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UK virtual reality firm Improbable raises $500M
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- quirkot 9y agoHoly moly that's a lot of money
- nmca 9y agoNot a virtual reality company. Cool tech though.
- elvirs 9y agobasically softbank just purchased almost half of this company. nice payday for Andreesen Horowitz though
- blazespin 9y agoYeah, it feels like Softbank is paying out someone and channeling it through this company. Either that or someone with too much money and no sense just finished bingeing RPO.
- drenvuk 9y agoI honestly could not help but laugh at the Softbank for burning their money like this. But what do I know, I haven't raised that kind of funding before, maybe running boxes on aws with persistent storage is too difficult for most game developers. $500MM though? The skeptic in me is saying they're going to write the majority of this down in 5 years.
- denizen_kane 9y agoYup, and they recently wrote down half a billion in Ola and Snapdeal in India. Basically, this investment gives Improbable a 5-10 year time horizon to basically do whatever they want. But they can't just work with every game dev studio under the sun -- they actually have to grow the entire MMO market in order to actually turn a profit for investors.
- pzone 9y agoJuicero investors only pissed away 120 mil. This is four times that.
- lacker 9y agoWow, that's a big jump from their last round a couple years ago with a16z that valued them probably somewhere around 60m-70m. I'm surprised since they don't seem to have real customers yet, just some demo games they partially funded. But it's quite possible the investors know something I don't.
- UK-AL 9y agoVenture capitalists make silly investments all of the time. Countless times its been proven that connections + chrasmatic founder means investers will invest in silly things. Something seriously good + no connections and no charisma means your going to have a bad time. The hardest part is getting noticed.
- faragon 9y agoIf a Telecom like SoftBank has piles of money to spent gambling buying and selling international companies (ARM, Improbable, Supercell, and others), may be there is not enough competition in Japan. Do they have huge profits because of not having enough competition, or because they don't they have to return profits to the investors?
- clock_tower 9y agoWhatever their problem is, they're not the only ones to have it. Japan's been in the doldrums for decades; my understanding is that the country turns a profit, as it were, but doesn't have many opportunities for further investment. Of course, Japanese capital isn't the only capital that chases stupid stuff, especially not right now. We're all Japan these days. :)
- KaoruAoiShiho 9y agoSoftBank is not a telecom, it's a holding company like Berkshire.
- faragon 9y agoYou can buy SoftBank telecom suscriptions and services [1], with its trademark, while e.g. Berkshire don't sell soft-drinks (Berkshire has Coca-Cola stock, but it is not Cola-Cola). So, in my opinion, it is not the same thing. Not even close. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Group
- peterjlee 9y agoI think that's more of a branding thing. Telecom is just one of the things SoftBank does and it just happens to be more visible to consumers. Berkshire owns Geico but you wouldn't call Berkshire a insurance company.
- genericpseudo 9y agoTotally would :-) They're an insurance company which monetizes through operating businesses rather than the traditional model of bancassurance.
- corysama 9y agoI poked my nose into the Improbable's public API docs. What I saw looked like an OK Entity-Component-System straight out of /r/gamedev + some C# serialization so that you could have Systems (aka "functions") run on different nodes on a network. What did I not notice that's worth half a bil?
- bane 9y agoMy understanding is that their twist on the problem is some kind of dynamic sharding of game entities across a cluster of servers. Different games seem to try to deal with this in different ways: - WoW - Several servers hosting copies of the main game world, dedicated party servers for instances - Second Life - A server maps to a specific volumetric "box" that is estimated to be able to handle whatever activity and whatever entities end up in that box - Eve - A server maps to a star system, local game time can slow down to accommodate more activity My understanding is that these guys do something else, where they determine sets of entities (players, NPCs and non-player entities) that are likely to interact and shard off the controlling logic to a server. As the world-state changes, the clustering and mapping of entity groups to servers changes and they have some kind of way to move likely interacting clusters of entities seamlessly within the infrastructure. This has the possibility of supporting huge persistent game worlds with tens of thousands of players at a time without the kinds of ill effects we see with the other approaches.
- revelation 9y agoThere is a reason for that and they call it "the latency numbers every programmer should know".
