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Deal

NetEase has invested $50m in Improbable

Date Type Companies involved Size
July 27th, 2018 investment Improbable
NetEase
$0m
50m
NetEase has invested $50m in Improbable

Chinese games specialist NetEase has put $50m behind cloud-tech firm Improbable.

The deal consists of the Asian firm snapping up $50m of new shares in the London-based start-up. This follows a partnership between the two companies which was announced back in February of this year.

This new financial relationship will see NetEase using SpatialOS tech in a project which is set to be announced later this year. It's possible we'll see something about this at Gamescom, given that it's the last big games trade show of the year.

Additionally, Improbable says that it is on the hunt for new business opportunities in China and Asia. Given that this is the biggest area of potential in the world for PC gaming right now, this makes sense.

"It is a small minority investment in the company, but it is quite significant because we've been trying to broaden our pool of partners to encompass Asia more effectively, especially China because it's the largest games market in the world,"Improbable CEO Herman Narula (pictured) told GamesIndustry.biz.

"We reached a point earlier this year where our technology matured to the point where we feel comfortable and were really engaging with top end developers like NetEase. We were quite happy and impressed that [they were] really excited about our technology."

Narula also spoke about the potential impact this Chinese connection will have for small developers around the world.

"It's going to be huge," he said.

"If you're a small indie dev in the UK, you may be able to deploy your games on us and potentially even access the Chinese markets through partnerships as well, which is super exciting. Having a presence there and being able to show we can work in Asia and we can work globally as a platform, I think that makes us even more reliable and trustworthy for developers.

"Also having a company of this scale... Netease has thousands of engineers developing games that serves hundreds of millions of users. It's very tough now for a developer to look at Spatial and say, 'you know, it's cool but I'll wait until someone serious is using it'. There's not many more serious people than NetEase."

This latest investment follows Improbable securing a $502m investment from Japanese financial organisation Softbank.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.