Over the Christmas holiday, I received a text message from twitter that declared Metaplace.com was closing.  Frankly, I was shocked to see this news.  Raph Koster’s a very well known designer and I figured if anyone could make the case for User Generated Content (UGC), it was him.  Unfortunately, I was wrong but Metaplace.com failing to gain traction in the marketplace does not diminish the value of UGC as some are quick to point out.

All the failure of Metaplace.com does is point out that its type of UGC may not have been enough to cause a startup company to earn revenues required to achieve the expected growth from VC investment.  In my eyes, UGC and Developer Generated Content (DGC) are two points on a line; opposite ends to be more precise.  On the one end stood Metaplace.com and on the other end, the “Theme park MMO”, of which there are many examples.  Consider the following diagram:

 

That’s how I view the MMO space today.  City of Heroes is about as DGC centered as any MMO can be.  There’s very little crafting, a tiny economy and very little user generated content of any type.  World of Warcraft adds an economy through crafting and more formal guilds.  LotRO adds limited player housing.  Everquest II adds more detailed player housing and selling from your house while Star Wars Galaxies adds the ability to place your house/store anywhere.  Ultima Online finally adds the ability to custom design housing to the mix.  That’s the current limit of Theme Park Worlds.  Your city still can’t become a formal faction of the world like it can with Eve Online. Eve Online, however, isn’t nearly as friendly to new players as the other worlds.  In fact, that’s a trend that we see with all UGC based MMOs and in my opinion, part of the reason why Metaplace.com didn’t work out.

On one side we have the Theme Park worlds and on the other side we have the UGC/Sandbox worlds.  There’s a vast sea of possibilities in the middle of that spectrum where there have been very few AAA MMO releases to date.  Of the MMOs that tried, they all seem to have failed for some other reason unrelated to the amount of UGC present in the game itself.  Metaplace.com is the first failure of a primarily UGC based game that was both fully realized and properly funded.  There’s a couple of points to make about this spectrum.

1) I think Eve Online has found the minimum DGC level where a MMO can succeed.  Anything less than that results in Metaplace.com or Second Life.  The latter two, feel more like creation tools than they do living, breathing virtual worlds. 

2) The closer you get to the “Theme Park World” side of the spectrum, the more likely you are to develop your game in that direction.  Ultima Online moved significantly to the right with the release of Trammel as did Star Wars Galaxies with the release of NGE.

All of this is to point out why I don’t think that Metaplace.com will impact future UGC based MMOs.  Metaplace.com ends up being a huge gamble that only someone like Raph Koster could take on.  It had some very lofty goals and I’d have liked to have seen it succeed as much as the next guy but it didn’t.  Of course, Raph’s promised a post mortem of sorts and I eagerly await his insight into why Metaplace.com failed to gain market traction.  I suspect that any number of the following factors influenced this outcome.

1) The interface, while polished and well done, still left the user with far too much construction.  In the end, game design, construction and administration is hard work no matter how intuitive the interface is.  Ask any MUD admin about the hours upon hours of care and feeding a successful MUD required.  The vast majority of the “mass market” player base would rather upload photos of their family to an existing photo album in a crude virtual space over constructing their own virtual space only to have to then build the photo album before getting to the uploading and sharing part.

2) The idea failed to attract Twitter/Facebook unique visitor levels that would be required to monetize the product to produce the expected returns on the investment.

3) An opportunity to use the technology surfaced during development that represented a better market in which to generate the expected returns on the investment.

Finally, Metaplace.com, the technology, is not dead.  As any good entrepreneur knows, there might come a time where you have to repurpose your technology when a market path proves to not be as lucrative as you expected it to be.  In VC terms they call that failing fast and pivoting which is exactly what I suspect Raph is doing with his company so there’s still hope that his creation finds a market and ultimately rewards him for his efforts.  Meanwhile, we’re still trekking along looking for a private investor to provide matching funds for a KEF investment undeterred by the critics declaration of the death of UGC.  UGC is nowhere near dead.