Raph is no longer taunting us (Metaplace)

[EvilJohn]

So, wait, if the villagers are eating all the sheep then the dragon comes down from the mountain side to harass the village ?

It's Genius !!!

I  you.

[Ixxit]

I'm planning to pillage all the failed Metaplace MMO attempts for art / programming / concepts that I can use in my uber-MMO. Because I will succeed where others have failed, dammit.

Hee hee ha heee..... will this be the 'griefing de jour' of the brave new world of metaplace??

Then you will have the cs forums overflowing with cries of ''waaaaaaaaaaa,  so and so stole my assets and intellectual property".

[Venkman]

In all seriousness though gamers, in general hate ads and value their privacy.

Unless it makes sense in the context of the world. Driving and sports games for example. Fake ads are more annoying than real ones. And if you have the hooks and the connection, why not then support sell-through?

But yea, Pizza Hut ads on the sign out front of the AH in Ironforge, not so much :)

Making an MMO is nigh-impossible without huge piles of money

Even before the Metaplace, this was fast becoming not true. There already has been a mass migration over to Flash-/browser-based games which generate a heck of a lot of traffic, cost way very less (single-digit millions rather than almost triple-digit), are much faster at growing because they are immediately accessible, and are much more intrinsically supportable by ad-based advertising (ingame or banner) than anything downloaded/purchased and installed.

Nobody's claiming Blizzard revenue, but then nobody's got anywhere near 350 people working on a single game (and that's before the 2,000+ they have on CSR alone). The genre has already evolved beyond the point where Press Releases define success. No single measure is relevant anymore, one of the reasons Bruce's charts were declining in relevance. "Success" is dependant upon factors that can differ between businesses. And lots of businesses wouldn't necessarily even want to be that big. Bigger is not always better.

[Soln]

And even Flash is not required.  Warbook on Facebook seems bizarrely popular, and it literally is only a bunch of web scripts tied together. 

[Sky]

At what point, Raph, did you snap?  What point was it that you said, "you know, fuck it, I don't have to make a game that I want to play, for people to buy,... I can just be a whore for advertising dollars!"

Because when you make a niche game (aka a good one), people don't buy it. Look at Freedom Force or System Shock, the closings of so many incredible studios. I see it more as allowing Raph to make that great game he wants to play, with a more modernized revenue stream. I really, really dislike ads (didn't buy BF2142 because of them), but there's only so much you can do.

If that's how Raph has to do it, wouldn't you say that's a better road then the one he took doing it the traditional way? I mean...SWG. C'mon. That's what the traditional way buys you, the inability to make the game you want to make.

Anyway, back to working on our f13 game. We've got a Pac-Man Penis and Clown Punisher. Now I see the first ideas for a level design concept. The goatse cavern dungeon with a soundtrack by Rick Astley...

[Ixxit]

The goatse cavern dungeon with a soundtrack by Rick Astley...

Only to be topped by my Missile Command/Tubgirl variant with native trackball support for stream adjustment.

<God I disgust myself>

[Sky]

Sponsored by Coke™ and Mentos™! :)

[bhodi]

A poon slip-n-slide with gameplay similar to the last part of Oregon trail.

[Grand Design]

How about just Oregon Trail.  Most addictive piece of crap ever.

[tkinnun0]

"Success" is dependant upon factors that can differ between businesses. And lots of businesses wouldn't necessarily even want to be that big. Bigger is not always better.

Well, what would be a good measure of success? EBITA per dev per month? If my math is not horribly wrong, Blizzard's is 51000€ (Vivendi Games' 6-month EBITA €119 million * 0,9 / 6 months / 350 devs).

At 51000€ per dev per month, I can't think of a business that wouldn't want as many such devs as they could.

[Akkori]

At what point, Raph, did you snap?  What point was it that you said, "you know, fuck it, I don't have to make a game that I want to play, for people to buy,... I can just be a whore for advertising dollars!"

I'd like to say that I couldn't be more tired of souless and soul-crushing advertising (as I look up at the bright Days Inn banner ad on f13), but I know that the true hell hasn't even begun.

Fuck.

F13 has ad's? Host files are your friend...

