Monumental aims at Unity with browser MMO engine

Though many industry experts say Unity has wiped the floor clean in the social and mobile engine markets, Monumental believes the firm has missed a spot.

Now, Monumental is launching its own engine, entitled Prime. The firm says its new tech is “the world’s first commercially available browser-based 3D MMO engine”.

Prime formally launched last week at Gamescom, hitting the market before the launch of Unity’s next engine – Unity 3 – a rival game platform that is said will provide support for MMO developers.

But Monumental is already rolling out Prime to a select number of developers, and will shortly make it more widely available.

The engine is built on “pure MMO technology”, says Monumental, and optimised to provide the best performance across all types of networks. The company itself has developed online MMO titles such as Football Superstars and Little Horrors.

Prime is fully browser-based and Facebook-compatible, and Monumental says the tech provides a thorough toolkit for the creation of browser-based light persistent state worlds (LPSW).

“Our aim is to make Prime the premier middleware choice for the creation of LPSW games,” said Monumental business development director Mike Cox.

“To reach the next level of social gaming, browser-based MMOs need to look and feel just as good as console games. Prime will make this much easier to achieve, freeing developers to concentrate on design and gameplay without the need to build the engine that powers it. We are already talking to a number of developers and we’re excited about what they might come up with.”