French publishing giant Ubisoft has unveiled its foray into the cloud games space with its Scalar platform.

This initiative, created by the company's studios in Malmö, Helsinki, Bucharest and Kyiv, offloads processes such as AI, audio and physics to the cloud, meaning that games are no longer limited to the hardware they are being played on.

This sounds rather similar to Improbable's SpatialOS, or how Microsoft planned to use its Azure servers at one point.

“This is a major moment in our careers as game developers," Ubisoft Stockholm technical director Christian Holmqvist said.

"We feel that same inspiration and freedom as when we first started using our home computers as teenagers - that feeling that you can do anything by fully tapping into the power of cloud, for the first time in gaming.”

Ubisoft's VP of production tech Guillemette Picard added: “Ubisoft builds on 35 years of continued investment in R&D and proprietary technologies, because technological independence is a critical differentiator. Ubisoft Scalar is in line with that spirit, enhancing both our creativity and our unique co-development model with new, seamless ways to collaborate at a global scale. It marks a step forward and an exciting milestone for the gaming community." 

Disclaimer: Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who has worked with Ubisoft on projects in the past