I don't mind ad's *IF* they fit with the overall theme of the game/area. The ad's in BF2142 aren't bad at all. The color palette's are the same as the game world, which means no blazing icepicks to the eyes. I honestly don't even notice them. As a matter of fact, the only ad I even remember is a Core2 Duo ad by Intel, and only then because I am dying to upgrade my p4 3ghz relic one day soon.

[Venkman]

Well, what would be a good measure of success? EBITA per dev per month? If my math is not horribly wrong, Blizzard's is 51000€ (Vivendi Games' 6-month EBITA €119 million * 0,9 / 6 months / 350 devs).

At 51000€ per dev per month, I can't think of a business that wouldn't want as many such devs as they could.

Plus CSR, plus overhead for tools, space, distribution, plus marketing and sales, plus the support staff you need to support all the people doing the "work" (HR is just as important as a programmer, it's just the former's impact on the game itself is less obvious and most gamer's ignore it anyway). Blizzard/VUG are making a lot of money on WoW, as seen by their annual reports. This has all been argued before. But everyone else is making money too. If a game is still around, they're making enough money to keep going. That alone is enough to provide insight into the number of different ways this can be measured, both for private and for public companies. Ad revenue, ARPU, microtrans, subs, VC. Having lots of accounts is a good thing. Having lots of concurrent player is a good thing. But you need to be staffed and tooled up to support them too.

[Samwise]

Yeah but that's like any web service: if my blog jumps an order of magnitude (let's face it, through the addition of free porn) and suddenly I'm getting hundreds of thousands of hits a year, I know fine well that I'll have to pay more for it to my service provider.  I wouldn't expect to host ebay on my free VirginMedia pages.

I know that's how most hands-off hosting places do it, but it seems bass-ackwards (dare I say "Web 1.0"?) for something that seems to be aimed at making content creators happy.

Take, say, Amie Street -- as a piece of music gets more popular, the creator gets more money, not less, because the price to download it (i.e. cost to the content consumer) automatically goes up.  All the artist has to do is produce something that people want to listen to, and the website takes care of everything else.  It seems like that's the sort of experience Meatplace is aimed at providing -- you provide the imagination, we provide everything else.  It would be odd to go to all that trouble to make nice world-creation tools and then make each user implement their own billing system to keep their world afloat.

I hope that at the very least you can just tick a "Put advertising on my site" box somewhere and then be assured that you will never ever have to worry about getting a bandwidth bill.

[tkinnun0]

Plus CSR, plus overhead for tools, space, distribution, plus marketing and sales, plus the support staff you need to support all the people doing the "work"

It's earnings before tax and such so all that has already been included in the figure. It's almost pure profit, 51000€ per dev per month.

But everyone else is making money too.

Okay, so how much are they making per dev per month? Or to put it another way, if they turned off the servers tomorrow, how many new games could they develop with their profits before going bust?

10?

1?

If I recall correctly, the number for a single-player game studio needed to be something like 3-4 or otherwise they're dead.

[Venkman]

I don't go by single-player game studios. That's old skool :) And most don't go on to make sequels. They close or get bought with the individual moving on to something else.

And I understand EBITA. My point was that in order to get to that profit, Blizzard/VUG has had to invest on many orders of magnitude more than almost anyone else has any interest at all, much less the capability of, investing. Blizzard didn't come from nowhere and secure $75mil+ in VC funding. It's the old adage of needing money to make money. The day they conceived of WoW, they woke up with more of a warchest than just about anyone else I can think of interested in making a DIKU in this space.

Your question of per dev per month is a good one. I have no idea. Each company has a different amount of dollars their employees must result in generating, and each may have a different way of measuring that. Blizzard needs 350. Someone else might need 75 (size of the SWG dev team iirc, with a dev budget of $15mil). Another could do it with one person (Sherwood Dungeon). All could arguable be successful in their own right, successful based on the exceeding expectation, successful based on eyeballs, stickiness, revenue collected through microtrans, time per session, adjacencies, whatever.

The kind of comparisons that used to be made don't apply to all MMOs anymore. WoW competes against EQ2, FFXI, L2 and so on. Maplestory? Maybe. Habbo or SL? Quite likely not. SL vs vSide vs any doppelganger world? Maybe. SL vs Multiverse? Probably. GW vs some NWN quilt? No. And yet these are all "massively-multiplayer online" worlds of some form. What matters to one does not the other.

