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Bossa doesn't blame Improbable for Worlds Adrift's cancellation

Bossa doesn't blame Improbable for Worlds Adrift's cancellation

Developer Bossa Studios has said that Improbable's SpatialOS cloud tech wasn't to blame for the cancellation of ambitious MMO title Worlds Adrift.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, newly-hired studio general manager Daniel Clough said that working with emerging tech like SpatialOS presented a number of hurdles that needed to be overcome.

"There are always challenges when you work with early-stage technology, but we worked with Improbable on those," he said.

"I don't think we would pin the success or failure of the game on that technology. Any technology when you're working with it, and when they're building a bunch of things as you're working with it... there are always going to be more challenges than if you take something completely robust that you've built on before. But we don't really think about that project and link it to that challenge. It was a combination of things."

The cancellation of Worlds Adrift came months after Valve vet Chet Faliszek left Bossa to set up new studio Stray Bombay Company with Riot alum Dr Kimberly Voll. Clough says that the developer still wants to make ambitious titles like the defunct MMO and Faliszek's cancelled AI-driven project.

"We're trying to make sure as a studio we can take these kind of ideas but also have enough talent, capacity and process to be able to work on these games," he said.

"Some of the stuff we have in development are pretty big bets. I think the studio can continue to do games like Worlds Adrift and complicated AI games as well as other stuff, but we have to be realistic that we're the size of studio that we are."

Worlds Adrift was one of three projects using SpatialOS that were cancelled in pretty quick succession. Following Bossa's title, Automaton went into administration, killing battle royale title Mavericks in the process. That was before Spilt Milk announced it would no longer be working on MMO Lazarus in July


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.