RPG veteran Bill Roper leaves Improbable and joins indie studio AuthorDigital

Bill Roper has decided to leave Improbable, a British tech company that raised $502 million from SoftBank for its virtual world simulation software, to join Seattle area game startup AuthorDigital.

Roper, who was chief creative officer at Improbable, said in an interview with GamesBeat that he wanted to get back to the craft of making video games. At Improbable, he was a couple of steps removed from that hands-on work, as he advised game developers how to take advantage of Improbable’s cloud distributed computing platform, SpatialOS.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.