You'll probably have to turn up your volume and put on headphones, but here's my GDC 2019 interview with Paul Thomas, VP of Product at Improbable, a well-funded startup that launched in 2012 with a mission to enable the creation of "worlds which can be run in real time, simulating the behaviors and interactions of millions of entities."

In the short term, however, as Thomas explains, the main goal is to support "all kinds of games", as opposed to single-shard MMOs. In fact, the only single-shard MMO that's been announced for Improbable's Spatial OS cloud platform is Seed, the planet-colonizing game.

Why? For the most part, there's just not as much market interest in single-shard MMOs in the EU and North America -- or as he puts it: "In the Eastern regions, massive interest there, but in the Western regions, yeah, it tends to be more session-based type games."

Then again, we are still seeing interesting uses of the platform -- for instance, Thomas mentions Mavericks, a 1000 player battle royale with persistent, virtual world-type elements.

And yes, I asked Paul if Second Life could be deployed on Spatial OS, and his answer was more or less: Maybe, but it would be very difficult.

At one point, he mentions that they recently tested a single-shard MMO and achieved high simulated user concurrency, but then had to check with his team on the exact numbers. A rep came back with this statement: