Uncovering "Monkey Land" Otherside Developer Improbable: Founded by a Cambridge Graduate, Invested by NetEase

Original Title: "Who is the Developer of Monke? Even NetEase Has Invested"

Author: BlockBeats

Recently, Yuga Labs' metaverse project Otherside completed its "First Trip" closed beta test, attracting numerous players (Voyagers, owners of Otherdeed land) with a peak of over 4,000 concurrent users.

During this test, Voyagers could participate in various activities, navigate through game venues specifically designed for testing, experience actions like walking, running, jumping, and dancing, or showcase their owned NFTs. Although the features are not yet fully developed, the overall response from players to this closed beta is positive, especially considering that Otherside was officially launched only in May this year and is developed by Improbable.

Improbable is one of the most well-funded video game development companies in Europe in recent years, having received investments from a16z, SoftBank, and NetEase. With Improbable's technology, Otherside will support over 15,000 users interacting in a single virtual space, experiencing rich, immersive gameplay powered by AI and physics, while players will overcome barriers of scale, bandwidth, and rendering, creating new gameplay and social possibilities. BlockBeats will introduce readers to other noteworthy aspects of Improbable.

The Metaverse Platform Founded by Cambridge Graduates

Ten years ago, computer science major Herman Narula met Improbable's other co-founder Rob Whitehead while both were studying at Cambridge University. Narula has always been fascinated by games and the online world, believing that games are a part of their generation, and the relationships built in games are important to him. Meanwhile, Whitehead was making money by selling items in the online game "Second Life."

As enthusiastic gamers, both Narula and Whitehead wanted to understand why the complexity of the games they were playing was limited. Why couldn't more players play together at the same time? What was hindering the scalability of games?

Upon graduating in 2013, they, along with a third co-founder Peter Lipka, launched Improbable, aiming to solve this problem.

From the beginning, Improbable aimed to create large-scale games that could bring many players into a single world. Despite significant advancements in visual effects, the amount of information that different players and entities could exchange in games remained limited, presenting a complex data and networking challenge.

Narula explained that adding 10 players in a game means sending 100 times more data from the server to the client. They needed to render a large number of animated characters on screen, each with unique animation states and potential custom settings, which required building a server architecture capable of handling the density of game logic, AI, and world physics, while still being recognized by designers and programmers.

"As graduates of Cambridge, we naively thought we could solve this problem quickly, perhaps in about a year. However, in reality, it took us about 10 years to build the solution we envisioned," Narula stated.

Over the years, Improbable focused on the fundamental technical challenges of scale and complexity in game worlds, aiming to handle low-latency, high-capacity, high-throughput data replication, which means that potentially 10,000 players could join a virtual space with more advanced simulated content.

By 2015, Improbable successfully raised $20 million in Series A funding from a16z, with participation from Horizons Ventures and Temasek. In 2017, Improbable secured $502 million in Series B funding led by SoftBank, with follow-on investments from Horizons Ventures and a16z, reaching a valuation of $2 billion, making Improbable one of the most well-funded video game development companies in Europe in recent years.

Recognizing Improbable's immense technical potential, NetEase made a strategic investment in 2018 to enhance its competitiveness in providing game development technology for Asian market game developers, helping to create and publish games that go beyond single-server architecture limitations based on its game development platform SpatialOS.

Multiplayer Game Service IMS

Additionally, Improbable is keen on helping game developers build their own interactive virtual worlds. From its first product SpatialOS to acquiring online game hosting company zeuz and multiplayer co-development studio The Multiplayer Guys for game server operations and orchestration, Improbable is continuously advancing and enhancing the services it offers to developers.

Since creating multiplayer games is a complex process, Improbable aims to alleviate the development tasks that may hinder the creation of original multiplayer games and quality content. Therefore, it launched the Improbable Multiplayer Services (IMS) brand, designed to provide game developers with backend technology and professional services for creating online multiplayer games as a service, addressing common development challenges.

By integrating existing products—SpatialOS network engine and zeuz game server operations and orchestration—with further backend and professional services aimed at developing and operating GaaS games, IMS will support developers across more domains, eliminating the burden of evaluating, customizing, and integrating third-party products, allowing them to focus on creativity.

Moreover, to assist developers struggling due to incompatibility with the new engine and services launched by Unity, Improbable partnered with Epic Games to launch a $25 million joint fund to help developers transition to more open engines, services, and ecosystems.

