A team of developers from studios like CCP, Remedy, and Next Games have come together to start Mainframe Industries, a game development studio that aims to develop an MMO game built from the ground up for cloud platforms.
The studio’s founding team includes 13 developers from around the pan-Nordic game industry and sees the Helsinki- and Reykjavik-based studio raising €2 million (~$2.2 million) in seed funding from the likes of Maki.vc, Play Ventures, Crowberry Capital, and Sisu Game Ventures to kick things off.
“For Mainframe, the ability to deliver to all platforms a level of immersion and world simulation typically only seen in high-end PC games means that the visual gap between devices disappears as we move to the cloud,” said co-founder and CEO Thor Gunnarsson in a press release.
“And we see tremendous potential in the expansive computing and storage capacity of the cloud," explains Gunnarsson. "We can make bigger and better games with more complex physics simulation, AI, and character systems to deliver a fresh gaming experience unbounded by the constraints of individual platforms.”
All in all, the studio's starting roster includes Börkur Eiríksson, Kjartan Pierre Emilsson, Thor Gunnarsson, Fridrik Haraldsson, Reynir Hardarson, Sulka Haro, Kristján Valur Jónsson, Jyrki Korpi-Anttila, Saku Lehtinen, Ansu Lönnberg, Eetu Martola, Vigfús Ómarsson, and Jón Helgi Thórarinsson, developers who, between them, have experience on games like EVE Online, Alan Wake and The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land.
Mainframe's first project has yet to be fully announced, but is described as an open-world, social sandbox MMO game built to take advantage of the unique features cloud gaming platforms bring to the table.