- chris_io 9y agoThat's pretty accurate, yes. To add to your examples: - Worlds adrift - 100s of instances of Unity running in the background, but it appears to be a single seamless world to players.
- jcfrei 9y agoInteresting, so I guess this still limits the number of entities that can interact with each other on one server but allows for much more non-interacting entities spread out over a large world. But couldn't then lots of players (maybe by accident) meet in one spot and then slow that server down?
- avaer 9y ago> The company believes it has developed revolutionary technology with its Spatial OS operating system ... allowing small developers to create massive simulations without much infrastructure of their own. If that's the case I can't help but feel this is a gross misuse of the VR buzzword in the headline. This is cool stuff, but we call that cloud computing, not VR.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoI think they mean VR in the sense of Second Life, not in the sense of Oculus.
- AndrewKemendo 9y agoSecond Life isn't VR. You could potentially use VR to use SL but they are different technologies. This is typical for technology reporting. edit: Someone want to tell me why this comment is getting hammered?
- rl3 9y agoSecond Life is "virtual reality", just not in the common head-mounted display sense.
- Animats 9y agoThere's Oculus Rift support for Second Life.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoBecause the older meaning of "virtual reality" is similar in meaning to "cyberspace" and not just a euphemism for "3D immersive display". It meant exactly what the phrase implied -- a virtual reality. Displays like the Oculus are a way to experience a virtual reality, but are not full immersion (eg, tactile feedback) and are not the only way we could theoretically experience one. Things like advanced cockpit or vehicle simulators arguably count. (Think things with a mocked up vehicle interior, but windows are replaced by monitors. Often, these are mounted on systems that provide motion feedback.) That meaning has largely been transitioned to the term "virtual world" (eg, in Second Life's marketing materials) because of the terminology collision around 3D headsets. I personally think this is an abuse of marketing that destroyed a useful term to a reductionist view because they wanted to co-opt the interest and goodwill around the long history of literature on the original meaning. Other people feel differently. In your case, you're being downvoted because you're insisting people only use the reductive new meaning of the term, when it was used perfectly sensibly in the older style in the title. (As it would apply, in calling Second Life "VR", since it's a "virtual reality".)
- stuart78 9y agoAm I the only one who read that as "UK virtual reality firm improbably raises $500m"?
- flashman 9y agoThis company has to be satirical. "Improbable"? When it crashes and burns it will all be revealed as art, like that time the KLF burned a million pounds.
- avaer 9y agoThat reduces to the absurd conclusion that otherwise smart people doing $500m investments do zero due diligence and don't care about being legally bound by fiduciary duty.
- ruleabidinguser 9y agoDon't put them on a pedestal
- moron4hire 9y agoI mean, Theranos is only a recent example.
- curiousleo 9y agoMore coverage from other news sites: - Wired: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/improbable-quest-to-build-the-matrix http://www.wired.co.uk/article/improbable-quest-to-build-the... - Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-11/softbank-leads-502-million-investment-in-u-k-tech-startup https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-11/softbank-... - TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/11/improbable-grabs-502m-led-by-softbank-at-a-1b-valuation-for-its-virtual-world-spatial-os/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/11/improbable-grabs-502m-led-... - Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/76529d16-3669-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0fd2e https://www.ft.com/content/76529d16-3669-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0f... - Improbable's own announcement: https://improbable.io/2017/05/11/our-ceo-herman-narula-on-our-series-b-funding https://improbable.io/2017/05/11/our-ceo-herman-narula-on-ou... (Disclosure: I work at Improbable.)
- nivertech 9y agoThey probably pitched SoftBank some Sci-Fi inspired "Simulated World."
- rezashirazian 9y agoI wonder how much of deals like this that don't make sense on its surface is based on behind the scene agreements. "If you invest 100 million in this company we backed two years ago, we'll give you a good deal on this other thing we know you're interested" "If you back our cloud computing company, we'll get our other unicorns to use your CRM technologies"
- objectivistbrit 9y agoI knew one of the founders when they were starting out... one of the other founders is the son of an Indian multi-billionaire, which probably opens a few doors. The founder I knew told me excitedly their vision for a dynamic interactive world - I thought this sounded like pure nerd crack though wasn't sure if it would actually work as a game. (I built a much more basic dynamic world MMO in university and it ended up with huge drama amongst the player base). I think they pivoted to building a platform rather than a game about a year later. Wish I'd stayed in touch now, though that seems to happen a lot in the start-up world.
