Whatever happened to 'the power of the cloud'? | Opinion
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Thursday 19th May 2022
This week marked another milestone for cloud gaming, as yet another outfit with aspirations to revolutionize the industry with games only possible with cloud computing gave up on those dreams after years of work and millions of dollars spent.
QUOTE | "As part of our announced focus on the metaverse, Improbable announced the divestment of its non-metaverse focused content teams at the start of the year." - Improbable CEO Herman Narula, explaining why the company this week sold Midwinter, the last of its internal game developers established to create games that would showcase the power of its SpatialOS cloud computing technology.
QUOTE | "A lot of people just can't believe that we think games are important... It is gaming that is our central focus, core vision and direction. All of the founders are passionate gamers, that is what we talk about and think about. It is great that our raw technology has applications in many different areas, but for us it is gaming first." - Narula, speaking to us in 2017, after the company raised $502 million in investment from SoftBank.
Despite Narula's insistence back then that the company's work on virtual worlds was "as important and significant as AI or space travel," Improbable just isn't as interested games these days. Instead, it has pivoted to the metaverse, the new market of the moment where a little interesting tech with unclear applications and a lot of vague promises can go a long way.
With the finalization of its departure from cloud gaming, Improbable becomes the latest in a string of companies to have promised a cloud-powered revolution and then failed spectacularly to deliver anything of the sort.
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