Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Raphcasting and Areae

Everyone, but everyone, is (fn1) playing along with Raph Koster's teaser-ad campaign.  Genius.  Lum's "Raph Koster decloaks off the starboard bow" is the best of the post titles, but hardly anyone with an interest in virtual worlds has remained aloof.  And I am no different: I, too, wish to play at guessing what his product actually will be.

So my guess, influenced by what I'm doing with Multiverse, is that it will be a browser-based product that draws, for its inspiration, upon LambdaMoo (heavily so), The Sims (oh mention not The Sims Online), Habbo Hotel and a touch of those furry freak brothers, Second Life.  You'll be able to build your own private pocket dimension within the larger metaverse provided by Areae, who will provide easy-to-use content-creation tools (as opposed to Second Life's kludgy nonsense).  The Koreans and Japanese are already mad for this kind of mySpace meets my space type of thing, and they only have terrible, sprite-type graphics and single screen/"room" spaces.

I think that users will be able to do the Sims thing and design and sell objects - so microtransactions will be there for sure - and I think that money will be made by Areae by, amongst other things, selling items themselves.  They'll be able to do this despite a mushrooming market for third-party items by being able to supply functional objects: as the keepers of the code, they can make things do extra stuff, in the way EA can supply a pet instead of just a chair.  They will probably also supply third places: the public spaces where socialisation will occur.  In what will probably be a single world on the Eve model rather than sharded like MMOs (in a social world, barriers are the last thing you want) I don't envy them the task of load-managing as certain spaces become Corellia starport(fn2).

Pets: there's a point.  I'll bet those will sell well.  There's a DS-style minigame to begin with.  A sticky one, too,  Though I doubt if you'll be able to buy a Frenzied Graul, sadly.

If they're not doing all this, then they should be ;)  Maybe I should be!

This business model would not be a huge threat to middleware providers: if you want a highly customised, tailored world you need to code, and will do for some time.  But it would be a huge kick in the teeth to Second Life.  And done well, it would be a real threat other social networking spaces, too: Areae could well see their competitors as mySpace, the Sims, Yahoo and MSN.  I certainly don't think that World of Warcraft or Everquest II would be much more than a source of customers (in that many will be customers of both, since they share wider social networks that are exposed to to the Raphaelites). I've often said that Second Life should be looking to get bought by one of the big messenging clients.  Of course, that was before I understood just how incompetent their server architecture was...

PS I suggest that Raph should counterbalance the vowel-count by naming the product syzygy.  It's a word with spatial and locative meanings, and it deserves more of an outing.  It's obscurantist, pretentious and unpronounceable, but we've already seen that those are no barriers... nyuck nyuck.

-------------

1 - Hurt and upset at being relegated to the word "is", Amber is right to point out that her interview with Raph deserves so very, very much more... So here is a nice, long link instead.

2 - In virtual worlds with easy movement, the real-world tendency for certain popular spaces to become extremely well-frequented is exaggerated.  In Star Wars Galaxies, the central node of the travel network between worlds was just in front of Corellia startport, which would become horribly overloaded as people congregated there for trade, socialisation, gouping and the like.  It was, while very laggy, extremely vibrant: while technically a problem, it was, socially, a huge success.