Yuga Labs will build its Otherside metaverse on Improbable’s Msquared

Yuga Labs and Improbable have teamed up to build a metaverse dubbed Otherside, the companies announced during a Town Hall meeting for Otherside.

The companies announced that Yuga Labs will migrate its Otherside metaverse onto Msquared, which is Improbable’s network of interconnected metaverses — something that was announced today during an online town hall, which drew around 1,200 to 1,300 people to the same digital space.

Improbable and Yuga Labs will reveal other news related to Otherside’s development, including more events, a massive multiplayer event coming in July, and a World Builder ODK (Otherside Developer Kit) which is an extension of the M2 ODK to put tools in the hands of Voyagers to build on Otherside. 

Peter Lipka, COO and cofounder of Improbable, said in an interview with GamesBeat that Msquared is Improbable’s latest-generation technology for building metaverses. It has shared infrastructure among different companies, assets that can be shared, avatars that can move from one metaverse to another — all built on a foundation of Web3 technology and the company’s Morpheus engine.

The World Builder ODK enables game companies and other metaverse firms to build their own worlds. It enables user-generated content. With these worlds, the underlying tech is interoperable, but each metaverse builder owns its own front door in the connected worlds, Lipka said.

What that means ultimately is that by re-establishing Otherside on Improbable infrastructure and technology, Yuga Labs will provide Otherside community the ability to build, in a mass-scale environment, and with interoperability between the metaverses that are already on the Improbable network. 

The two companies have been doing special Otherside events together. Each one has been super easy for the Bored Ape and Mutant Ape — properties of Yuga Labs — to get into. You just click on a link and you’re transported into the world.

Herman Narula, CEO of Improbable, said in an interview that in contrast to a traditional MMO, players can occupy the same space as other players. Thus, the density of players in a given space is much higher with Otherside, where there are multiple people on top of each other, compared to an online game. Lipka said it is easy to get 20,000 players in the same space, with high-fidelity graphics and 3D audio so they can talk to each other amid a flood of audio streams.

Msquared lets other people, including players, build their own metaverse. What’s the difference between an online game and a metaverse in this case? The game industry has rejected the metaverse as something it aspires to create, Narula said, as the popularity of the “metaverse” word has declined in the post-pandemic era. But the notion of shared virtual spaces is still alive, and it is being embraced for activities like virtual concerts and live sporting events.

While Narula expects to be able to serve the game industry still, Improbable pivoted away from building its own games. It shipped two such games, but with the shorter projects enabled by Msquared, it has been able to do dozens in a matter of months, Narula said. He said Improbable is not trying to build only high concurrent user technology, where scaling is still a real challenge; rather, it’s building a complete metaverse stack.

“We are not trying to build MMOs,” he said. “We have found a way to do that more effectively now with interactive entertainment happening at a large scale.”

Narula said that Yuga Labs worked with Improbable early on for its Otherside experiences, and then Yuga Labs widened its base of technical partners. Now Yuga Labs is embracing the Msquared network and the leverage Improbable has built, Narula said.

“It’s a big vote of confidence,” he said.