Man is hope for MMOs – Says his new platform has max load of 1 billion people
Since 2017, the British-Indian entrepreneur Herman Narula has been the hope for fans of MMOs and MMORPGs who want games with tens of thousands of simultaneous players again. Narula is currently working on M-Squared with his company Improbable. The new project is intended to usher in the “metaverse” and will hold up to a billion people at its peak.
What is the hope for MMOs?
- Before 2005, some MMOs were chaotic worlds with tens of thousands of players on one server, all of whom could come together and interact: huge siege battles or raids with several hundred players were possible.
- With WoW the phase of “instancing” began; Although there are still thousands of players on a server, they no longer play together, but in separate rooms, which usually only hold 5 players, but a maximum of between 40 and 100 people. The “massive” has largely disappeared from MMOs. Only in games like EVE Online, which were made before 2005, do thousands of players come together and do something relevant.
- The hope is that such “massive games” will come back. But the technical prerequisites must be created for this: Because currently such “mass gatherings” would overwhelm the technology and a game would crash, bug or become unplayable due to all the lag. EVE Online only manages its mass events because the game speed is drastically throttled.
Hopes for new MMOs and MMORPGs rest on this man
Narula had a billion-dollar idea for ‘massive MMOs’
Why is Narula the hope for MMOs? Herman Narula is the son of a wealthy builder. He studied computer science in Cambridge and developed an idea there.
With the “SpatialOS” technology, it should be possible for even small teams to simulate large, gigantic worlds, a special server technology should make this possible. As early as 2017, he received a cash injection of 502 million US dollars for his newly founded company Improbable, which made Narula a multimillionaire overnight – the value of his company was already estimated at 1 billion dollars. Young companies rated this highly are called “unicorns” because they’re so damn rare.
In 2018, it was said that Improbable wanted to “herald the next generation of MMOs.” Narula wanted to fix missteps in MMO gaming and bring the genre out of its stalemate.
In the years that followed, he continued to work on SpatialOS, attempting to launch several MMOs using this technology. But all these plans have largely failed, the MMOs simply didn’t work, didn’t find a large audience or were already discontinued in development.
Currently he has dedicated himself to a new project: the Metaverse.
Herman Narula’s latest project:
This is his new project now: In a statement, Narula says he’s been working on SpatialOs for years and all the “pain” from that “stupid stupid journey” is now going into the work on his new projects like M² and Morpheus. Its focus is on the meta-verse.
M2 should become a platform on which both huge battles and gigantic parties are possible. With the Morpheus technique one wants to make it possible to change existing worlds or to create new worlds. The result of this technique was compared to “Ready Player One” by early viewers.
In an audio test by M², Narula now shows how it looks and sounds when the sound is activated in his new project.
Here you can see and hear the audio test:
He has big goals for his platform. When asked on Twitter how many people fit in the game. Whether you could put over 500 players in a MMORPG at the same time, answered:
“Our peak capacity is 1 billion: I suppose we can still increase the number of users considerably, but honestly we don’t need it right now. We can do about 15,000. But this is just a voice test with one user.”
MMO visionary now totally in Metaverse and Web3 fever
Will the hopes of MMOs come true? That is hard to say. Narula seems to have abandoned the idea of making MMOs “to play” in recent years, instead dreaming of the Metaverse as a gigantic marketplace full of microtransactions.
Narula believes the “WEb3” will multiply the value of the world’s most powerful companies.
A new project that he associates with seems to fit in with this: the “Otherside” project is already selling virtual properties.
However, games that Narula had high hopes for years ago have failed and he has parted ways with them to focus on new projects.
The MMO Scavengers was considered the best game developed with SpatialOS, but it was not a success either
A new MMO should save the genre – but Scavengers flops on Steam and the dream of huge worlds dies
Reference-mein-mmo.de