What’s up, Plato? — October Edition

It’s been a while since we’ve given an update on what we’re working on for Plato, so here we are.

Currently our focus is on five core areas:

• Fixing things that just aren’t working right
• Making it easier to connect and play games with friends on Plato
• Adding more options for communication using Plato
• Extending beyond mobile devices
• MOAR GAMES

We’ll touch on each area to give you some more context. The following things may change and these aren’t hard commitments. If we make something and it sucks or just can’t work the way we want it to, it won’t be released.

Fixing things that just aren’t working right

The stability of Plato is our #1 priority. We’ve come a long way over the years with fewer and fewer unplanned outages. No service is perfect and we know Plato isn’t flawless, but our goal is for Plato to be up over 99% of the time.

Thanks to our new Community Leader program we’ve been able to better learn of issues affecting the product and have fixed or are fixing a number of bugs that have flown under the radar for some time.

Bug reports over e-mail and social media are welcome, but often fall short in the details we need to actually locate and solve problems, so please bear with us.

Making it easier to connect and play games with friends on Plato

Plato Links to join Groups and become friends are just the beginning of the steps we’re taking to make it easier to play together. We’re working on giving game creators full control over their games with the ability to kick players, reserve seats, or for players to stand up and walk away if they need to. Links for games will also follow, making it super simple for a group of friends to jump into any game at any time.

Beyond Plato Links, we’ll be adding additional features to Groups (such as custom group avatars).

Adding more options for communication using Plato

Voice chat is coming.

An alpha version of voice on Plato is almost ready and we’re very excited to hear what you think and learn how you’d want to see more voice integrated across Plato.

Extending beyond mobile devices

A Windows version of Plato is in the works. This is a huge undertaking for our team and will take many months to complete, but we want to bring the best of Plato to your desktop in 2022.

MOAR GAMES

Pretty simple: More games are on the way and we will improve the existing games on Plato, too.

That’s it for this update. We appreciate your time and hope you continue to find fun on Plato.

If you’re based in the US with experience in building applications at scale, we’re also hiring!