Improbable (company)

Improbable Worlds Limited (commonly referred to as Improbable) is a British multinational technology company founded in 2012, and headquartered in London, England. It makes distributed simulation software for video games and corporate use.[2]

Improbable
Type of businessPrivate
Founded15 April 2012 (2012-04-15)[1]
Headquarters10 Bishops Square, London, E1 6EG, UK [2]
Founder(s)Herman Narula
Peter Lipka
Rob Whitehead [3]
IndustryCloud computing
Information technology
Video games
Employees600+[4]
ParentIndependent
URLimprobable.io

The company has created SpatialOS, a computation platform that enables the creation of massive simulations and virtual worlds for use in video games and corporate simulations. The firm partnered with Google in December 2016.[5] The software was released into open beta in February 2017.[6]

In 2018, Improbable founded a branch office in Edmonton, Alberta, in western Canada. Aaryn Flynn – a former general manager at BioWare Edmonton – was hired to serve as the general manager of Improbable's North American operations anchored out of Edmonton.[7]

The company received an investment of $500 million from SoftBank in May 2017.[8] The first games built on the technology were Worlds Adrift by Bossa Studios and Lazarus by Spilt Milk Studio,[9] but both games have since been shut down.[10]

Its founder, Herman Narula, is the son of Harpinder Singh Narula.[11] The company was founded in 2012 and run by Narula and his colleagues from his parents' Hertfordshire house, Hyver Hall, through the end of 2013.[12]

January 2019, saw a public conflict between Improbable and Unity Technologies, the developers of the Unity game engine. Improbable asserted that a change in the Terms of Service for Unity made in December 2018 would make it illegal to use SpatialOS, affecting several existing games and ones under development. Unity countered that Improbable had been in breach of the Terms of Service for more than a year and had been notified of this, and the change would only affect Improbable and not those developers of games already using it. Improbable partnered with Epic Games, the makers of the competing Unreal Engine to provide a US$25 million fund to help developers that may be affected by this change to more open solutions.[13][14]

List of games

References
  1. "Improbable - Crunchbase". Crunchbase. Retrieved 2017-05-05.
  2. "Improbable Website".
  3. "The Leap 100" (PDF). City A.M. Retrieved 5 May 2017.
  4. "Big Bang Theory", Edge, p. 10, 27 April 2017, retrieved 8 May 2017
  5. "Google's Improbable Deal to Recreate the Real World in VR". Wired. 2016-12-13. Retrieved 4 May 2017.
  6. "SpatialOS platform for building games of 'unprecedented size' gets open beta". VentureBeat. 2017-02-28. Retrieved 4 May 2017.
  7. Shankar, Bradly (19 September 2018). "Former Bioware GM creating new games tech office in Edmonton". MobileSyrup. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  8. Sweney, Mark (2017-05-12). "Improbable sums? Cambridge graduates' tech firm raises $500m". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 May 2017.
  9. "Lazarus, Official Site". Retrieved 16 May 2017.
  10. "Another SpatialOS game's been canned, making it the third this year;". 12 August 2019. Retrieved 5 November 2019.
  11. "Meet Improbable, The Startup Building The World's Most Powerful Simulations". Forbes.com. 27 May 2015. Retrieved 12 May 2017.
  12. Solon, Olivia (29 May 2014). "The Improbable dream to radically transform online gaming". Wired UK. Retrieved 12 May 2017.
  13. Orland, Kyle (January 10, 2019). "Improbable snubs Unity, partners with Epic for $25M "open engine" fund". Ars Technica. Retrieved January 11, 2019.
  14. Hern, Alex (2019-01-10). "Graphics dispute plunges British gaming company into crisis". The Guardian. Retrieved 10 January 2019.
  15. "Ion, the space survival game by Dean Hall and Improbable, is dead". Eurogamer. Retrieved 3 February 2021.
  16. "Games made with SpatialOS". Improbable.io. Retrieved 12 August 2018.
  17. "Scavengers". Improbable.io. Retrieved 8 September 2020.
  18. "Former BioWare Developers Are Building An Online RPG For Improbable". GameInformer. Retrieved 8 September 2020.
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