So I prefer to sub-categorize the genres and then determine if there's a competitive landscape. If player A is somewhere, where else are they. SOE for example hopes player A is in EQ2 and SWG. Habbo may look at Facebook more than Club Penguin. People don't "Game" to the exclusive of everything else anymore. We've already discussed the death of subscription-based MMOs. I foresee a near future where even full screen is out. In the old days we used lots of tools to get around limitations of the game (like UO and IM were almost a requirement), used at the same time. We're getting back to that for a different reason. And which means different business arrangements (like, say, launching your Metaplace avatar from your IMVU assets used within Messenger because you saw someone's Kongregate or Pjio game).

[Schazzwozzer]

Hey, I wasn't sure if this had been posted here yet, but here's the BBC video on YouTube.

Also, I've got to say that I hope the website up at metaplace.com is little more than a placeholder.  I've a friend who I think would have at least been somewhat interested in what metaplace is all about, as he's been wanting to create his own Shmup for a while.  He's got strong ideas for the creative side -- art and music style, for instance -- but hasn't the programming chops to make it happen yet.  So I linked him to metaplace.com, and he replied, like, 4 seconds later with, "no thanks".  He said he saw "virtual apartment" and was turned off right there.  I imagine the lime green kiddy motif didn't do a lot to capture his interest either. 

I can appreciate that Metaplace is looking to attract a diverse audience, but I think something a bit sleeker and less pastel might help bring in the early adopter crowd, which I would speculate is most important in these early days.

[tkinnun0]

All could arguable be successful in their own right, successful based on the exceeding expectation, successful based on eyeballs, stickiness, revenue collected through microtrans, time per session, adjacencies, whatever.

In the Special Internet Web Olympics 2.0 everybody is a winner!

The kind of comparisons that used to be made don't apply to all MMOs anymore. WoW competes against EQ2, FFXI, L2 and so on. Maplestory? Maybe. Habbo or SL? Quite likely not. SL vs vSide vs any doppelganger world? Maybe. SL vs Multiverse? Probably. GW vs some NWN quilt? No. And yet these are all "massively-multiplayer online" worlds of some form. What matters to one does not the other.

All those are commercial entities, so their success could be distilled down to few simple numbers: how much profit do you get from a dev-month and how many new projects could you bring to completion with the proceeds from your last project? Yet they hide behind a plethora of other metrics. It's because they are embarrassed that while 10% crappier but 20% cheaper than WoW is a better deal for the customer on paper, they are part of the Tragedy of the Internets.

[Merusk]

Why does this whole discussion sound like 1999 redux? 

[Musashi]

Does anyone else feel like they just found out their favorite band is working on an unplugged album?

[Venkman]

What's different now is that back then you had Runescape, 3D in a browser. Nowadays games in browsers are much more viable and cheaper because the entire thought process is beyond "let's do EQ1-lite in a browser", largely due to the new audience.

All those are commercial entities, so their success could be distilled down to few simple numbers: how much profit do you get from a dev-month and how many new projects could you bring to completion with the proceeds from your last project? Yet they hide behind a plethora of other metrics. It's because they are embarrassed that while 10% crappier but 20% cheaper than WoW is a better deal for the customer on paper, they are part of the Tragedy of the Internets.

I agree with the first part of course because it just makes sense. But you are ignoring what I said earlier about the desired size of companies and staffing and the size needed for the relative success they want. Profit-per-dev is never going to be an adequate comparison because it's part of a company's competitive advantage, to themselves, to their stake (and/or stock) holders, to their funding sources. America is largely small business (95% of our economy last I read). VUG is not small business. Maybe it's just a cultural thing, I don't know.

The second part though is just wrong. First, browser based MMOs are not 20% cheaper than WoW. They're 10% of the total cost, if that, require no purchase, require no installation (though some, like Maplestory and Audition do, still free though). Second, you can't honestly think that the 75mil+ registered members of Maplestory, the 80mil+ of Habbo and the 120mil+ of Audition are signs of second-rate failed games. Last I counted, almost half a billion accounts existed in anything called an MMO. WoW's 8.5mil aren't all that much in comparison. Yes, they make a lot more ARPU to support their huge ass staff and have the money hats to show for it. But just like when EQ1 was on top, the whole world does not revolve around a single metric, and in no way is money not going other ways.

