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Look out Roblox and Fortnite, Sky is coming for your concerts

Sky: Children of the Light’s concert technology is only a year old, but thatgamecompany’s team is dedicated to expanding its potential.

Sky Children of the Light concerts: A close-up of Aurora's avatar in Sky

Based on what we’ve heard at SkyFest, Sky: Children of the Light concerts could be the next big metaverse events to rival those in Roblox and Fortnite. While the social MMO is not strictly a metaverse platform, expansions to its in-game ‘broadcasting’ features are paving the way for new kinds of immersive entertainment.

For a long time, Sky: Children of the Light has incorporated music and performance into its gameplay as a form of self-expression for players, which is ever-important in a mostly wordless videogame world. But last year, thatgamecompany took the connection one step further by hosting an in-game concert with Frozen 2 musician, Aurora, much like those found in games like Roblox and Fortnite. Players viewed the concert 1.6 million times over its run in rooms of 4k players at a time, and later in the year, Sky broke the world record for “Most users in a concert-themed virtual world” with over 10k players in a server simultaneously.

Fortnite’s live concerts inspired Jenova Chen, thatgamecompany’s CEO and Creative Director, to pursue a similar goal in Sky. In an interview with Venure Beat, he said, “[The Fortnite concert] was an impressive technological wonder, seeing that show. When they said they had 15 million people watching together, though, it didn’t really feel that way. It didn’t really feel like a real concert.” It was this experience that inspired the interactivity of Sky’s Aurora concert, where you could directly chat with seven other players in your row in the larger interactive room.

As part of his keynote at SkyFest 2024 in Tokyo, Japan, Chen gave an overview of some of the upcoming changes to the broadcasting feature, which is the technology behind the Aurora concert. Some of these include removing the cap on players who can view a performance, so more than 10k people can enjoy a concert across multiple servers. At the event, we got to chat to Denise Schlickbernd from Sky’s Community Team about the future applications of broadcasting tech.

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She said, “We’ve been working on broadcast technology since the Aurora concert last year, which at the time was just developer accounts get special back-end permissions. The idea was ‘Well, if we can stream these videos in-game, if we have this broadcasting tech that devs can use, why not just add to it and have the instruments that players play be heard across dozens of servers with hundreds of thousands of people at once?’”

To close out SkyFest, thatgamecompany hosted a concert in-game with actual player musicians to show off the new broadcasting tech and its many applications. We asked Schlickbernd if she could reveal anything about future concerts, but she was pretty tight-lipped. “So I can’t talk to any specifics about what future plans are, but the concert today is like a version 1.0 of some of the ideas we have and that we’re hoping to do in the future.”

Sky Children of the Light concerts: Two characters piggy-backing on each other in the concert audience

This air of mystery from the Community Team paired with Chen’s comments on concert technology suggests that this is just the beginning of Sky’s metaverse journey. In the same Venture Beat interview, he said, “What do people do in real life when you have more than 10,000 people together? There are only a few things that people do together in such massive numbers. We’d like to use the technology we’ve built and keep exploring what other things we can do with tens of thousands of people together.” After all, thatgamecompany’s dev team frequently refers to Sky as a videogame theme park, so the possibilities are endless.

Those are our thoughts on Sky: Children of the Light’s concerts. While you’re here, learn more about this adorable social MMO and the upcoming Sky: Children of the Light Moomin collaboration. Make sure to follow us on X to see more from SkyFest 2024.