do have to get that poll from the market to be able to really start the momentum and growth. The freemium model is one of the ways that we start to engage people — getting visibility into the product, getting exposure to the product, really getting people thinking about, and frankly, spreading the word about how this product can provide value.

Photo: Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch