Unleashed is making a platform for MMOs to bring people together | The DeanBeat

Irena Pereira worked at 38 Studios, the massively multiplayer online game company spearheaded by former Boston Red Sox star pitcher Curt Schilling. She wound up in possession of a hard drive that had the contents of the game, Kingdoms of Amalur, which was never launched.

She searched (so far) in vain for a way to access the encrypted drive, and one of the only people who knew the code passed away. Pereira still hasn’t opened that hard drive, which has the contents of an MMO that took six years to develop but crashed and burned due to poor management and a dearth of funding.

But here’s a thought. Maybe that game wasn’t meant to see daylight, and maybe it was better that Pereira chose to move forward on her own path in gaming. After all, 38 Studios was really a place where it can be argued that you learned how not to make a game.

“I saw $133 million set on fire by a baseball player,” Pereira said. (The story is told well in Jason Schreier’s Press Reset book).

Without access to the story of R.A. Salvatore and the art of Todd McFarlane — who helped Schilling build his virtual world — she had to figure out a better way.

She founded a company called Unleashed, and last year she went through the A16z Speedrun accelerator, raising a small round of funding.

Now she is working on Unleashed Realms, which is a production pipeline that leverages generative AI and human expertise to make it far easier to make the kinds of MMOs that Schilling sought to make — at an affordable price.

“Now we can build MMO scale games, and at a fraction of the time and cost,” Pereira said. “The question is how do we deliver this as the platform we’ve always imagined?”

Unleashed Realms

Pereira’s goal is to make games that bring people together. But now that idea is taking a different form than what she expected.

She started the company in May 2022, a full decade after 38 Studios went into bankruptcy. At first, the idea was to build a big MMO. Then reality set in.

In June 2023, Pereira took her startup and went through the A16z Speedrun accelerator. That was how she was able to refine the idea, raise $1.3 million and get a commitment for over $3 million.

“One of the realities is the venture market has been tough. We’ve had to reconsider our business and figure out what is the benefit that we actually realized while building a game. We built a prototype after Speedrun,” Pereira said. “And because we were using generative AI the way that we were, and also deep procedural tech, we actually came up with a gameplay platform.”

As she knows from working for 38 Studios, successful MMOs can be highly profitable over many years, but they are extremely expensive to develop, launch, and sustain. While hits like World of Warcraft earn billions year over year, they cost well over $100 million and five years+ to produce.

At first, the team wanted to build an MMO to beat all MMOs. They wanted it to scale. The future of gaming is about creating experiences that scale, but doing it with smaller markets and tighter teams.

“We actually figured out how to do that. We’re still the company that makes games that bring people together, and this is really important to us, because we are, at our core, a social gaming company. We like group multiplayer games, and we especially love MMOs for two reasons.”

One, she said, is that they are incredibly immersive and highly retentive products. They have really high margins, and they can last for a very long time. The game as a service model is perfect for such titles.

“People just move in, they become residents. But we don’t build MMOs anymore because they’re really hard. You know my story. I saw $133 million set on fire by a baseball player. But we’ve been making games for a long time. The thing is they don’t have to be that risky. You can actually make them super small.”

The instinct for developers is to take $200 million and build something “stupidly expensive,” Pereira said.

“Kingdoms of Amal or never made a dime, but it cost $133 million in world building. And that’s where the cost is: content generation. We can do it in 10% to 20% of the time, and the same for cost,” Pereira said.

The team is seasoned, and they developed an “amazing process.”

“They optimized how we can use generative AI to speed up timelines,” Pereira said.

Pereira was joined by developers who worked on titles like the MMO of MMOs — World of Warcraft — as well as multi-billion dollar hits Monopoly Go, Medal of Honor, and other top triple-A games. Unleashed is a studio with a completely new approach for developing online games.

Unleashed Realms

Dubbed Realms, Unleashed’s platform leverages both gen AI and deep human expertise in growing gamer communities, making development rapid, cost-effective, and highly monetizable – scalable for both niche games with a small but passionate fanbase, to mass market MMOs with many millions of players.

Unleashed Realms features include advanced gen AI, procedural generation, and bespoke content tools enable powerful and cost-effective game development – giving Unleashed’s team of human artists and designers a force multiplier.

