TenTonHammer.com - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Corey: Well, I guess the new excitement is that we've released version 1.0 of the platform.  That happened a month or two back.  We're up to over 13,000 registrations of teams that want to use the actual technology to start building stuff.  That's pretty exciting.  There have been a number of those groups that were waiting for version 1.0 before they really started moving ahead in earnest, and it looks like they are now moving ahead.  That's exciting and gratifying and scary and just bloody fantastic.  

Timed with the release of version 1.0 of the platform, we launched a program called "Worlds In Progress", which lets people get a sneak peek at some of the worlds that are being developed on the Multiverse platform.  Now, the interesting thing which you may recall about Multiverse, one of the most unique things, is that we have this concept called the World Browser.  It lets you access any world, play any game that's built on the Multiverse platform.  That's very different from how the video game industry works today, but I think it makes a lot of sense for what can be done with virtual worlds.  If you look at this as a new medium, such that virtual worlds can be used for entertainment but also for education, business tools, and also military simulations and socializing - all that wide stuff - if you look at it as a medium and you think of it from the point of view of - like the Web is a medium - that where we started from and we thought:  why not be similar to the Web in that you have a client/server situation and you have this one common browser that lets you see everything.  

Obviously, we came from Netscape, so we had that on our brains.  So that's exciting.  Anybody can now download the Multiverse World Browser and can actually go in and inhabit some of these worlds and hang around and see how they're coming along.  And a few of them are going to go beta later this year.  So you log in every few weeks or so and look at what has been added to the world - what new features, what new areas and functionality, as well as what new worlds are being added.  We're getting requests from teams to make their worlds public.  When you build a world, once you want people to access it with the World Browser, you have to register it with Multiverse.  We just flip a switch and it is added into the network.  So we've got all these requests since we launched Worlds in Progress of people saying, "okay, turn on my world, turn on my world".  Which is fantastic, it means that there's more teams than we've had contact with that are actually building stuff.  That's as exciting as hell.  

Corey: An interesting thing about Multiverse is that we make our technology available for free to anybody who wants it.  Just download the whole SDK, the client/server tools, the sample worlds, full documentation, the whole shebang.  They can start building a world immediately.  They can build whatever world they want.  It can be as big as they want, have as many consumers as they want, and they never pay us a dime until they start charging consumers.  Then we do a 10% revenue share.  So we retain 10%, and the world developer retains 90% and full intellectual property.  We have some larger, more fully funded companies who do pay us for support, and we have direct relationships with them.  But by and large, looking at just the sheer numbers we don't actually know or haven't had direct contact with most of our customers.

Corey: Those are teams.  There's an average of about six people per team, so there's probably north of 50,000 people actually using our tech. But we're only in contact with a few dozen of these guys.  The business model of that is very much geared toward enabling Indies to get into this space and experiment with this new medium.  We're really eager to get Indies in there making new kinds of MMOs.  
Don’t get me wrong, I love World of Warcraft and the first MMO I played was Ultima Online. So I'm a big fan of the men-in-tights, sword-and-sorcery genre that seems to be the only one that has any major success. What's motivating us is that we're trying to enable Indies to get into this new medium and build new stuff, whether it's a game or not a game.  But we're all gamers at Multiverse.  The four founders have literally played every MMO amongst us.  So we're dying to see new, interesting genres, new types of game play, and just all kinds of new stuff.  So letting the Indies get in there and having this business model of ours where anybody can download and start building means that we don't have the traditional relationship with our customers.  They're able to start building stuff without even interacting with us.  

We have this great development community that feels like an open-source community.  We're not an open source solution.  We make a lot of our technology source-available.  But the lower levels of our technology are not open source.  So it would be wrong to say that we're partially open source.  The term is source-available.  Even with that, the community of developers really does feel like an open-source community.  Everybody is sharing information, assisting each other, and supporting each other.  There was this interesting thing - one of our developers posted a note in one of our forums saying "I'm having trouble getting my mini-map to work.  Here's my code.  Can anybody see what I'm doing wrong?".  Another developer said "Here, use my mini-map code".  These are teams that are nominally competitors with one another.  But there's this notion that we're all in this together, forging a new frontier in this new medium, and it's big enough to accommodate all of these different teams.  Very few of our customers, except for some of the larger companies, are overly secretive or not willing to share.  It's a fantastic thing.  So we're showing some of these "Worlds in Progress" worlds at our booth tomorrow.  The range of what's being done is just fascinating.  This team called MaxGaming Technologies with Dark Horizons Universe...

