Hypersonic Laboratories raises $7M for sandbox UGC gaming platform
Summary
Players and fans can quite literally make the game in crazy detail, like triple-A graphics at in real life (IRL) cityscape scale.Play Ventures led the round, with participation from AppWorks, WTIC, KB Investment, and Alex Ekvall. The new funds will be used to expand the Hypersonic Laboratories team and prepare for Helixs closed alpha launch later this year, said Jack Kim, CEO of Hypersonic Laboratories, in an interview with Games.Weve followed Jack (Maker) and his team closely since their earliest days and have increasingly been amazed by their big vision and ability to execute, said Kenrick Drijkoningen, general partner at Play Ventures, in a statement. The goal is the majority of the content on the platform will be created by other artists.Since the team is using Unreal Engine 5, Kim thinks the creations will be more realistic and appeal to older players and developers, much like you see with Grand Theft Auto mods.The biggest problem here is the lack of professional tooling around modding. Ive always thought that to do the same things in a virtual space, you open up way more creativity.Despite the immense popularity of role-playing mods and servers across various games, the industry has long neglected this thriving community, providing little to zero commercial or professional support, sometimes even going after the mod creators in an effort to shut them down, Hypersonic said.This community has continued to grow while fighting this uphill battle: For the last several years, RP consistently ranks as the No. Well be sharing much more about how this works in the future, including how creators and developers can monetize their work on Helix.Hypersonic Laboratories is led by a team of veterans from various gaming companies such as Roblox/Uplift Games, Hypixel Studios, Activision, Kongregate, GameStop, and more.The company is also announcing the addition of Kasey Fitton (aka Mycroft), the former lead of ESX, a popular FiveM framework which is used by more than 25,000 RP servers, and Joshua Eger (aka Kakarot), the creator of QBCore, another hugely popular FiveM framework.Helix has already started to pick up some buzz in the RP developer circle, with several prominent RP modders already experimenting with the platform to create incredible worlds and player experiences.