Improbable CEO shows off M² tech test, claims the platform has ‘peak capacity’ of 1B users

May 23, 2022 10:00 AM

Improbable CEO Herman Narula is once again making some pretty big claims on Twitter. A video demonstration shared last week (and posted on YouTube shortly after) offers a look at a tech test for M², the company’s self-described “network of interoperable web3 metaverses,” operating at some pretty big scales – if Narula is to be believed.

The test features a claimed number of 430 people in one area using audio chat all at once, though visually it looks like a few dozen; Narula notes that graphics are placeholder, but also lauds the use of spatial audio and full occlusion along with handling the amount of chatters. The demonstration by itself is pretty impressive; Narula says that that the M² platform can handle a billion people at “peak capability” but then walking that back to “about 15,000” when asked about MMO-like concurrency. “We can do about 15000,” he says. “This is just a voice test with a few testers.”

A later tweet from Narula bemoans the “pain” and “stupidly difficult journey” of developing SpatialOS, Improbable’s initial platform built for MMORPG devs, but he also says that development time is what’s led to the current innovations of his new babies, M² and Morpheus.

Notably, the tech demo footage tags the official Twitter account of Otherside, the supposed in-development MMORPG being built by Yuga Labs that was set to launch in April but never did. We point this out as both a potential partnership between Yuga and Improbable as well as bring up the fact that Yuga was unable to handle NFT transactions at a scale of about 10,000; the network problems were ultimately associated with ETH transactions, but maybe take the claims of player load with a grain of salt all the same.

Readers will recall that Herman Narula first entered our radar in 2016 with the introduction of SpatialOS, which brought in a tremendous amount of investor cash, including half a billion bucks from SoftBank. At the time, Narula suggested his plan was to rescue the MMO genre from what he called a “nuclear winter“; indeed, he was already floating hypotheticals about one billion-person game virtual worlds back in 2017. The list of MMOs that have actually launched using SpatialOS, however, is terribly tiny, and Improbable had recently been selling off its game studios.