US developer Lucid Sight has raised $2.6 million to launch multiplayer technology Colyseus Arena as a cloud-hosted service.
The funding round for Colyseus Arena was led by Galaxy Interactive, with other investors including VamosVentures, Goal Venture Partners and Gaingels, as well as existing investors.
This new round brings the total raised to $15.4 million.
The open-source framework has been downloaded more than 300,000 times, and is currently averaging ten thousand downloads a month.
Lucid Sight acquired Colyseus Arena earlier in 2021 and early access sign-ups began to be accepted in February 2021.
It handles server management, infrastructure and scaling so that game makers can focus their attention on design and development.
Cheaper for everyone
“Networking and DevOps engineers have always created a $500,000 to $1 million annual drag on every multiplayer game Lucid Sight has ever created,” said Lucid Sight CEO Randy Saaf.
“Our goal with Arena is to bring that cost way down, so more styles of casual, hypercasual, and NFT games can afford rich multiplayer experiences.
“Colyseus will always be open-source and we made the lowest tier of Arena free because we wanted no barrier for developers to dive in and get to fun faster.”
All types of game developer can use Colyseus Arena, but it is proving especially useful for multiplayer games requiring a flexible server hosting solution. Developers have instant scalability with a pay-to-use billing model.
“One of the fastest-growing verticals we see for Colyseus Arena is our hosting of web, quick-play, instant-play games. These types of games typically run within another application or standalone on a mobile accessible website,” commented Lucid Sight CTO Fazri Zubair.
“For these games a flexible hosting plan that has the ability to scale from 1 CPU to 1000s CPUs and then back down again in a short period of time is essential and a service Arena provides.
“Combine this with Colyseus’ small resource footprint and simple JavaScript programing language and you quickly see why Colyseus Arena provides the best solution for these instant play style multiplayer games.”
Lucid Sight is also combining its experience in blockchain to provide Colyseus Arena to a number of NFT gaming and metaverse projects.
Find out more via the website.
