Comments on: RPS Exclusive: Raph Koster on The MMO

By: Rock, Paper, Birthday: We Are One | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Rock, Paper, Birthday: We Are One | Rock, Paper, Shotgun — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:12:19 +0000

[...] stuff Ragnar Tørnquist On… Storytelling. Sexy Ragnar. Some bloke from Gearbox on Borderlands. Raph “Theory Of Fun” Koster talks MMOs and Metaplace. Ron “Monkey Island 2″ Gilbert talks Deathspank. Soren “Civ4″ Johnson talks [...]

By: But Seriously….

But Seriously…. — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 07:38:46 +0000

[...] of late, Raph has been working on a product called Metaplace. It is, essentially, a toolkit to be used to build your own MMO, as a [...]

By: for serious

for serious — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 21:09:30 +0000

Ralph Kosters credibility took a nosedive with SWG. It’s all talk and not much of anything else.

@Kalle: agreed.

By: Kadayi

Kadayi — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 13:47:16 +0000

Good interview, but I have strong reservations as to whether anything constructive will come out of it. One of the big issues with user made content is that by and large the vast majority of it is poor, because:-

1) Time = quality (think Valve) and most people don’t invest enough time into their content.

2) Enthusiasm generally gets the better of critical self assessment for most people.

That’s not to say that there aren’t people out there who will create wondrous things, but the vast majority will be dross and it’s a challenge (in your time) to find the diamond in the rough. Even with rating systems it’s a trawl to find decent content on say sim2 exchange, or good films on the Movies online because peoples threshold for what is ‘excellent’ is generally low. If it’s currently a challenge to find decent user made content for simpler games, how much more difficult to make innovative, enjoyable, enthralling MMO games…

By: Kalle

Kalle — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:55:21 +0000

Koster speaks good game, but lets not forget that in the last decade his crowning achievement is the clusterfuck that is Star Wars: Galaxies.

Those who can, do, those who can’t, write books about what the people who can are doing wrong, in essence.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 03:38:37 +0000

The cool thing that excites me about meta place, is we’ll be seeing worlds for communities to just hang out in. Instead of just a forum or whatever attached to a webcomics, news sites, or blogs, we’ll be able to hang out in little worlds attached to existing communities. I think people will be surprised at just how awesome the games and worlds that people will fork, iterate, fork, merge, borrow, will become.

There’ll be people dedicated to making mmo templates that are specifically designed for being borrowed by website communities.

As an example, it’s pretty inevitable that Penny Arcade will be forced to make one filled with Gabe’s art. I think they even mentioned that in a post once.

Currently MMO’s usually need to create communities from scratch. Web 2 has given us extremely deep and numerous social networks in many different forms. It’s a huge market really. I think metaplace will succeed because it is trying to fit in snugly along side the current web concepts. It will complement existing frameworks and communities, not try to take advantage of them. I think it’s more of a tool than a gaming space.

Think of building a site.. Hmm now we need a blog, we need forum, we need a flickr page, we need a metaplace. If it works it wont be the only option, others will eventually compete, but it will definitely be the first.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 03:15:37 +0000

These developer interviews are excellent..

By: Rock, Paper, Shotgun: Punk Rock, Like Talking Heads » Blog Archive » And You May Have Missed…

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 10:27:17 +0000

[...] Developers with high talkosity verbospeaking. Raph “Theory Of Fun” Koster talks MMOs and Metaplace. Ron “Monkey Island 2″ Gilbert talks Deathspank. Soren “Civ4″ Johnson talks [...]

By: Eolirin

Eolirin — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 03:16:05 +0000

“I understand his goals and plans, but I just don’t buy them as a valid revenue model. I’ll most likely give the system a whirl, but I can’t imagine ANYTHING making me grab for my wallet. Also, as with any user content creation, 99% of it will be trash. Except a lot of people will pay money to find out it’s trash.”

I see a few comments like this, and they really don’t make any sense to me in the slightest. Metaplace is really three things. The first part is a set of content creation tools, and as things stand right now, those will be free. The second part is a hosting service. This isn’t free, but only impacts world owners, and then only those that are using more than a certain amount of resources. The third part is a portal site, which is best described as being similar to YouTube, except that the individual world owners can decide to rope off their content with fees. This is the only segment of the system that requires players to spend money, but on that level it wouldn’t be any different than buying any boxed game, finding out that you didn’t really care for it, and being out 50-60 bucks… well, except that you’d probably be out a lot less from trying out a bad Metaplace game than from buying a bad boxed game. And then there will be all of the worlds that are free to play or that rely on microtransactions instead of subscription fees, or whatever. I wouldn’t be surprised if we started to see donation run worlds even.

Under many circumstances you’d never even *need* to pull out your wallet.

By: Harold

Harold — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:33:31 +0000

I think there’s a confusion here between high end and polish. High end games tend to be polish but they sometimes aren’t and they are monolithic. Polish games are everywhere on every scales and this is what make them truly successful: Habbo, Maple Story, Portal, WoW Picross or Zelda PH are polished. The entire experience from the first log in or first file created to the end or log off is polished.
The “polish status” is not only technical, as for the “high end status”.

By: Ledomaylnosti

Ledomaylnosti — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:13:42 +0000

I know of a project being developed with Metaplace that’ll be high quality, http://www.darksunworld.com if you want to have a look. There are many others that will also be of exceptional quality, and we will be able to find them because worlds will be rated by users. You will instantly be able to see the cream of the crop, and have to hunt for bad games because they’ll be out of sight.

Some will make money selling artwork, code snippets, etc to other Metaplace developers, and because you’ll be able to charge ”metabucks’ for your game/world it allows for micro transactions.

Users will be banding together to make alternative clients to the current Flash one, allowing for…”anything” to be built.

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:51:43 +0000

Right, I’ve got my idea now, any ideas when I’ll be able to make a fortune from it?