Raph Koster announces Metaplace, the new do-everything MMO platform

by Scott Jon Siegel { Sep 20th 2007 at 7:30AM }

MMO heavyweight Raph Koster left Sony back in March 2006 to start his own virtual-world company, and only now are we beginning to see just what he was so excited about. Koster and his cohorts have just announced Metaplace, a brand new virtual world venture promising an open-platform, open-ended approach to the increasingly bloated genre of massively-multiplayer gaming.

As the first project to come out of Koster's recently-established Areae company, Metaplace is an ambitious exercise in building not just a virtual world, but a virtual world standard, upon which users/players can create a multitude of varied MMO communities. Although details are currently sparse, the Metaplace website promises that the platform will integrate smoothly into our current web standards, allowing for integration of Metaplace elements into websites, RSS feeders, and more.

Metaplace was recently featured as one of the 40 hottest startups in the TechCrunch40 conference, and a short video of Koster demo-ing the platform can be found on BBC News. Will Metaplace change the MMO market, or is it just another company riding the user-generated bandwagon?

Tags: areae, metaplace, raphkoster

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

ThornedVenom @ Sep 20th 2007 7:43AM

I really know nothing about Metaplace, so my question may seem stupid, but I need an answer.

How is it gonna be different from Second Life?

aMac @ Sep 20th 2007 7:50AM

-Even better- furry avatars and simulated sex.

whiny bitch @ Sep 20th 2007 7:47PM

The announcement's quite vague, so it's hard to tell exactly what this will be like.

One major difference is that you're not all hanging out in one giant world, where people attack you with flying cocks. You can create new worlds and restrict use of them however you like-- for one giant example, Raph Koster's new, gamey, big-time, serious MMO will be made using Metaplace. But if you're playing his game, again, you can't jump into it and start flying around on your giant, magical riding cock. (Unless that's an epic mount.)

Another difference is the focus of Metaplace on integrating with the rest of the web. A world might use a variety of inputs from elsewhere on the web, such as particular RSS feeds, and it might output all sorts of data about itself for easy display on other web pages (so that you don't have to have a giant team to put together a massive app like the Armory).

Of course, it's all vague and vapory right now. Still, I think it'll be quite different from Second Life.

Rubang B (NDF - Heart) @ Sep 20th 2007 8:51AM

I think the MMO market is the best place for a huge user-generated-content-fest like this, especially with the ability to separate the communities like that. It sounds REALLY good on paper. Good luck gentlemen!

Vince @ Sep 20th 2007 8:52AM

This entry needs more information.

Scott Jon Siegel @ Sep 20th 2007 11:46AM

Agreed, but this is pretty much all of the information currently available about Metaplace. That BBC video's your best bet for details at the moment, and even that's a little fuzzy.

My favorite thing about Metaplace is the name, which will inevitably become commonly mistyped as "Meatplace" ^_^