2020 was inarguably THE year for online gamers worldwide, with the pandemic making a significant impact on the gaming industry, leading to an unprecedented surge in gaming. A Newzoo report revealed that 2021 might witnessed nearly 2.8 billion gamers worldwide. Mobile gaming has become immensely popular these days, and thus, the need for android emulators has also skyrocketed. With this, BlueStacks, possibly the biggest android emulator in the market, has announced that it has crossed over one billion downloads worldwide.
With this news comes a great surprise as well. BlueStacks has also announced an update on its beta channel, promising major improvements and support for ARM devices. The new BlueStacks 5 (Beta) offers a 40% reduction in RAM usage, significantly faster boot, install, and launch times, as well as better gameplay experiences for core gamers, the company announced in a statement.
In the press release, Chief Architect for BlueStacks 5 Sharad Agarwal said, “Our app container technology enables games to be optimized to run on PC, Mac, and other devices without any additional work needed from the developer. This is a key component missing in both Android on Chromebook and iOS apps on Mac. We see the market for BlueStacks App Player expanding considerably with Apple’s endorsement of running iOS apps on the Mac form factor, and App Containers is a key technology for this. ARM devices have a big advantage over x86 devices for running Android Apps as they don’t need a binary translation. Our support for ARM reflects the work we have been doing for the last three years.”
The beta includes new and advanced features like FPS lock and Long-Features to enable “smooth continuous gameplay, making the new BlueStacks 5 (Beta) a great platform for marathon gaming sessions. With significantly faster boot, install, and launch times, core gamers can now look forward to amazing gameplay experiences for performance-hungry RPGs, strategy, and other games.” In simple terms, it optimizes BlueStacks for long gaming sessions, making it possible to have smooth continuous gameplay over extended periods of time, coupled with the faster boot, install and launch times. A typical BlueStacks user spends an average of 5 hours playing mobile games every day, statistics revealed.
The Eco mode, on the other hand, lets users multitask more efficiently and run multiple instances of the emulator without any adverse effects on performance.
Founded in 2011 by Rosen Sharma, Jay Vaishnav, Harvinder Sawhney, and Suman Saraf, BlueStacks today boasts a global team of over 400 people and over one billion downloads since it was first launched.
“Our product has been downloaded over 1BN times since the first launch. We listen to our over 500 million users around the world and give them what they want. They asked for a truly immersive gameplay experience on an easy-to-use, fast-performing platform that is not demanding on hardware specs. And BlueStacks 5 is giving millions of gamers just that,” said Rosen Sharma, CEO of BlueStacks Inc.
