wanted to bring higher scale, more interesting networking, easier to develop workflows, to every type of multiplayer game – why just restrict ourselves to one type? “So in doing that, and just listening to and working with more and more customers, we realised that people have a lot of problems that have nothing to do with networking. Just running and hosting your game, that’s pretty hard. People want and need a lot of support with a lot of other multiplayer problems.” And that’s why the company is now launching what it calls Improbable Multiplayer Services (IMS). “It’s our way of going ‘Okay, why don’t we just solve the key multiplayer problems that many people in the industry are facing’,” Narula explains. “Where people want to do really impressive things with really high scale, well great, we’ve got the technology to support that. But when what they want is just a more efficient way of running their multiplayer game, a better operating platform and the ability to leverage bare metal in the cloud, all kinds of common industry problems, we have those solved as well. “And what we’ve found is that we get into relationships with developers who come to us to solve one problem. And when we do that well, they want to work with us on more problems. And so there’s a really nice kind of flow of relationships and deals.” And that greater integration into the broader industry can then be a trojan for its grander plans. “Before we could only really work with a very small number of people in the industry. Who were building very specific kinds of games, and we had to work with them in a very narrow way. It just didn’t work out very well, it’s better to be a partner that can do all of these things for someone. “And with our new deck, we’re taking a very modular approach, rather than having to adopt everything. As you see with Scavengers, which in a sense is using one part of our technology for the game session, and then a different part for Scavlab. Theoretically, you can drop that part into another game, which maybe wasn’t even
running on Spatial OS for the main game. That flexibility, that incremental adoption, we think is really where we need to be, in order to serve customers better.” IMS isn’t totally new, it’s more an umbrella brand for a wide range of services that Improbable has been (somewhat quietly) providing for some time. Two acquisitions form key parts of IMS, explains Narula. “One was Zeuz, which became part of our hosting and operations solution, which is kind of core to everything else that we provide, and it allows people to buy that stuff by itself, which is great, because again that means we can work with more and more developers. “And on the co-dev side, we acquired the Multiplayer Guys. And we’ve built that out, we’ve been able to work with studios that have problems, even when those problems don’t necessarily involve our deck. And that means we can start relationships and solve problems with people. It’s growing really, really fast. Actually, it’s one of the fastest growing parts of our business.” Co-dev is often a secretive business, but Improbable is able to speak on some projects the team, now numbering 150, have worked with. 2K, Zenimax Online Studios and Arkane Studios are mentioned, plus it contributed to Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout. Primarily helping with multiplayer networking, but also other elements, such as technical art. “It’s very specialised. So we work on helping people with multiplayer networking, back end and other kinds of problems. The very same problems that Improbable Multiplayer Services helps solve. So there’s a really nice synergy there,” says Narula. Although honestly we’re just thinking about a 10,000 player game of Fall Guys at that point. Narula continues: “We think by positioning ourselves that way and supporting the industry as it shifts towards more ambitious games, that’s the best way to fulfil our original vision. “It’s sort of the evil master plan in a way,” he smiles. “We want to be able to solve multiple problems that people have at any level of the stack, if they want a place to host, if they need support and engineers, if they want to be more ambitious. We want to be the company that helps them with all of those things.” And helping it is. “On the hosting side, I think there are 10m monthly active users across
24 | MCV/DEVELOP June 2021
20-25 MCV 969 Improbable_v5FINAL.indd 24
27/05/2021 15:33
