Google Teamed Up With Improbable To Enable Developers To Created Massive Online Games At Low Costs
A new company Improbable, based in London created a new Operating System called SpatialOS for game developers. The OS and the software that runs on top of it, allows game companies to create large distributed cloud-based online games. Partnering with Google will allow the new technology access to a vast cloud platform, that will result in highly sophisticated and distributed gaming.
SpatialOS and conjunction with Google's vast infrastructure of distributed computing, will enable game creators access to backend servers that are needed to create complex systems. Even small game developers will be able to create and use the OS to simulate complease objects and environments, such as an entire city. With the new venture Google and Improbable are giving game developers their entire platform to create new online games. Developers can now experiment and deploy massive complex systems and online gaming technology for free.
Historically it has been incredibly difficult to create games and then scale them to a large audience. Game developers had to first invest and create game engines to just begin experimenting with building out basic games. SpatialOS and its suite of tools comes with the prerequisite engines to start building out story lines and then games themselves. In addition Google brings its own array of huge parallel servers and hardware that game developers can use, instead of building out their own infrastructure. Game engines and hardware is the primary stumbling block when it comes to creating complex games especially for small startups without money to spare. Google subsidy is very large and will create an entry point into the gaming space that did not exist previously.
For game developers this is a game changer, that will allow them to concentrate on the game echo system instead of tweaking hardware and operating systems. Development of games that took years to create and set up to run on correct hardware infrastructure was just reduced to just the game development. Since the development takes place already on Google servers, even the deployment headache to hardware is taken out of the equation. Improbable tools and infrastructure allows developers to share and reuse each other's code. The new ecosystem and environment is set up around open source code, which allows ready to use code pieces and active projects to be used in each other’s games.
Because the cost of running SpatialOS is based on usage only, small developers that do not have a large audience yet, can start without large investment. Usage cost only goes up when the audience grows and more gamers join the community. This creates a predictable business model without having to spend and manage hardware/software that comes with building a large complex array of servers. Google and Improbable handle game infrastructure in the background, allowing game developers to create new games and online worlds for gamers to enjoy.