Swedish startup Coherence has raised $2.5 million in seed funding to create an open source platform to democratize connected game development.
Dino Patti, one of the business leaders behind single-player games such as Limbo and Inside, started up the Malmö, Sweden-based company. He wished those games could be easily turned into shared multiplayer experiences.
London-based Firstminute Capital led the round. Other investors in the round included major industry names like Finnish-based SISU Game Ventures and Paul Heydon, an early investor in Supercell and Unity.
Launched earlier this year, the Coherence team includes industry veterans from DICE, Unity, and Playdead, with a track record ranging from big multiplayer titles to critically acclaimed single-player experiences.
Coherence is on a mission is to democratize online games by supporting the creation of massively scalable and persistent virtual worlds for studios of any size. Tight editor integration with Unity and other game engines will make it easy for developers to add multiplayer connectivity to their games, the company said.
Built around a battle-tested game networking approach used in fast-paced, low latency triple-A games like Battlefield, it leverages cloud technology to easily and seamlessly plug real-time interaction capability into anything, from room-based multiplayer to large scale persistent MMO games running across multiple servers.
“We are very excited about removing the limit of scale and adding the possibility of full real-time persistence into a game from the beginning, as it has the potential to fundamentally change the way we create and consume games. I don’t feel that game developers are properly led in the right direction at the moment. Too many are looking at the bigger productions for inspiration and that often gets boring — I’d love to see what happens when creatives can think more freely in this space”, said Dino Patti, CEO of Coherence, in a statement. “We want to break the cycle of rehashing the same online game designs over and over due to limited technology. With our platform, we aspire to get out of the developer’s way so they can try out crazy creative ideas with minimal risk. We’d love to see coherence used at game jams.”
Powerful editor plugins and visual tools will make it easy to get started and to prototype, giving even less tech-savvy developers the power to explore connected game designs that have been out of their reach so far. More experienced teams will be interested in the fact that coherence is also fully built around a data-oriented (ECS / DOTS) technical design to maximize efficiency and scalability and minimize latency across the board.
“With this investment, we’re looking to grow our team in Malmö and are also exploring the possibilities of building strategic satellite offices in other cities with large developer communities,” Patti said.
Coherence will launch in 2020, with a pioneer program planned for early next year.
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