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Corey: Look out for the GPDs!  And we're not anti-GPD, we just want them in the right place.  You don't want them in a kid's world, for God's sake.  

Corey: Yes!  It's like the Web at large.  There are kid's sites and there are adult sites.  The critical thing is just to keep them separate.  So, we're going to have that solved.

Corey: Hmmm, I wish I could.  

Corey: Nothing that I can announce.  

Corey: Nothing that I can announce. (laughing)  Believe me, it is killing me.  

Corey: I'm drooling - I drool on  a daily basis.  I can't say anything, I'm sorry.  There are a lot of players in this, and there are contractually legal issues about what can be said and what can't.  I wish I could say more.

Corey: You know, I used to be able to say that kind of stuff, but now I'm not even supposed to say that anymore.  You can go back and see what I said a few months ago.  I think I can say that.  Hollywood's weird.  I'll just sum it up:  Hollywood's weird.  And we're fairly plugged in to Hollywood.  James Cameron, the movie director, is on our board of advisors, along with John Landau.  They're awesome, great guys.  

But the rest of Hollywood is kinda nuts.  To me, it's wonderful that guys like that, who are really top of their game and top of their craft, arguably the best filmmakers in the world, are really interested in this new medium.  Certainly from an entertainment perspective, but also in a larger use-case.  We met with them just last week.  The ideas they've got and the directions they want to go is cool.  Which again, that's a content free set of sentences I've given you.  I keep hoping there's something I can say - oh I can't say this, I can't say that - dammit!  

Ten Ton Hammer:  It makes for an interesting read anyway.  How about a commercial release for the Multiverse platform?  When are the games going to be available to consumers?

Corey: I'd say certainly next year.  Some of the games are going to go into beta this year.  I think Dark Horizons Universe by MaxGaming Technologies and Forgotten Legends by Doomsburg, either later this year or early next year are going to go into wide public beta.  I'll have to check with those guys to see what their release schedule is.  You really should come take a look at the booth tomorrow.

Corey: Exactly.  We're really enabling the whole long-tail idea for games.  It just hasn't been economically feasible for that in the past.  It was just too expensive.  It was this real blockbuster movie mentality economics, where you had to spend a whole lot, and it then had to be a huge mainstream success so you could recoup all that investment.  Now, with Multiverse, the economics are so changed that you can afford to build something that you are truly yourself interested in or passionate in, and sure enough there's going to be other people in the world who are interested in that same niche or whatever that is.  That'll be very exciting, when we start seeing a lot of these worlds come onto the Multiverse network this year and next.

Corey: Good point.  We will probably have some kind of "seal of approval" that we will grant, bestow, whatever the proper non-annoying verb is, onto the best games on our platform.  Because consumers, when they get the World Browser, are going to say "which ones are the good games?".  The whole problem with the Internet - why Yahoo and Google exist - is that 95% of everything on the Internet it is crap.  You're like "how do I find the good stuff?  Oh, I look at a search engine."  It's entirely possible there's going to be that same ratio on Multiverse.  So it's going to be critically important to bring the good stuff to consumers right from the very beginning.  So we're always going to have, I'm sure, recommendations for games to play.  We're going to have things like collabrative filtering, which is a functionality where you play a certain number of games...

Ten Ton Hammer:  Kinda like Tivo.

Corey: Yeah.  Basically the World Browser will say "I notice you played this game.  People who played that game also enjoyed these games."  The same with the Internet.  Your friends can send you URLs.  It'll be the same thing with Multiverse.  You'll be able to send URLs to friends, and there'll be that kind of filtering as well.  But the question of merchandising:  bringing just the right product, as it were - the right world or game - to the right consumer is going to be a critical thing.  Because there will probably be a lot of crap.  But that's part of the "let a million flowers bloom" approach that we're taking.  Generally speaking, we don't police people's content.  They build it themselves, in private, and they host it wherever they want.  Then of course, when they want that to go and be a public thing they have to register it with our network essentially.  But even then, it's not like we're publishers.   

