London-based Improbable received a $50 million investment from Chinese developer and publisher NetEase (which recently also invested even more into Bungie).
Speaking with GamesIndustry, Improbable CEO Herman Narula talked about the deal as well as Improbable's objective to power gaming's 'trillion dollar' industry with its SpatialOS cloud infrastructure.
It is a small minority investment in the company, but it is quite significant because we've been trying to broaden our pool of partners to encompass Asia more effectively, especially China because it's the largest games market in the world.
We reached a point earlier this year where our technology matured to the point where we feel comfortable and were really engaging with top end developers like NetEase. We were quite happy and impressed that [they were] really excited about our technology.
It's so exciting for us because they're one of the best online games developers on the planet. They've got hundreds of millions of users. Not as many people in the industry might know their name as well as Tencent, which operates in the same market, but their engineering talent is second to none and having them as a customer is extremely exciting. We're already getting brilliant feedback and we're in co-development on some cool products.
The explosion of new gameplay that we think distributed computation and platforms like ours can bring is really hard to fathom. As a business, we're completely focused on this. We think this is a trillion dollar industry and we want to be the infrastructure for it. Partnerships like this continue to make other developers go 'hey, let's go do this thing', whether with us or even competing with us, we think it's for the best for everyone.
Soon there might be a huge wave of online games powered by Improbable's SpatialOS, such as Worlds Adrift, Lazarus, Fractured, Seed, Mavericks, Scavengers and the next games by Jagex and Darewise.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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