What is this company that was invested 50 million dollars by NetEase and is still cooperating with Tencent Cloud?

Introduction: a possibility to change the way the game is played.

A while back, XISHANJU CEO Guo Weiwei talked to Grapevine: "The cost of MMOs is too high. 150 million, 200 million, basically can't escape this number." After the cost climbed, many manufacturers are trying to innovate and explore the evolution of the category's gameplay.

Unfortunately, Grapevine has yet to observe a product that can bring about breakthrough changes, or perhaps it's just like Guo Weiwei said, "MMO handheld games don't have a set of the best solutions so far. This situation has given some practitioners a new idea: the change of MMO may have to start from the underlying architecture. Improbable, a technology company from the UK, has explored this area.

Figure source: Improbable official website

Simply put, SpatialOS developed by Improbable is not a game engine, but a game development environment based on underlying public cloud resources. With SpatialOS's cloud-based distributed platform, multiplayer game development teams can reduce their investment in the backend of the game, promote rapid experimentation and innovation and efficient development, as well as explore new game models.

To date, Ingenium has received a $50 million strategic investment from NetEase and a $502 million Series B led by SoftBank. What exactly is this company's technology and why is it favored by capital?

Image's Shanghai office

The four challenges of online multiplayer gaming, and the value of Image

Through the four challenges of online multiplayer gaming, we may be able to analyze the value of Image.

The first challenge: cost. The development of a multiplayer online game requires multiple technical staff to set up and manage the game's backend. For some small and medium-sized developers, this cost is hard to afford. SpatialOS provides an online development platform and toolchain to help customers simplify the back-end network infrastructure, thereby lowering the development threshold and accelerating the development process.

Taking MidwinterEntertainment Studio, which is a subsidiary of Intel, as an example, the 30-member studio is developing a multiplayer online shooter product called Scavengers, which contains elements of exploration, survival, and combat. During the development process, they left copy management, player identity and external database integration, as well as networking and server hosting to SpatialOS, saving them money and allowing them to focus more on the game idea itself.

Scavengers

The second conundrum: the limitations of the solution. Today's mainstream multiplayer online game solutions are of two kinds, each with its own advantages and disadvantages: 1) DedicatedServer (DS), the room-based system represented by today's chicken gameplay, and 2) traditional C/S (Client/Server), which is represented by MMORPGs.

Figure source: MJ's sharing at the Unreal event

What SpatialOS is trying to do is to combine the advantages of DS's high fidelity and fast iteration with the advantages of traditional C/S's distributed computing, high concurrency connections, and persistent worlds to bring more possibilities for multiplayer online games from the underlying architecture.

Specifically, SpatialOS adopts a distributed DS architecture, deploying a large number of DS nodes in the cloud, each of which separately simulates a part of the game world. With seamless partitioning technology, players can switch between multiple DS nodes imperceptibly. Compared to the previous DS single-node architecture, this raises the upper limit of the number of players that the game can carry and accommodates more players.

Distributed DS architecture

On top of that, SpatialOS also provides a set of dynamic load balancing development interfaces for developers. That is, when a node is under heavy load, developers can choose to turn off the node's migration function, control player traffic, and dynamically adjust the node's load.

In addition to increasing the maximum number of players to be accommodated, SpatialOS also realizes AI load splitting with its unique DS architecture. Specifically, by implementing different logic through different 'layers', a certain play system can be simulated by different backend service processes (simulation layer). Since SpatialOS allows the number of service processes to be added linearly, developers can then add more gameplay content by adding more layers.

An illustration of SpatialOS AI load-splitting technology

Simply put, with this technology, more NPCs, more complex AI systems, and richer in-game systems can be added to the game, and even the logic of a tree or a cat can be realized in separate layers. This provides more design space for game developers.

Take Halo 5's Warzone mode, for example. The maximum number of players in this mode is 24, and there are corresponding limits on the number of AIs, vectors, and targets to ensure that it doesn't break through the server carrying capacity cap and affect the gaming experience. For this reason, Halo 5 has simplified the AI logic, and the AI's intelligence or reaction level is weaker than that of the campaign mode. And with SpatialOS' distributed DS architecture, this limitation will no longer exist.

