Today we’re reporting on the news that American video game software developer, Unreal Engine and online video game Fortnite creator Epic Games, alongside 2050 Capital, Alumni Ventures, Aster Capital, Entrepreneur First and InQTel, has recently invested in Metaverse infrastructure developer Hadean, as part of a $30 million Series A round of funding - Series A funding generally refers to any investment in a privately-held start-up company after it has shown progress in building its business model and demonstrated the potential for growth and revenue generation.
We’ve covered Epic Games numerous times on themetabite.com, most recently in our “Future titans of the Metaverse” series of posts where we explore the past, present and potential future of the largest players in the Metaverse. Epic Games is an active investor in the Metaverse and Metaverse technologies, having acquired Harmonix in 2021. In the accompanying press release Epic Games stated that: “Harmonix has a track record of creating fun and engaging music experiences designed for everyone to enjoy. As we work to build the metaverse, this expertise is needed to reimagine how music is experienced, created and distributed.” Epic Games themselves are 40% owned by fellow “Future titan of the Metaverse” Tencent.
So what does Epic Games’ investment in Hadean mean? Founded by CEO Craig Beddis in London in 2015, Hadean is a startup focused on reimagining distributed, spatial, and scalable computing for web 3.0 and the Metaverse. Hadean customers include Sony, Microsoft, Minecraft, the Francis Crick Institute and the UK MOD. Hadean’s broad mission is to place “supercomputer levels of processing power at the disposal of anyone”. The company’s focus being on: concurrency, removing the current cap on the number of users participating in the same world; interactivity, increasing the interplay between different Metaverses, Metaworlds, or simulations; and stability, minimising lag, avoiding crashes and enhancing the user experience.
If we take the above at face value the benefit to Epic Games’ is pretty obvious. As a video game software developer, any technology that increases the number of players able to simultaneously participate in a game, enhances interoperability across platforms, and delivers low latency online experiences, will positively impact Epic Games’ bottom line. Games like Fortnite already have thriving ecosystems and have already held high attendance virtual events for their communities. But while Fortnite has hundreds of millions of registered players, and while Travis Scott’s 2020 Astronomical Tour in Fortnite attracted over 45 million viewers, instances are limited to 100 people at a time. Hadean looks to break this constraint, opening up instances to “thousands of concurrent users”, delivering a better, more immersive experience, and, ultimately creating a scalable Metaverse.
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