[Ide]

Raph Koster's new venture has announced its platform:

Metaplace - Metaplace Announcement

Basically a 'make your own MMO' in five minutes. Thought some of you might like to see that (if you haven't yet, I imagine Matt might have already).

[Xerihae]

It's also been reported on by the BBC here.

It'll be interesting to try it out and see how things work. They could be on to something which blasts open the MMO world to new ideas, but then the cynical part of me thinks if MMO developers wanted new ideas they could have just spent some time studying the great MUD games out there...

[Lasher]

Originally Posted by Xerihae It's also been reported on by the BBC here. It'll be interesting to try it out and see how things work. They could be on to something which blasts open the MMO world to new ideas, but then the cynical part of me thinks if MMO developers wanted new ideas they could have just spent some time studying the great MUD games out there...

Haven't read the article yet so maybe it already says this, but my first thought at reading the site is that they're aiming much bigger than MMOs. Instead of "check out my myspace/facebook page" the next generation of internet users could be likely to say "check out my metaplace".

Be interesting to learn more about what their business model is, running ads in/on the games that are made, selling additional tools as optional extras, etc.

[Brody]

w00t for this thread. Thanks, Ide! (And sorry for duplicating the other one. I'll see to its demise.)

I am interested in tinkering - already applied for the alpha!

[Zeno]

Not Found The requested URL / was not found on this server.

Site is down.

[Fern]

If Raph Koster is involved, count me in. *races over*

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by Xerihae It's also been reported on by the BBC here. It'll be interesting to try it out and see how things work. They could be on to something which blasts open the MMO world to new ideas, but then the cynical part of me thinks if MMO developers wanted new ideas they could have just spent some time studying the great MUD games out there...

I know a fair number of MMO developers (and we're developing one ourself) and there is no shortage of ideas, at all. Quite the opposite. The trouble is that ideas are cheap and easy. Everyone's got tons of them.

Executing on those ideas such that the result is a product profitable enough to be worth the money+risk is the hard part.

--matt

[Xerihae]

Originally Posted by the_logos Executing on those ideas such that the result is a product profitable enough to be worth the money+risk is the hard part.

Which is exactly the problem. No-one wants to risk trying something new in case they don't make any money, so we get a bunch of WoW clones. Hopefully this will provide a way for MMO developers to track what is popular in the online community using it that doesn't currently feature in MMOs, and add it with less risk. They can even develop the idea in their own Metaplace free of charge (if I read this right) and see what kind of feedback it gets with no initial cost outlay at all except their time.

Good things all round I reckon!

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by Xerihae Which is exactly the problem. No-one wants to risk trying something new in case they don't make any money, so we get a bunch of WoW clones.

I'm not sure that's fair to say either. If you look at the most popular MMOs in the world, most of them are not WoW clones, actually. Look at like Club Penguin, Habbo, Runescape (the latter two predate WoW by years), Maple Story, Webkinz, Audition, and so on. MTV (who is pumping half a billion into online games) has released six MMOs in the last couple of years, none of which are anything like WoW.

Metaplace may indeed allow developers to prototype more quickly and might even be good enough to build full-on commercial MMOs in. Raph's company is working on implementing their first "worldy" MMO using Metaplace, for instance. I suspect the devil is in the details here though and until a lot of devs start using it's kind of hard to judge to what extent it'll be useful. The idea itself is freaking cool but see above.....

--matt
P.S. What's really amazing is that Areae/Raph did this in a year, on a relatively small team.

[Ide]

Rather than starting a totally new thread, poking the necro stick at this one. A new interview is up where Metaplace gets explained in more detail -- this is a good one to get an idea of what this thing actually is all about:

The MMO Gamer » » Interview: Areae’s Raph Koster Talks Metaplace

I have to admit it's starting to sound pretty damn cool.

What are people's opinions on Lua?

[Sandra]

Raph's always got some great ideas for gaming. I definitely jumped up and signed in for being a tester as I usually do with his projects.

I love when he does interviews. He gives us free pr!