In terms of security, by combining innovative technologies in gaming and digital entertainment with computational modeling, AI, and data analytics, including collaboration with Microsoft's security and intelligence business, Improbable's security division provides cutting-edge synthetic environments with immense scale and complexity. These simulations enhance defenses by allowing users to explore complex security threats in virtual worlds before taking action in the real world.

Based on this, Improbable is trusted by studios creating some of the largest and most innovative Web3, blockchain-supported, and GaaS multiplayer games. It provides a new, open, and continuously expanding ecosystem of interoperable products, services, and expertise, supporting around 60 game publishers globally, including half of them being AAA studios, among which is Yuga Labs.

With IMS, Improbable is changing the game by providing end-to-end solutions that combine technology and professional services, enabling developers to offload tasks like evaluating and integrating products, freeing up time and internal skills to focus on creating outstanding games.

Creating a Metaverse for Yuga Labs

Today, more and more people believe that the metaverse is the future of gaming.

The metaverse is a massive expansion of society, essentially democratizing a new reality that allows everyone to add and create value. People build interconnected user experiences in the virtual world of the metaverse, meaningfully expanding their life potential and providing new opportunities for economic, social, and cultural transformation; at the same time, these enriching online experiences will increasingly permeate people's daily lives, further enhancing live interactive events, entertainment, and social spaces.

As companies and individuals around the world begin to create, experiment, and engage in increasingly complex immersive experiences in the metaverse, Improbable, with a decade of experience, will provide the necessary infrastructure, including technology, expertise, creativity, and services, to help users unlock the potential of virtual worlds and the metaverse.

Yuga Labs' well-known metaverse project Otherside is a game that is currently being developed with technology support from Improbable, creating a gamified, interoperable metaverse that combines MMORPG and Web3-supported virtual world mechanics, opening doors to new experiences in gaming, entertainment, and art.

In this environment, NFTs can become playable characters, allowing thousands of people to play together simultaneously. Yuga Labs will also provide an SDK that allows creators to make items for Otherside and sell them in the game marketplace: this includes not just characters, but also clothing, tools, structures, and even games.

In this regard, Improbable CEO Narula stated that Otherside will disrupt people's thinking while also overturning decades of ideas about games and open platforms.

Interoperable Metaverse Network M²

In April of this year, Improbable also announced the launch of a new project M² (MSquared), an interoperable metaverse network designed to create interconnected virtual worlds and experiences for users to socialize, play games, attend concerts, and create value over time.

The M² network will combine Improbable's Morpheus technology with new services aimed at supporting interoperability, digital asset commerce, and Web3 governance, bringing together companies, existing communities, and fans from sports, music, fashion, and entertainment, enabling them to interact in dense virtual spaces with unprecedented fidelity and supporting integration with existing worlds and new projects.

The Morpheus technology is an evolution of Improbable's early SpatialOS product and is central to M². This technology addresses the challenges of density and player presence in real-time online experiences, enhancing social interaction and presence within virtual spaces, thereby creating outstanding experiences in games and live events, as well as building, operating, and servicing new virtual worlds for other enterprises in the open metaverse.

Furthermore, Morpheus allows over 10,000 real users to interact in high-fidelity, low-latency environments at the same time and place. The platform now processes over 350 million communication operations (ops) per second and was first demonstrated in live events with thousands of players in 2021.

For instance, in the multiplayer game Scavengers developed by the former Improbable studio Midwinter Entertainment, the experimental game mode ScavLab showcased Morpheus technology, allowing over 4,000 people to interact synchronously in a shared game world. Additionally, in a metaverse fan event with K-Pop star AleXa last November, fans could dance on a massive virtual stage and interact with the singer, experiencing groundbreaking virtual experiences.

Moreover, M² has completed $150 million in funding, led by a16z and the SoftBank Vision Fund, with a post-investment valuation of $1 billion. The funding will be used to develop this blockchain and metaverse technology-based video game.

Currently, Improbable is realizing new types of shared immersive experiences that will accelerate various emerging user behaviors, including fair player-managed communities, complex player-driven economies, and open developer-driven experiences, all of which are gradually taking root in the Web3 world. Improbable may pioneer a new way to connect Web2 and Web3 across interconnected virtual world entertainment, creation, and value discovery.