Interview: Areae’s Raph Koster Talks Metaplace

Our interview with Raph Koster continues…

Interview, Part Three:

The MMO Gamer: When I initially read the announcement, the first three things that popped into my head as to being the major hurdles that the system would have to overcome were money, money, and money.

So, let’s talk about that.

You’re obviously a business, with rent to pay and employees on salary, and I assume you would like to keep it that way.

Where does the money come from in this system?

Raph Koster: We were originally VC funded, but obviously we don’t expect to be taking money throughout our existence that way.

We actually have a variety of business models, and this of course is the stuff that the players always hate us talking about, but we’re going to talk about it anyway, because they’re all enlightened people and understand that we need to make money.

The virtual currency that exists at the network level is probably key. There are a lot of services that we can provide users that exist at that network level, it’s everything from, “Hey, if you tend to play the games on our site there’s probably going to be ads on our site, you don’t want ads,” that’s an upsell. Getting access to the richer profile stuff might be an upsell.

There’s all kinds of things like that… just think of it like tiered service. You register with us you start getting benefits.

You can also, if you’re a content creator of any sort, you can charge other people the virtual currency for access to your worlds, for your scripts, modules, for example, stuff like that. There’s a marketplace for content creators, and we’ll take a cut of stuff on the marketplace.

And we’re going to be the only source of minting the currency, so people who want to obtain it have to get it from us.

Approved business partners will be able to cash out that virtual currency, so if you make a popular world, at some point we’re going to come knocking at your door and saying, “Your world’s really kind of expensive to run, the bandwidth load, the hosting load, and so on, we need you to pay us.”

And we’re going to bill you in the virtual currency, so you could turn around and charge your users in the virtual currency. At that point it’s basically like we’re your billing system in a box. You don’t need to get set up with your own system or anything. And then if you are an approved partner you can cash out whatever profit you make, so at that point you can basically an MMO business on top of Metaplace, and that’s fine with us. There’s all of that kind of thing.

And there’s other things on top of that, we’ve been in talks lots of possible partners who want to run commercial worlds, people who have existing IP in other areas that want to bring it over to Metaplace, there’s people who want to run storefronts, all kinds of things like that. The reason to use a virtual currency is because it kind of cuts across all of those applications, we can always end up as the virtual currency and use it as a transfer mechanism, and then on top of that there’s ad stuff. You know, the usual.

The MMO Gamer: Being an American company I would assume that the US Dollar is going to be the primary means of exchange for the currency system. What about international players? Will you have support for the Canadian Dollar, Pounds Sterling, Euros?

Raph Koster: We’ve already been approached by people who want to handle our business overseas, essentially.

A big thing here is that unlike even a lot of the sharded MMOs, we are not interested in creating like “Metaplace Europe,” or “Metaplace China,” or whatever. There is going to be one network.

Again, a virtue of the virtual currency setup is we can have partners who will handle essentially the billing mechanism for you to obtain virtual currency, so there could be a Chinese partner for that, or a partner in Europe, and so on, and lots of different possible payment methods, but you’ll still end up in the one virtual currency.

The MMO Gamer: You said that if I have, for example, an addictive puzzle game, I would be able to charge people, for instance, eight Metas—or whatever you’re going to call the currency—for access to it?

Raph Koster: Yeah.

The MMO Gamer: What if I want to charge a hundred Metas?

Raph Koster: …Ok…

The MMO Gamer: The reason I ask is—

Raph Koster: [Laughing] They have to agree!

The MMO Gamer: In seemingly every single game—or, in your case, system—that releases with an auction house, you always have certain enterprising individuals who put up items for say, two copper, and a hundred gold.

Raph Koster: Right.

The MMO Gamer: People see the two copper part, and ignore the hundred gold part. So, do you have any plans to combat quote-unquote “Meta Fraud”?

Raph Koster: The thing about “Meta Fraud” kind of things is they are very dependant on what the actual interface looks like. That precise example you cite is an interface problem. So, until we have that interface it’s kind of hard to say what plans we need to put in place to fight it, because, to my mind, a lot of that kind of thing is essentially a flaw in the UI design.

The key thing to understand is that because the virtual currency is a network level thing, you aren’t writing that code in your world. You are accessing our API, and it happens on our site, so we can verify the transaction, we can make sure that it was correct, we can double check and make sure the popup confirms, and all that kind of thing. So it’s not like you can just willy-nilly “Somebody logs into my world, I’m going to drain their account!” Can’t do that.

The MMO Gamer: Getting further into the money issue—

Raph Koster: Even further?! [Laughing]

The MMO Gamer: What is your stance on the “ownership” of virtual property?

Raph Koster: We are the network, we are not the world operator, we don’t run your world, customer service is your job. Similarly, we’re not claiming ownership of your stuff. It would be kind of silly considering that you may have links to it from some place else. It probably isn’t on our site, even.

The MMO Gamer: So if someone has a popular world, gets sick of running it, and decides to sell it on eBay for a few grand, the company wouldn’t have a problem with that?

Raph Koster: That’s essentially selling the account to access it, from an admin point of view.

The only thing about that is at that point I would have to check with lawyers to find out if there are any weird privacy questions where we could end up liable because you transferred your account with your credit card information to somebody else. So there’s weird things like that, I think the way to put it is actually we’re kind of like a hosting company.