Corey: That's a thing that we've been very aware of.  I guess Worlds in Progress is kind of the first step in that.  The games that we're making available through Worlds in Progress right now are ones that we have actually visited.  There are other games out there, other worlds, that are not in Worlds in Progress because they're uninteresting or not all that useful to people.  More than perhaps any other company,  we depend on our customers' success for us to be successful.  If we're building a platform and a network, there have got to be these top-quality, great, interesting things.  It's not like we're selling somebody technology or tools, throwing it over a wall, and saying "great, have fun, good-bye, see you later".  We only succeed if our customers succeed.  So that's why we have good relationships with a few dozen of our most promising developers.  

Corey: *with sarcasm dripping from his voice* Unlimited upside! (laughs) We do have a highly leveraged business.  We're not doing the hosting, we're not laying cable.  We build software, put it out there on the Web, and we run a little bit of this infrastructure for this network.  But our customers, the world developers, host their own worlds so we haven't got much in the way of expenses.  Retail boxes, that stuff's expensive.  There's a high cost of goods on that stuff.  So I'd love to wait on that until people are banging down our door demanding that.  Then we'll cut a deal with somebody to do the packaging.  

Corey: I love that, "unlimited upside".  That's certainly a very credible thing to say.  What could possibly sound ridiculous about that?  (laughing)  We actually did have that as a joke.  We ended up not getting venture capital.  We met with a number of VCs over the last few years and we ended up instead going with angels.  The difference is that venture capitalists are these institutional organizations and angels are basically just rich entrepeneurs.  It is someone who, for one reason or another, has a lot of money and they just cut you a personal check essentially.  As opposed to a venture capitalist where you have a whole board of people.  Having been at Netscape in the early days I've got a lot of buddies who are now VCs.  I have no problem with VCs.  But the terms that VCs generally wanted for us were not acceptable, as opposed to the terms that angels were happy with.  So we ended up doing our first round of funding that was entirely angel-based.  You get a half-million over there, a quarter million over there, and soon it adds up to real money.

Corey: It's a funny thing, that we didn't need to do the VC route, which is nice.  So when we were talking to VCs, we had this joke around the company that we would just go in and say "Unlimited upside!", walk out, and see if they bite.  "Unlimited upside.  Did we mention unlimited upside?"  But I think it could be huge, anyway.  

Corey: It's not just unlimited upside, there's unlimited work we can do to make the client and the server better.  I'll give you an example.  Our technology is such that it's very extensible.  You can customize it and do radically different things with it than anybody else might be doing.  It's a very modular system which uses what we call a plug-in architecture.  You can change how one set of features work and it doesn't ripple through and break all this other stuff.  That's important if you want to build something that's unique and different from what other people are doing.  You can build just all sorts of wild stuff.  We actually provide a lot of these plug-ins.  There's a default combat plug-in, there's a default trading plug-in.  

Using combat as an example, you can say the default fits your conception of combat perfectly, or you can say you want something different.  We provide source code for all those plug-ins.  You can throw it out entirely and say:  "in my game, combat is completely different.  It's psychic, or it's social status-based".  Right now we have a movement plug-in that makes it easy to build a games that are based on running around on terrain, or maybe flying or swimming, but there's always an absolute "up" and a "down".  As opposed to, say, a 3D game where there is no absolute "up" or "down".  You could build that on Multiverse today, but if you wait until version 2.0 of that platform we'll have a plug-in that makes it a lot easier.  We'll do a lot of that work for 3D movement with relative "up" and "down".  That's the sort of thing that we're going to keep doing, keep enhancing the platform both server side and client side.  There's years and years and years of work we can do to make this even better.  We're off to a good start, but certainly we can be as busy as we want to be for as long as we want to be.  

Corey: It is important to be backward-compatible with a platform like this.  Much more complex, but the same sort of thing that we dealt with at Netscape.  If you have version 1.0 of the client and the server and somebody builds a Web site, then version 2.0 of the client comes out, you want to still have it work with that existing stuff.  Same proposition here.  We've got to keep our stuff backward compatible, which is a challenge.  When we had the initial idea for Multiverse four years ago, the four of us founders literally spent eight months having lunch every week and working out the structure of the architecture of the platform, and the ramifications of the business model.  We spent eight months doing that on a regular basis, often meeting multiple times in a week.  Eight months before we incorporated, quit our jobs, linked arms and jumped off the cliff together.  So it is going to be a true platform, and the architecture is critical, and you want to plan that stuff ahead of time.  It keeps you from having as many headaches down the road if you put down a good base.  Unlimited upside!

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