Improbable Gets Half a Billion Dollars to Create Truly Massive MMOs

To be honest I'm more excited about this than just about any VR-related funding news:

Today, Improbable has announced a $502m Series B funding round, led by SoftBank. Our Series A investors Andreessen Horowitz and Horizons Ventures are both joining this round with follow-on investments, and we are very grateful to all our investors for their support...   At Improbable we are working towards a future in which participatory virtual worlds and simulations of unimaginable scale become ubiquitous. We think this is potentially as exciting and important a technical development as work on AI or the Internet of Things. We think that the games of today are an incredibly exciting medium, but also that they will evolve into massive worlds and offer meaningful experiences for a much broader segment of society than previously imagined. It’s our goal to solve the critical technical problems and unlock that future.

We've been tracking Improbable on New World Notes since Day Z's lead creator joined the team in 2015, and also MMOs/virtual worlds running on the Improbable platform, especially Worlds Adrift, a single-shard MMO. Given the money and the team, this could be the company that finally realizes that early dream we talked about so much at Linden Lab, to create a single-shard virtual world with hundreds of thousands or even millions of concurrent players.  (Except without, you know, all the epic lag and grey goo.)

Hat tip:Adrian Cutler.

Comments

[Wolkenreiter]

I've been lucky enough to receive a key for the Worlds Adrift alpha playtest, and while I do enjoying playing it immensely and find it makes for a refreshingly novel and intense experience, currently it's perfect proof how performance and "sim" crossings could also be much worse than they are in SL... The whole game freezing completely for up to 10seconds while traversing between island is the rule, rather than the exception and whole areas running in slow motion once they get littered by abandonded ships and parts have become pretty much normal over time.
As I said, I love that game, and hope the soon-to-be-released public beta will make a major leap forward in performance, I do not agree that Improbable manages to magically fix the issues we experience in SL. Also, keep in mind that Worlds Adrift is NOT a streaming environment, all the content (islands, ship components) is downloaded to your hard drive in advance and just the particular combinations and positions of actual assets get managed and synchronized on the server...
Also, sporting numbers like $500m, anyone else feels the Valley has completely lost link with reality? I see another crisis on the horizon once some of the current hype bubbles burst...

[sirhc deSantis]

Interesting, its a wonderfully meaningless number to be throwing around so probably about right, in valley terms. Little out of touch so how many units of one of those top AAA games get shifted by comparison? They are what 50 bucks apiece? Also curious - how much has SL actually cost the lab over all these years?

[Carlos Loff]

They should buy SL and make it better, no need to invent the wheel again

[Carlos Loff]

It is so much money - It reminds me how much Star Citizen has done with only about 200 millions, for example - How many bright brains would grab 100.000$ and startup revolutionary projects, and these giys, nothing personal against them, just get half billion - The sponsors could have a contest for creating the best virtual platforms and pay 1 million to the best 500 pitchers - OMG