It also has templatized game development, where gameplay user experience is architected to be rapidly reusable across many multiple fantasy MMOs, simply by reskinning art and other assets.

The game also has deep user engagement tools, with built-in hooks and social mechanics to grow and sustain vibrant in-game communities that drive strong player retention – and monetization.

“I imagine these to be almost like theme parks, or virtual theme parks,” she said. “I would want to maintain quality, be consistent, and make sure we honor our trust and safety pledge.”

Perhaps five years from now, she would like to have 10 to 15 realms, or more if it really works out. Pereira thinks of family friendly games, whether they’re like Animal Crossing or set in dungeons.

It’s not a metaverse in the same way we have come to understand Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash or Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.

Pereira’s vision for this metaverse-like collection of realms came from one of her favorite sci-fi authors, Tad Williams. He wrote a book series dubbed Otherland, where a future world is immersed in virtual reality.

“But the user interface, how the player engaged into the world, and the inputs, the controls — all of those things were consistent, and they had kind of a unifying factor that was almost like the laws of physics in different dimensions. Certain rules still apply, and having that consistency allows the player to be more creative and also be more portable into different realities. So I reticent to use the that loaded term ‘metaverse,’ but I absolutely see this as realm hopping.”

One of the things that can happen is that players can change the “skins” for their characters as jump in and out of different realms. It’s kind of like Fortnite islands, but it won’t feel like every island is Fortnite. Each realm will be different. You could have a environment in each realm.

“Our realm is basically our answer to what we think is a better solution for what the others offer,” Pereira said.

Haven

Unleashed’s first proof point for Unleashed Realms is Haven, a fantasy MMORPG designed for a mainstream crossover audience playable across multiple devices, which friends and family can enjoy together, both on a hardcore basis and in casual play.

Primarily targeted for friends and families who play together, Haven is a freemium game with optional monthly subscriptions that are optimized for group play, going from $10/month for individual players, less for duos and groups, all the way to a “Village Plan” at $150/month for 150 players.

These monetization options, along with freemium upgrades, are integrated and optimized right out of the box for all MMOs created in Unleashed Realms.

The first realm is Haven, and it was built by Pereira’s team. It’s the proving ground where they have created the gameplay that they know is a lot of fun and that is a cross-platform prototype that allows the team to be able to reskin content very quickly from one IP to another.

“Haven just has been our proving ground so that we know that we have recreated a replicable process that is not bound to our specific IP and the way that we’ve architected so it makes it a really highly engaging user experience,” Pereira said. “People know how to play it. We’ve had kids as young as seven years old playing our game and being able to move around and playing it for hours and hours. We’ve had Gen Z players playing our game. We’ve had people who have never played World of Warcraft playing our game. That’s where we’ve been investing our time and making sure that it has a a great, consistent user experience. That’s my wheelhouse, and what I think users actually need.”

The game has a loop where it’s fun to have big boss battles, much like a World of Warcraft collaborative game. But it can be reskinned onto any IP. This is where the AI comes in, as it can take existing content and translate it into an art style that is consistent and has compatible game assets.

Pereira said you should consider a suit of armor, which is very expensive to make as a customizable item in an MMO. You have to come up with many different versions of breast plates, pants, shoes, and more. Instead of having someone create all of those items, the AI can do that now and make sure the geometry of the armor models matches.

“We can do an entire armor set in less than a week with quality controls,” Pereira said. “That would take months for an artist. We’re not taking away a job that they want to be doing. That just means they get to make more armor sets. What’s different with how we’re using generative AI is we make sure that we are respectful to the artist and that it is a force multiplier on their creativity and not taking the fun part of their job away.”

Pereira added, “We’ve worked out a model to where we can get a game out the door at quality, or something that feels like its own game, in our gameplay platform, super fast. And again, like at a fraction of the cost.”

“Our vision is to bring multiple worlds to this experience so that you’re not just stuck in Haven,” she said. “We’ve learned there are plenty of IP companies that are desperate to be able to reach new audiences, and they are the ones that are actually very hungry to use this technology.”

Some of the tech goes as far back as procedural generation. That can automatically generate game scenes, but a lot of the ideas in Unleashed Realms are new with generative AI. Character generation, for instance, has been revolutionized by gen AI.