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- jamii 9y agoTheir previous partnership with the DayZ folks seemed to end with neither side willing/able to explain what killed it - http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-07-ion-the-space-survival-game-by-dean-hall-and-improbable-is-dead http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-07-ion-the-space-s...
- blazespin 9y agoMaybe it's a big bet to create Oasis. 500M is about what it would take, that's for sure. I have to say, linden labs and high fidelity must be pretty excited by all this enthusiasm.
- quocble 9y agoThat's a fitting name. "Improbable"
- mfav 9y agoImprobable's SpatialOS is actually a really, really neat piece of tech. For the first time it's becoming easy for an independent developer to build an MMO type application. With the impending growth of VR (and virtual worlds in general), this is a great candidate for being the foundation of a new generation of apps. Unity has done this for game development. It's the de facto engine of many research projects, video games, and some applications. Unity lacks the ability to scale to large projects, however, which is where SpatialOS comes in. It's for projects that are large in scope (encourages/requires better programming practices) and is literally made for scale. The nice thing is that the SpatialOS tech uses Unity, but doesn't require it. It can be used with any engine if desired.
- UK-AL 9y agoSpatialOS is nice tech, and can help people who don't have distributed systems engineering experience. However a couple distributed systems engineers, dev ops, and games engineers could build something similar. It's not that hard for a team like that to replicate it from what I've seen of the documentation on how to use it. It's defiantly worth something, but for 500 million? You could literally phone up game industry legends and get them build something amazing for that.
- sjg007 9y agoWhat language did they write the os in?
- mattfrommars 9y agoWow, are the founders around 26 year old? They managed to build something like this a virtual reality technology from ground up? Or am I missing something.
- Animats 9y agoThe big question is, what do you do in a big virtual world? There's a "build it and they will come" assumption here. There's Second Life, which peaked years ago. There's "There". There's High Fidelity, which is a higher-resolution Second Life with few users. Most of those can be used with a VR headset. But nobody cares. It's not a technology problem. The current technology is marginally adequate. It's lack of market interest.
- terryf 9y agoVery good point - I guess it could work of someone somehow invented an economy in there that allowed for people to exchange time for money (as in work). No idea what it could be, but in theory - why not, right.
- rnabel 9y agoBesides games, there is potential to run real-world simulations. If you can describe the behaviour of a single agent, you can accurately predict how a large number of such agents, e.g. humans, would act given an environment, say a city. Their blog [0] is showing a few such examples, incl. a simulation of the internet [1]. Making it really easy to develop such simulations could open this tech up for people who have applications for it but can't afford to build this kind of thing from scratch as the companies building things like Second Life. [0] https://improbable.io/news https://improbable.io/news [1] https://improbable.io/2016/03/24/what-we-found-when-we-simulated-the-backbone-of-the-entire-internet-on-spatialos https://improbable.io/2016/03/24/what-we-found-when-we-simul...
- Ntrails 9y agoHow does VR impact agent based modelling techniques? I could be missing something, but real-world simulations seem entirely possible without needing the extra work for visualisation.
- rnabel 9y agoImprobable's SpatialOS is not a VR platform in the Oculus-way. Real-time simulations can be (and are) used as the backbone for super-expansive game universes which are visualised using VR graphics engines (or any other technology, really).
- yomly 9y agoFrom reading the article, it seems like the best case scenario (aside from unforeseen tech advances or alternative usecases) is that online gaming will become easier through cloud platforms and a lot more indie MMOs will start popping up. A bit like mobile games did ~10 years ago. Anyone able to correct me?
- Chris2048 9y agoJust to clarify - Improbable are a simulation company, right? As in, VR would just be one application/interface to their software, but the point is simulating things at scale?
- ggambetta 9y agoYes, that's correct.
- Banderly 9y agoCan anyone from improbable explain why your technology is suitable for simulations? I'm talking about the non real time simulations of cities, traffic etc in your promotional material. If a simulation does not have a real time requirement then what's the advantage of improbable?