Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Mainframe Industries recently announced funding for making a massive cloud-native MMO, but the word "Metaverse" is conspicuously absent from that news… even though it sure looks like they're building a Metaverse kind of experience:

Mainframe Industries, the startup behind the first cloud-native massively multiplayer online game, today announced it has raised $23 million in new funding led by Andreessen Horowitz… “We’re creating a persistent living world that people will call their home for years and hopefully decades,” Thor Gunnarsson, co-founder and chief executive of Mainframe, told SiliconANGLE.

"We’re not working on a VR product and Metaverse as being discussed implies VR to a lot of people, so didn’t want to lead people into thinking we’re in the VR space," Sulka Haro, design director of Mainframe, tells me now. "We’re definitely in the business of building a world millions will want to live in for years, if that is what Metaverse is about."

Haro was a lead designer on Habbo Hotel, a hugely popular virtual world platform last decade, and his team includes vets from CCP, Ubisoft, Remedy, and Blizzard Entertainment. This strong background in game development may give Mainframe an advantage over say Improbable, which also had ambitions to create massive single-shard MMO worlds, but has fallen short so far:

"Improbable looked at the market from the tech angle," as Haro puts it. "We're 100% focused on creating a game that provides an amazing gameplay experience to the players. Tech is cool and we need some very advanced solutions to make the product we're making but the focus really is on the player experience.

No word on the specific game/virtual world/Metaverse-ish thingy they're making yet, but you can check the homepage for potential clues.