Competitive advantages

Unleashed’s approach with Unleashed Realms has the edge on traditional studios and gen AI-facing competitors in several ways.

It’s future ready. Unleashed Realms redefines the entire development pipeline so that gen AI does not replace but acts as a force multiplier for seasoned human developers.

Modeled on successful revenue strategies from Unleashed leadership across multiple games and genres, any MMO created in Unleashed Realms is ready to grow and earn money at launch. It has a seasoned team backed by strategic alliances, a robust IP acquisition pipeline, and a deep bench of game industry veterans who’ve helped lead development of AAA/casual game brands (see Founding Team).

It is optimized for social design with built-in user adoption, social growth, and online community hooks based on features successfully implemented in highly profitable games.

Founding team

Unleashed is led by a dream team of veteran game devs, designers, and artists behind many massive hit games. One of the most recent to join is Unleashed is New York Times bestselling author R.A. Salvatore, who, besides working on the 10,000-year-lore of the ill-fated Kingdoms of Amalur, is known for his development of the Forgotten Realms universe, the iconic Drizzt, and his epic Demon Wars Saga.

Pereira, CEO and creative director, has more than 20 years of experience in gaming. She was a user interface engineer on World of Warcraft, and most recently led social and moment-to-moment design on Monopoly Go, growing usage by a KFactor of 2; the game subsequently earned $2 billion within its first year.

Dave Cham, CTO, was formerly a technical director at Electronic Arts, where he helped develop Medal of Honor and other hits. He was also previously studio general manager at Wicked Realms Games.

Thom Ang is the chief art officer who formerly worked at Disney Interactive as an artist and he was also art director at THQ and Electronic Arts, where he led art on the Medal of Honor franchise.

Kris Zierhut is chief game designer. Zierhut spent 18 years at Blizzard Entertainment across multiple titles, including principal/lead systems designer on World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, Diablo Immortal, and Hearthstone.

Other core team members include Russell Brower, acclaimed music composer for World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and many others, who will contribute new soundtracks for use by gen AI in Unleashed Realms.

Brett Close, long-standing games industry CTO and product leader (one of the leaders of Project Copernicus), joined Unleashed’s advisory team where he is supporting Realms development.

Additional team members have contributed to hit games across many genres and platforms including Asheron’s Call 2, Boom Blox, Crash Bandicoot, Call of Duty, Destiny 2, Diablo 2/4, GSN Casino, Hearthstone, James Bond, Kingdoms of Amalur, Lord of the Rings Online, Starcraft, Star Trek Timelines, and Walking Dead.

Pereira expects Haven to generate its first revenue the fourth quarter of 2025. She has raised $1.3 million from A16z’s Speedrun, Andover Ventures and angels including Mark Long, Eden Chen and Tips Out. And she’s seeking a new round of funding to bridge the company to more milestones. The closed beta of Haven is expected to debut in the late 2025.

“This is the culmination of what we’re building,” Pereira said. “We built a game, but that game is actually a realm, and that realm allows us to create multiple realms. And then players can hop in and out of realms, but have the same consistent gameplay, the same consistent UX and the same consistent experience.”

It has trust and safety built into it so that the company can make family friendly products that are safe for children. It will also have accessibility features built in that will make it for new realm makers to implement without spending a lot of money.

“We have an accessible platform, and we can spread it across any IP that you can imagine,” she said.

What’s special about Unleashed is that it has built its game community first. The idea is to create a realm within the platform as the first game.

“We understand the social science deeply about how to make really strong communities and make it easy for you to find your friends,” Pereira said. “That’s where we focus on our innovation. We shortcut the distance, reduce the friction for you being able to launch that game and get in with your friends as easily as you can wherever you are, whether you’re on your TV or on your phone.”

Unfinished business

Of course, there is some unfinished business to think about. In 2018, the assets of 38 Studios and its Kingdoms of Amalur (Project Copernicus) were acquired by THQ Nordic along with the Amalur intellectual property. Pereira has spoken to them.

As for the Kingdoms of Amalur hard drive, Pereira said, “That’s actually really funny because we’re still on that quest. This is a Sherlock Holmes mystery. I’m going to write a book about this experience someday. I followed all the leads. I actually just found out last week that the best lead that I thought I had for a copy of the drive was dead. But there are more.”