Over $100 million invested in Trion and its unusual distribution platform
Trion announced that it has managed to get another $70 million in invested funds, bringing the total amount to over $100 million. For reference: that's somewhere in the ballpark of the development cost Grand Theft Auto IV, and about half of what Blizzard has spent on World of Warcraft since its 2004 launch.
Trion is the company co-founded by EA alum Lars Buttler and Might and Magic creator Jon Van Caneghem, which announced that it'll be making a game in concert with The Sci-Fi Channel, as well as a fantasy console MMO we know little about.
We've talked a bit about Trion's plans and business model before, but here's a refresher: it is creating development tools for making games that will run completely server-side. The graphics will be drawn on the client, but everything else -- physics, game logic, etc., will occur on the server and be downloaded to the user's computer. This serves two important functions. It greatly reduces the minimum hardware specifications for games and it makes piracy extremely difficult. We're not going to say yet that it makes piracy impossible, because, well, "life finds a way."
