The British-Indian entrepreneur Herman Narula has been the hope for fans of MMOs and MMORPGs since 2017, who wish for games with tens of thousands of simultaneous players again. Currently, Narula is working with his company Improbable on M-Squared. The new project is supposed to usher in the “metaverse” and can accommodate up to one 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 a server, all coming together and interacting: massive siege battles or raids with several hundred players were possible.
- With WoW began the phase of “instancing”; although there are still thousands of players on one server, they no longer play together, but in separated spaces, usually only accommodating 5 players, but at most between 40 and 100 people. The “massive” has largely disappeared from MMOs. Only in games like EVE Online, which were created before 2005, are truly thousands of players coming together and doing something relevant.
- The hope is that such “massive games” will return. But for that, the technical prerequisites must be created: Because currently, such “mass gatherings” would overwhelm the technology and a game would crash, bug, or become unplayable due to lag. EVE Online only manages its mass events because it drastically reduces the game speed.
Narula had a billion-dollar idea for “massive MMOs”
Why is Narula the hope for MMOs? Herman Narula is the son of a wealthy construction entrepreneur. He studied computer science at Cambridge and developed an idea there.
With the technology “SpatialOS,” it should be possible for small teams to simulate large gigantic worlds; a special server technology should make that possible. As early as 2017, he received a funding boost 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 that are valued this high are called “unicorns” because they are so damn rare.
In 2018, it was said, Improbable wanted to “usher in the next generation of MMOs.” Narula aimed to correct misdevelopments in MMO gaming and lead the genre out of its stagnation.
In the following years, he continued to work on SpatialOS, trying to launch several MMOs with this technology. But all these plans largely failed; the MMOs simply did not work, did not find a large audience, or were already discontinued in development.
Currently, he has dedicated himself to a new project: the metaverse.
The latest project of Herman Narula:
This is now his new project: In a statement, Narula says he has worked on SpatialOS for years and all the “pain” from this “ridiculously dumb journey” is now flowing into the work of his new projects like M² and Morpheus. His focus is on the metaverse.
M² is supposed to become a platform, where both massive battles and gigantic parties are possible. With the Morpheus technology, it will be possible to change existing worlds or create new worlds. The result of this technology has been compared by initial viewers to “Ready Player One.”
In an audio test of M², Narula is now showing how it looks and sounds when the sound is activated in his new project.
Here is the audiotest to see and hear:
For his platform, he has big ambitions. When asked on Twitter how many people can fit in the game, whether they could bring over 500 players simultaneously into an MMORPG, he replied:
Our peak capacity is 1 billion: I assume we can significantly increase the user count, but to be honest, we do not really need that right now. We can handle about 15,000. But that is just a stress test with a few users.
MMO visionary now totally into the metaverse and Web3 fever
Will the hope for MMOs be fulfilled? It is hard to say. Narula seems to have given up on the idea of making MMOs for “playing” in recent years, instead dreaming of the metaverse as a gigantic marketplace full of microtransactions.
Narula believes that “Web3” will multiply the value of the most powerful companies in the world again.
This seems to fit into a new project he is associated with: The project “Otherside” is already selling virtual land.
Games that Narula had high hopes for years ago have failed, and he has distanced himself from them to focus on new projects.
Thus, the MMO Scavengers was considered the best game developed with SpatialOS, but it also did not achieve success:
