UK studio Improbable announced today that it’s partnered with Google to allow video game developers to develop games using Google’s Cloud and Improbable’s SpatialOS tech — “without charge up to the point of commercial release.”
If Improbable and SpatialOS sound familiar, that’s because they’ve been popping up in relation to a bunch of MMORPGs and fringe MMOs in the last couple of years: Worlds Adrift, Chronicles of Elyria, Metaworld, and Ion are all based on SpatialOS tech, which is specifically intended to help modern persistent virtual worlds — MMORPG — get off the ground.
“Creating and running massive simulations that solve those problems on a public cloud requires a kind of distributed supercomputing – with potentially thousands of cores working together. This is what SpatialOS makes possible, by distributing work automatically and intelligently across hundreds or thousands of servers. […] SpatialOS gives any developer the ability to define and build simulated worlds which can accommodate thousands of simultaneous players in a single world at the same time, exceeding the usual limits of what a conventional game server can do. These simulations are persistent and support the kind of complex computation needed to bring new game ideas to life, while enabling a development methodology that supports extremely rapid iteration.”
“We read books and we cry, we laugh, we’re horrified, we fall in love — those experiences matter to people,” Improbable founder Herman Narula told Wired earlier this year. “Online worlds need to evoke the same thing. In the last few years we’ve seen the abysmal failure of games attempting to mimic the World of Warcraft model of repeating scripted content. The average gamer age is 37, the industry is worth a hundred billion dollars, and people are hungry for deeper experiences. They want their actions to make a difference.”
