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

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?