It's worth mentioning that in the latest version of SpatialOS Unreal Engine 2020.2 released yesterday, Ingenuity has once again improved AI load splitting. Currently in a 3x3 kilometer map, they have been able to achieve a 5:1 ratio of intelligent AI to player.

Improvements in AI split effectiveness

In summary, with SpatialOS, ideally millions of players can interact more in the same big, no-load world. Currently, SpatialOS has been applied to a number of games, including Scavenger, NetEase's The Homeland, and Yumi Entertainment's Codename: Odyssey.

The third challenge: Multiplayer online games often require repeated testing and high innovation costs for gameplay. For this reason, SpatialOS provides a cloud platform and service test distribution tools that can help developers conduct scaleable playability tests as early as possible in the early stages of development.

Visualization testing tools

Benefiting from this, developers can see the effects of visualization adjustments in real time as they tweak and test the game, adjusting common parameters such as weapon damage values without the need for a separate game patch. With SpatialOS, game teams can even change the core gameplay midway through the game without changing the underlying architecture, says Ingenious.

The fourth conundrum: All-platform and globalization. Multiplayer online games are now moving in the direction of multi-platform and multi-region, but some small and medium-sized vendors don't have the ability to do this. For this reason, Inmax and its professional server hosting company zeuz have deployed cloud servers around the world to provide developers with cross-platform development, global deployment and overseas support.

Inmax's overseas server deployment

Inmax has also developed specialized GDKs for Unreal and Unity engines, which are commonly used by developers, and the newly released version 2020.2 of SpatialOS Unreal Engine has officially opened the preview version of handheld game development, which is available for development teams to develop and test their games on iOS and Android. development and testing on iOS and Android. It can be said that the ultimate goal of SpatialOS is to make the production of multiplayer games less complicated and at the same time provide more possibilities for the development of multiplayer online games.

The possibilities brought about by Inmax

According to the official website of Inmax, since its establishment in 2012, Inmax has taken over zeuz, a game server hosting service company, and The MultiplayerGuys, a multiplayer game service company, by means of investment and mergers and acquisitions, etc. They now have a global network of more than 600 game servers, and have a network of more than 600 game servers. They now have over 600 employees globally, with offices in the US, Canada and China, in addition to their UK headquarters in London.

Inmax's growth potential has also been recognized by the capital market. Up to now, the cumulative amount of financing of Yingma has reached 602 million U.S. dollars, of which the B round of financing was led by Japan's SoftBank Group and followed by AndreessenHorowitz, Harbour Investments, etc., amounting to 502 million U.S. dollars.

In the past two years, Mighty and China's game market is very closely linked, for example, they have obtained NetEase 50 million U.S. dollars of strategic investment, and with Tencent Cloud launched the "Mighty Cloud Program", plans to deploy in the Tencent cloud through the SpatialOS developed by the game developers and on-line game on the Tencent cloud, the total value of the game developers, to provide a total value of about 72 million yuan of support.

Tencent Cloud Vice President Jixi A and Peter Lipka, co-founder and Asia CEO of Majestic

Earlier this year, Majestic Shanghai also participated in a signing ceremony organized by the Shanghai Municipal Government as one of the major foreign-funded projects stationed in Shanghai's Jing'an District and was recognized by the Shanghai Municipal Government as the regional headquarters for China.

Looking at these technology shares and capital movements alone, Grapevine seems to see yet another possibility for the gaming industry. It's not as mind-blowing as the Unreal 5 demo, but it does give me a new vision for the future of gaming: thousands of people exploring a real world like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wilderness.

Of course, there's always a risk to innovation: SpatialOS requires the use of public cloud resources, and cloud-based game development itself is still in the early stages of development. On a positive note, today's discussions and explorations of cloud gaming are currently quite heated in China, and vendors such as Unity are trying to utilize cloud services to lower the barriers to development in the cloud for game developers, which may mean that this direction is viable.

These possibilities, in my opinion, are the greatest joys that the game industry can bring to those who work in it.

Readers can also get a more intuitive and in-depth understanding of the latest features offered by SpatialOS version 2020.2 by visiting the Ingenium booth (Booth W4B705 at the Shanghai New International Expo Center) during ChinaJoy 2020 and CGDC.