The Chinese internet tech company NetEase has made a $50 million investment in SpatialOS dev Improbable, picking up what a press release describes as a “small stake” in the company in the process.
For Improbable, however, the partnership represents a way for the company to bring its cloud-based platform to both China and developers in the Asia Pacific region, something that is typically difficult to do for a Western company.
SpatialOS itself is a cloud-based technology geared toward developers making online games. The platform divides the computational work of managing online worlds and divides it up between a battalion of cloud-based servers, allowing developers to create more vast and persistent online worlds. So far, the tech has been used in the recently released MMO game Worlds Adrift and is used by the upcoming AI-driven MMO title Seed as well.
As part of the partnership, NetEase itself has announced that it will be releasing at least one SpatialOS-powered game in the future, though it won’t officially reveal the title itself until later this year.