Corey: No, that's WarDog.  And that's fantastic - I'm a sucker for giant robots.  Just to talk about the WarDog guys, they've never made a full video game before, but they've always wanted to get into this industry.  They've got the discipline and the ability and the ideas to make something interesting.  It's just really cool.  Giant robots - it's awesome.  

So this other team, MaxGaming Technologies, with Dark Horizons Universe, is making this MMO/shooter.  Both of those games, even though they're both science fiction, are both very different looking and very different feeling.  We've got a company called Telos - they've got this social world, this "flirting" world, called "City of Sinners and Saints", which is completely different from both of those things.  It's very cartoony, you walk around and flirt with other people.  

The range of what the different teams is doing is just massive.  There's this guy named Andrew Harrison, goes by the name Doomsburg, he's a college student in New Zealand - he actually just graduated college a few months ago.  He was pretty much a one-man-band building this one MMO that was not entirely dissimilar to, say, World of Warcraft, in the art style and the functionality.  He posted some movies and some screen shots of his world into our developer forums, and was innundated with dozens of people saying "That's fantastic!  What can I do to help?".  He grabbed the best half dozen or so and said "Ok, great.  Maybe you can help me do some sound engineering, maybe some models".  He's got this extended team of some additional folks helping him out.  He's this twenty-year-old guy from New Zealand who's able to build this thing, whereas before you had to have six years and eighty million dollars.  He's showing off his world - it's called "Forgotten Legends".  I'm convinced it could be the next Runescape.  It's been proven - and hopefully this will be true for other genres as well - but certainly in the fantasy genre people will play a nice, uncomplicated fantasy MMO like Runescape.  There's tons of people playing Runescape.  And this is 3D, and interesting.  I'm just convinced that it's going to turn out to be this sleeper hit when people start playing it.  Which is good for us, because the more people play any of our games...

Corey: Right, They've got the World Browser, and thus they are one click away from every other game that's been built on our technology.  So they're able to go and play all these other games.  The basic bet that Multiverse is making is that we're enabling this network, and we're counting on this flywheel to start spinning and this network effect to kick in.  The more consumers come, the more developers are going to say "I want to develop for all those built-in consumers".  The more developers build stuff, consumers are going to say "I want to play that."  You get this flywheel that starts moving and hopefully before too long it'll be huge.  

Corey: Oh yeah.  We have some of the world's biggest teams, actually.  I mentioned earlier that most of our customers that I'm aware of aren't overly secretive.  The big media and game companies are pretty secretive.  Hopefully I'll be able to announce some of those partnerships later this year.  But a lot of the big guys want to keep everything secret until they go to beta.  We've got just huge companies building really interesting stuff.  There are market segements that are not paid much attention to:  games for young girls, or young boys, or adult themes.  There are huge audiences out there that are completely unserved by the games that are out there right now.  That's going to be a really interesting effect of Multiverse.  

Corey: There's going to be a content rating system throughout this Multiverse network.  By the way, just a brief mention of how the network works:  our direct customers are the world builders.  Their customers are the consumers.  So anybody who downloads our technologies to build a world, they host it themselves.  Just like a Web site.  As opposed to some of the other solutions out there that mandate that they host the world for you.  That means it is a distributed network.  As such, we have no direct control over what somebody puts in their world.  We're not hosting it, we can't just turn it off.  So it's very important to make sure that any kid who gets the World Browser can't go into somewhere inappropriate.  We're going to have some age verification that we're in the process of building right now.  

When there are X number of good games then we can launch to consumers in a concerted way.  By the time we do that, we will have this authentication put in.  If you want to go to an adult world, you have to be authenticated.  There are a couple of different ways we can do that.  So basically, we'll have a content rating system, and on that there are even a couple of different ways to go.  I don't want to say we're going to do it one way and then we end up changing our mind.  But that's fairly key, especially with some of the large companies we're talking to that have very powerful kid's brands.  It is critically important to them.  They can build a world that doesn't have the flying penises that you see in Second Life, for example.  That's one of the problems that you get in solutions like that where you have this one world and everything has to coexist.  The GPDs, the Giant Penises of Doom is the industry term for those things.