Are you the type of person who enjoys gaming, but doesn't really have the time, patience, or perhaps the hard drive space to install and play games on your computer?  Have you ever wished that you could just play games straight from your browser?  Would you be interested in playing and sharing games with other people straight through the Internet, on your website, or on your social networking site?  Are you a game developer who is looking for a relatively inexpensive and wide-reaching platform to promote your titles?  If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, then you should definitely check out the newly updated gaming service called InstantAction.  Read on to learn about how InstantAction works and how it may just change the face of the gaming industry as we know it.

What exactly is InstantAction?

In 2000, a company by the name of GarageGames was founded.  The main purpose of the company was to develop and provide cross-platform technologies and tools for everything from video game engines and game publishing to web portals.  In 2007, Interactive Corporation and Barry Diller made a majority investment in GarageGames, and it was shortly after this investment that GarageGames announced the development of InstantAction.  InstantAction has been developed as a web-based gaming platform that allows you to play video games straight from your Internet browser.  The open beta for InstantAction.com was released on March 31, 2008, and there have been a number of updates since then.  The most notable update is also the most recent.  InstantAction was taken down on March 13, 2010, to implement updates that would allow for embedded games on practically any website that allows for HTML string inputs.  On May 2nd, InstantAction finally went live with its latest update, allowing you to embed the InstantAction gaming platform in your website, your Facebook profile, and practically any other website with support for HTML embedding.

How does InstantAction work?

Now, InstantAction is definitely an exciting development in the gaming industry as it changes the way that we can play, distribute, and share games through the Internet.  Basically, to perform web-based gaming, InstantAction makes use of what is known as "chunking," which is the concept of having a remote computer download chunks of a game so that you can play it through your browser.  In other words, there's no need to download and install an entire game.  You can play games on the go, continue saved games from any capable machine, and embed games on your website all through your browser.  Here are some other things you should know about how InstantAction works:

-  To play a specific game on your browser, the machine must meet the system requirements of that particular game.
-  You can only play games that are made for the operating system of the computer you are using.
-  Developers can have great control over the distribution of their titles, boosting sales, and having a variety of business models to choose from when dealing with InstantAction.