In May 2017, software entrepreneur Herman Narula’s (34) company Improbable received a $502 million investment. The company wanted to build the future of MMOs and MMORPGs with the technology SpatialOS. The CEO promised to create huge, fully simulated worlds. 6 years later, in January 2023, little is left of the dream, says our author Schuhmann.
What did the man get so much money for?
Future of MMOs: Technology should create gigantic online worlds
1 billion people in a virtual world would be their own country
This is what the man said at the time: After the huge investment, Narula hit the big notes. He said (via gamesindustry):
A lot of people don’t want to believe that we really think games matter. But they are incredibly important and they are becoming more and more important: Hypothetically, one day: If 100 million or 1 billion players go into a virtual world at the same time, then it would no longer be a game, it would be a country. That would be incredibly important for the world […]
Narula wanted to take MMOs out of “nuclear winter” and into the future
This was his motivation: Narula said he developed the technique for the love of games. Such games are not about escaping the real world, but about becoming more empathetic and clever by visiting virtual worlds. Visiting a virtual world is like a journey and you know that traveling educates.
I want the industry to believe in online games again. We’ve been through a kind of nuclear winter, especially in MMOs, and that was partly due to technology, partly due to gameplay and customer expectations. But now the time has come to revive the idea of how meaningful these worlds can be. […]
In 2019 he founded a studio in Edmonton, Canada. Today we know that the survival RPG “Nightingale” was created there. As he said in an interview (via Game Informer):
If you look at MMORPGs, there are very few in development, even though they bring in a fifth of all revenue in the industry.
The industry really has a blind spot. That’s why we think if we build a team here with so much experience, then we can take that as a goal.
This is Nightingale today:
Nightingale shows new trailer with PvE gameplay, looks more and more like Valheim
All games with SpatialOS fail or are canceled – there is little hope left
So how did it really go? Unfortunately not good at all. Improbable, in its early days, around 2017, tried to really fit their tech into “small development teams” who wanted to create massive worlds. But that turned out to be a flop:
The company later made a strategy change and bought gaming studios themselves in an attempt to implement their visions. But even that has not borne fruit so far:
NFT and Metaverse instead of the future of MMORPGs
Do you keep trying? No, Narula’s 2017 dream of reviving MMOs seems to have been abandoned by now.
Wundertechnik lets 10,000 players fight and celebrate in one place
Like so many others, the company has switched to crypto and Web3.
Since April 2022, the company has been working on “M-Square”, a web 3 metaverse project: The idea is to create a huge virtual meeting space in which developers can then integrate NFT or other digital objects.
This is apparently intended to serve as a space to hold virtual concerts or events.
With “Otherside” the company also has a typical “gamified metaverse” with NFTs in the works:
Man is hope for MMOs – Says his new platform has max load of 1 billion people