Well this is disappointing:
London tech startup Improbable saw its operating losses rise by almost two thirds to £63.7m million [i.e. about $82 million] in the year ending May 31 2019... Improbable is currently working on its SpatialOS cloud computing solution, which enables larger and more complex simulations. The poster child was Bossa Studio's Worlds Adrift [pictured], an MMO that permanently marked the consequences of player actions, such as wrecked ships and felled trees, and had a wildlife system that saw creatures continuing to more around and reproduce even when all players were offline.
But the studio announced in May 2019 it would be closing the game after just over a year in Early Access.
This was followed by the closure of Spilt Milk Studios' Lazarus and Mavericks: Proving Grounds developer Automaton Games entering administration. Without these titles, the only visible games applications of SpatialOS are Midwinter Entertainment's Scavengers and NetEase's Nostos.
This despite $500 million in funding! But quick correction to the Gameindustry.biz report above: Seed, the highly ambitious massive strategy MMO from Klang Games (which I consult for on occasion), is another SpatialOS project and is still strongly chugging along toward release, last I heard.
Still, the larger trend is not encouraging:
I was very excited by the breadth and scope of Worlds Adrift, so its end late last year was pretty painful. My bigger disappointment with Improbable -- or rather, the market it was attempting to create -- was at GDC 2019, when a company spokesperson told me there just was little market interest in truly massive, single shard MMOs:
In the short term, however, as Thomas explains, the main goal is to support "all kinds of games", as opposed to single-shard MMOs. In fact, the only single-shard MMO that's been announced for Improbable's Spatial OS cloud platform is Seed, the planet-colonizing game.
Why? For the most part, there's just not as much market interest in single-shard MMOs in the EU and North America -- or as he puts it: "In the Eastern regions, massive interest there, but in the Western regions, yeah, it tends to be more session-based type games."
The problem, perhaps, is that truly huge games like Fortnite can create the sense of being a massive online world without actually being one, and that seems to be enough for most consumers. Whereas when it comes to single-shard MMOs, we can basically just point to Eve Online and Second Life as successful-if-niche examples. And unless/until we get a single-shard virtual world with a concurrency in the hundreds of thousands, not tens of thousands (roughly where Eve & SL cap off), Improbable is basically offering a solution to a problem few people actually asked for.
Hat tip: Reader "V" in the Comments!
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