French indie studio Novaquark has secured $3.7 million in funding from private investors to push on with the development of its sci-fi MMO, Dual Universe.
That means the studio has raised a grand total of $7.4 million to create the game -- which sounds a lot like "Minecraft meets No Man's Sky" -- with a good chunk of that cash coming from various crowdfunding campaigns.
Dual Universe has captured imaginations by promising to deliver a seamless shared universe that can be simultaneously modified and inhabited by potentially millions of people.
The game is built on the back of Novaquark's proprietary continuous single-shard cluster (CSSC) tech, which manages the universe and supports player-driven in-game economies, trade, politics, and warfare.
Players will also apparently be able to freely modify the voxel-based universe to create anything they want, including superstructures, spaceships, and giant orbital stations.
"Our ambition is to become the number one platform for user-generated entertainment, all happening in the same universe, to create an ecosystemic amplification mechanism similar to that of social networks” explained Novaquark CEO, JC Baillie.