style="font-weight: bold;">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.  

style="font-weight: bold;">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.

style="font-weight: bold;">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...

style="font-weight: bold;">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...

style="font-weight: bold;">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.
 

style="font-weight: bold;">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.  

style="font-weight: bold;">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.