Consider just the concept of advertising by itself. What is more likely to be interesting to an ad agency: a bunch of veteran hardcore anti-establishment gamers who'd be pissed by their magic circle being broken by ads in Ironforge, or worlds played in browsers built on typical web components with many many times the amount of eyeballs passing by it daily?

[Righ]

Why does this whole discussion sound like 1999 redux? 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7X0T8e9KdE

[WindupAtheist]

Yeah, that site is fucking embarassing.

[tkinnun0]

What the hell, I just wanted to use "Tragedy of the Internets" 

Seriously, I'm tired of free crap. Make something that's worth something.

[WindupAtheist]

Seriously, make another website.  One for people over the age of twelve.

[Etro]

[Margalis]

"Metaplace" is a horrible name that is an instant turn-off for the vast majority of casuals who don't even understand what "meta" means and the entire thing sounds like a business plan in search of a concept to drive it.

In many ways the things Raph has done before are for the very hardcore. I think Raph trying to go after casual users is a fish-out-of-water scenario, I don't think it's in his DNA and the name really gives that away.

[UnSub]

"Metaplace" is a horrible name that is an instant turn-off for the vast majority of casuals who don't even understand what "meta" means and the entire thing sounds like a business plan in search of a concept to drive it.

In many ways the things Raph has done before are for the very hardcore. I think Raph trying to go after casual users is a fish-out-of-water scenario, I don't think it's in his DNA and the name really gives that away.

The name is simple enough for people to get, even if it (perhaps intentionally) falls into generic associations with MySpace and Facebook (and seriously, what's a facebook?).

What Raph did before was try to create massively complex and involved (often bug-riddled) systems that involved large social experiments to see how things would pan out. For instance, UO's social experiment question started as "Will people play an cooperative online MMO in sufficient numbers to justify the development cost?" and later transformed into "How do we allow both PvPers and non-PvPers to coexist in the same world?". Metaplace is a continuation of this social experimentation ethos that Raph explores and currently poses the question "Will non-gaming professional people be willing to develop content that other people can play through or borrow in sufficient numbers to meet demand / supply pressures?".

More detail is needed to flesh out the picture, of course, but Metaplace holds a lot of potential imo.

[Margalis]

The name is simple enough for people to get, even if it (perhaps intentionally) falls into generic associations with MySpace and Facebook (and seriously, what's a facebook?).

Most people know what "my" and "space" mean and a facebook is a common real-life college thing. (It's a book of incoming freshman) The word "meta" is meaningless to most people.

[Venkman]

But it sounds cool. And you can't escape the homage to Snow Crash. We loves us our metaverse :)

[naum]

Anything you can do I can do META!

[lamaros]

"Metaplace" is a horrible name that is an instant turn-off for the vast majority of casuals who don't even understand what "meta" means and the entire thing sounds like a business plan in search of a concept to drive it.

In many ways the things Raph has done before are for the very hardcore. I think Raph trying to go after casual users is a fish-out-of-water scenario, I don't think it's in his DNA and the name really gives that away.

Concur!

But then, a name can change. Unless it's indicative of the project as a whole it isn't going to be a big deal.

[WindupAtheist]

Motherfucking win.

[taolurker]

I thought that photoshop was worth a chuckle, except I absolutely can't stand people who confuse your with you're.

[BigBlack]

I can't even begin to start on how much I'm looking forward to this.  I'm already daydreaming like crazy about what this will be like.  A lot of it comes down to how flexible the scripting will be.  But no matter how limited it is to begin with, I can only imagine that over time, Raph and friends will make the scripting tools more and more powerful/flexible -- the 'meta' equivalent of adding new content.  I think this really could be a paradigm shift in how MMOs are played and created once it gets rolling.

The day that I can hop onto MetaPlace and put together a 2D, faux-ASCII multiplayer Dwarf Fortress will be a good day indeed.

[WindupAtheist]

God I hope the tools are good.  They had better be if Raph expects virtual apartment-building and not just "WTF LOL?" from the kids.  The leader of my old guild wants us to make a game.  Neither of us knows shit about shit.