Prif Universe producer Loïc Saos on a 200MB browser MMO and FWC

Saos’s origin story is simple and literal: he first played Prif at age eleven in France and the game became his longest-running MMORPG. While studying computer science at INSA Lyon he picked a side project to test emerging web tech — a browser-run 3D PoC of the title he loved. After roughly a year of prototyping he opened an online showcase to gather community feedback and to try to contact GalaLab. GalaLab replied a few weeks later, meetings at Gamescom followed, and the prototype moved from hobby PoC to formal collaboration. In November 2019 Saos legally incorporated Sniegu Technologies in France and continued co-development with the original team.

On the technical side Saos was blunt about where the real work landed: the client. Servers, he said, look like traditional MMORPG architectures with only small protocol differences; the hard engineering was getting a 3D client to run inside the browser sandbox and still talk to device hardware efficiently. To do that the team built a custom engine and used C++ — a low-level language that allowed fine-grained memory control and long optimization cycles. The payoff Saos reports is a full game that runs inside the browser’s sandbox using roughly 200MB of memory. He described the tuning as detail-heavy and unforgiving — a single small mistake could turn into bugs — but it was necessary to squeeze performance from web constraints.

Practical user-facing tradeoffs show up most clearly in loading and texture management. Saos pointed out that initial loads and entering busy towns are dominated by texture image downloads, so the team implemented three texture-quality presets — low, medium, high — to match international connectivity differences. Players in slower-network countries can choose lower texture settings to reduce load time at the expense of visual detail. On security, Saos included consoles as part of the broader threat landscape when he noted that developers across PlayStation, Nintendo and other platforms have faced the same AI-assisted reverse engineering and code-extraction concerns lately. He said there has not been a catastrophic server compromise, but the team watches two things closely: attempts to extract clients for AI training or decompilation, and the rapid efficiency with which AI can help create automated cheating tools.

Saos framed the cheating risk concretely around bots: he worries about people using AI to generate code that runs automated playstyles that replace manual player control. Prif Universe intentionally does not include an auto-battle button on mobile; the game preserves the hands-on feel of older PC-era MMORPG play, and the team actively monitors for external automation tools. He also explained why building a native client isn’t a straightforward escape hatch: native programs can offer higher peak performance and allow commercial anti-cheat tool integration, but the web version’s cross-device, no-install access is a strategic advantage. That convenience comes with limits — particle effects and ultra-high-detail models are constrained by browser performance and by the need to keep downloads and loads realistic across diverse networks.

The move from France to Korea was both practical and emotional. Saos ran Sniegu Technologies and worked alongside GalaLab for two years in Europe before deciding that having face-to-face coordination from a Korean office would speed development. He progressed from lead developer to head of development and then to the game’s overall producer. Seeing an offline FWC stage full of fans and competitors was, he said, the most rewarding moment: numbers in analytics may show thousands of players, but an in-person tournament makes the scale feel real. The opposite extreme — server downtime — is his worst fear; when players cannot log in the team throws everything into recovery to restore access as quickly as possible.

Community stories are the softer but persistent thread in Saos’s account. He talked about how players form parties and guilds, and how in-game connections sometimes become real-world friendships. That sustained investment matters to him: players have already spent years building characters and time in Prif Universe, which is why his priority remains ongoing content and incremental improvement rather than abandoning the world for a new Prif title. When asked about future projects he split his answer: immediate focus stays on improving Prif Universe, while any new project would likely be a browser-based MMORPG using other IP, not another Prif installment.