Newsletter 
You may or may not have heard of Improbable and SpatialOS, a special operating system made for developing a very specific type of game. Namely, SpatialOS is made with the development of gigantic, open-world, massively multiplayer games in mind. One such game, which can be seen below, is called Worlds Adrift, and is made by Bossa Studios. Naturally, running an OS and engine made to power the backend of such huge games takes a ton of resources, both for development and for maintenance. It also requires a ton of manpower to do menial coding tasks, bridge pieces of code together, and run routine maintenance operations; all things that could be helped along by a sufficiently advanced cloud ecosystem. That’s just what Google Cloud Platform is and Google will be partnering up with Improbable to allow them and developers using their engine and SpatialOS to leverage it.
The power of Google Cloud Platform allows Improbable to not have to worry about network resources when developing SpatialOS. Things like server maintenance and storage are all taken care of, allowing Improbable to focus on extending the capabilities, compatibility, and ease of use of SpatialOS. To sweeten the partnership and help drum up new business, Google is also allowing Improbable to offer some Google Cloud Platform credits to their customers. Since their customers are, by the nature of SpatialOS, developing huge online games, Google Cloud Platform is a natural fit.
With Google Cloud Platform, online game developers using SpatialOS have their backend, network storage, and network maintenance all covered. This reduction in necessary manpower makes it easier for them to focus on building out the game. Additionally, having such a massive cloud backend at their disposal allows developers to build worlds that wouldn’t be possible on private servers; incredibly huge worlds measuring hundreds of kilometers, and containing thousands or even tens of thousands of players at a time, in the vein of long-running MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, can be build by anybody willing to give SpatialOS a try. Because of their large nature, SpatialOS games will likely require either insane computing power on the client’s part, or a good part of the game to be happening in the cloud, but if it’s the latter or you have a powerful system, you’ll have Google to thank for helping to trot out the next-generation of massively multiplayer online games.