Bossa Studios has raised $1.35 million in funding from venture capital firm London Venture Partners. London-based Bossa is working on an ambitious massively multiplayer online game world dubbed Worlds Adrift.
The title is a “sandbox” game where players can create their own flying pirate ships to explore islands that float in the clouds of a fantasy world. London Venture Partners, which funded successes such as Finland’s Supercell and Playfish, joins a number of private investors who have already invested in Bossa. The game is something like a Minecraft for a new generation, according to Edge magazine.
In the title, players band together in crews to build their own flying ships to explore a world fragmented by a cataclysm. They will have to cooperate to survive, trade, dominate territory and exploit resources to rebuild a broken society.
“The fantastic team at Bossa, composed of veterans from landmark studios such as Bullfrog, Jagex, Ubisoft, and Playfish, has been consistently innovating with games that turn genres on their heads,” said David LauKee, partner at London Venture Partners, in a statement. “Their BAFTA-winning debut title, Monstermind, was the world’s first realtime multiplayer game on Facebook; Surgeon Simulator, one of the most popular titles ever on YouTube, sparked a ‘Let’s Play’ discoverability revolution that is at full steam to this date. It’s no surprise that their latest project, Worlds Adrift, is their most ambitious yet and the one capable of completely transforming how we experience multiplayer gaming.”
Above: Worlds Adrift
Worlds Adrift is using online gaming infrastructure that is being built by United Kingdom-based Improbable.
Henrique Olifiers, CEO of Bossa, said in a statement, “We’re at the edge of a transformation in the games industry that will fundamentally change the way players interact with games. Advancements in artificial intelligence, near-limitless processing power in the cloud, and large-scale simulations are aligning to empower a new kind of entertainment that is built on the fly for the players and by the players. The games of tomorrow will be unique, tailormade experiences for each individual, whose actions will fundamentally affect the world around them, influencing everyone else’s experiences in unexpected and interesting ways.”
The investment round will enable the company to accelerate the development of Worlds Adrift, expand its operations, and develop other multiplayer and VR titles.
Olifiers added, “Worlds Adrift is the first game of this new generation, enabling players with a freedom of agency that has never been achieved before. It’s a universe that responds to every possibility engineered by a player: if they can think of it, it should be possible. This creates the ‘emergent gameplay’ design philosophy that Bossa Studios is spearheading. Think of it as the difference between a scripted TV show where once you’ve watched an episode and know what’s happened, there’s little point in watching it again; versus an improv stage where the same scenario can lead to an infinite number of unexpected interactions due to actors empowered with full freedom each time. This is what Worlds Adrift creates.”
