Hacker News Reader

Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

How does this relate to the technology that Improbable[^0] have built? I gather that their core tech is a massively distributed object graph designed to support the sort of interactions necessary for an MMO game to operate a global instance rather than shard worlds.

Improbable seem to have gone a bit... off the rails(?) in recent years, diving into Web3, metaverse, and defence contracting, but I assume the core tech is still there.

[^0]: https://www.improbable.io/

View on HN

As someone who glimpsed inside for a little bit during the first days - it's a curse of having too many resources, or too few pressure points. They were well funded from the beginning (read their founding history) and got a lot of additional money throughout the way (well, including but not limited to SoftBank) - so they were free to explore their vision, and gosh did they take their time to do it. They had good ideas coupled with a great engineering team, but the problems they were trying to solve did not exist in the real world - or at the very least - the problems were not important enough that game companies wanted to throw money at it. 1M concurrent online players looks good on paper - but who really cares to play such a game? Or who wants to pay exuberant prices for it when you can have the same amount of fun through sharded servers. So, although their vision materialized to an extent (they had the means to do it), and they had the foresight to know they had to support the engine with enough tooling and partnerships and what not and they built that as well, they were not able to make money out of it. If they set out to set problems that really existed in the world (gaming or otherwise) they could have been profitable by now. Instead, they panicked, restructured and pivoted into the latest hype(s) - they still have the means to go on, but with that culture and "baggage" (they are not nimble like a startup anymore) I give them less than 10% chance to turn a profit ever.

Ah. Lack of Product-Market fit. Classic. Thanks!

They had an incredible pmf - they could sell virtual spaceships in a game that didn't exist! People were hurling money at what they thought the product was going to be. It's just a question of how well they actually delivered on that promise.

That's not an example of product market fit, as the actual product: the game, never existed. The "product" in this case is a dream. "Star Citizen" means something very different to pretty much anyone who has thrown money at them.

My comment was referring to Improbable, not Star Citizen. I'd agree that SC seems to have reasonable product-market fit, but Improbable clearly doesn't if the parent comment is to be believed.

Improbable is basically a joke in the games industry.

I’m not exactly an expert in them or anything, but the last time I looked at them at all (admittedly many years ago) the whole concept of what they do seemed both very expensive and mostly useless for real games.

> Improbable is basically a joke in the games industry.

More so than Star Citizen?

It's not useless tech but they ran out of steam and most likely missed the train.

Unity ECS, which should really be called Unity “2”, sort of obsoleted Improbable’s approach. It is a base on which massive MMOs can be built correctly without the R&D cost of, well, inventing your own ECS architecture.

I don’t know if their Unreal offering is comparable to what they were doing with unreal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com