The wisdom of crowds

With its ScavLab tech, Improbable is designing for 10,000 players at once

Everywhere you look, there are players. Thousands of them, pressed so thickly that they seem to move as one, all the jostling and jumping translating into the tides of some single fluid entity. Towering overhead are a pair of colossal avatars, decked out in neon. They chat jovially with the crowd – then, laughing, one of them throws out an enormous gust of wind, blowing the players away in a dense cloud.

These community events have brought together an unprecedented number of players – 1,800 of them in the initial closed event, over 4,000 in the first that was open to the public – in a single real-time, fully 3D environment. Improbable, the technology company behind it all, reckons it can manage 15,000. Big numbers indeed.

The technology that makes this possible is named ‘ScavLab’, after the game the events are taking place in: Scavengers, a 60-player battle royale/ survival shooter hybrid currently playable in early access. But what actually happens during the events has very little to do with that title. It’s no great surprise, then, when Improbable creative director Bernd Diemer, ahead of his talk at this October’s Develop: Brighton, reveals that the tech didn’t initially have anything to do with Scavengers. In fact, it began as a way of holding company meetings.