You’re uploading a copy of information, you’re using our tools to create information. When something is created you get the copyright, so the IP is going to remain yours, whether or not it literally makes sense for you to transfer your account, or whether we need to set up a mechanism maybe for you to give your world to another active account, maybe we have to do that, I don’t know. I mean, the core of the thing is if you make a kick-ass game idea, we don’t own it, that’s your kick-ass game idea.

I’m sure there’s all kinds of legalese around that, where we have to have licenses to display it, and all kinds of crap like that, but…

The MMO Gamer: On another somewhat touchy subject: In-game advertising. Will builders who aren’t charged for hosting periodically have their pages taken over by McGriddles, ala IGN?

Raph Koster: Honestly, we don’t know yet. I think that there will be advertising on the portal. I think that there is the potential to do advertising in the games, I think that throwing up McGriddle ads in somebody’s carefully crafted fantasy world makes no sense at all, and doesn’t help anybody. It doesn’t help the advertiser, it doesn’t help the player, and it doesn’t help the world operator, because all it does is tick everybody off.

I don’t think that any of those things make sense. However, if somebody wants a world full of ads—which some people will—some people will want to make a realistic world with ads in it, some people will want to do things like storefronts which are essentially ads, more power to them.

The MMO Gamer: Are you considering the possibility for sponsored worlds? Halo 4 Online brought to you by Mountain Dew Game Fuel?

Raph Koster: Sure.

The MMO Gamer: But you aren’t currently in talks for anything like that?

Raph Koster: If I were in talks with numerous potential partners I couldn’t disclose who they were.

The MMO Gamer: Moving on to yet another prickly subject: Intellectual property rights. Would a creator who uploads content onto the marketplace you mentioned earlier be able to specify their own license for it? For instance, GNU open source, or Creative Commons?

Raph Koster: We haven’t settled on—we know that we will allow people to mark stuff as open or closed, for sure. And in fact, probably as just open and copyable, closed copyable, and closed non-copyable, for sure. Kind of three tiers that we know we’ll have.

Having stuff like support for Creative Commons licensing, something like that, is a natural fit I think, [but] there is essentially a gap between what you can enforce in code and what you cannot. So our primary goal is IP rights that can be enforced in code. A lot of the Creative Commons stuff is effectively, “It’s open source, but I’m putting this text tag on it,” you know. So putting a text tag on it is the easy part. The harder part for us is employing the hard coding.

The MMO Gamer: How would you deal with, say, someone using a ton of unauthorized copyrighted material in their worlds?

Raph Koster: If we get a takedown notice we’re going to have to respect it. Especially for hosting assets, we have to respect that, it’s the law.

The MMO Gamer: Under what circumstances would you delete a user’s world outright?

Raph Koster: Nonpayment? [Laughing] Something illegal?

We are not out to tell you what your world should be, we’re not out run your worlds for you. Obviously there are things—because anybody could be liable—where there are cases where something illegal is going on, something that actually needs to be taken, it wouldn’t matter if it were us or if it were a website host or whatever, people have to take action.

If somebody goes and starts planning terrorism, or if somebody starts plotting a murder, or if somebody is using it to extort… you know, whatever, who knows. Yeah, you take action for things like that.

But, we’re not really even going to be looking at what you’re doing, because we’re running the platform, and hopefully there’s so many worlds we have no idea what’s happening on all of them.

The MMO Gamer: Moving on once again. I have tried to come up with a more… delicate… way of phrasing this question but have always come up short, so I’m just going to have to ask it straight out: What are you going to do to ensure that every other world doesn’t just end up devolving into a shemale furry orgy?

Raph Koster: I actually have no doubts that we will have plenty of those worlds. I also have a lot of faith in users as to the diversity of stuff that they actually want to see, and want to make.

You have to understand that unlike the projects that stuff everybody’s creations into one world, our worlds are segmented, so you won’t be seeing the giant shemale furry penis bouncing whatever orgies happening over your fence in your back yard. That won’t be happening—well, unless you put it there, which I wouldn’t you past you, but hey— [Laughing]

The MMO Gamer: Thanks, Raph.

Raph Koster: So the worlds are segmented that way, you decide who has permission to edit your world, essentially.

That’s the first thing, you won’t bump into that stuff by accident. And then the second thing is we’ve already gotten such an amazing diverse array of people and of projects that people want to make, and so far the only mentions of “Hey, let’s make porno world,” or whatever, have actually been jokes on f13. Most people are actually saying, “Hey, I want to make cyberpunk world, I want to make a university, I want to…” you know.

People really want to use it, and I think if that’s the case we’ll see a big diversity of projects.

The MMO Gamer: I’m aware of the restrictions for individual worlds, but I was speaking more broadly as to all the worlds in the system in general. People given unlimited freedoms tend to take those freedoms to the extreme.

You’ve mentioned yourself in interviews, the first thing many people associate when they think of Second Life is flying penises. And, if a game—or system, in your case—doesn’t have its reputation, it has nothing.

Second Life eventually had to go so far as to implement a policy where distributing “broadly offensive” content was punishable by banning and deletion. Are you planning on having any similar policies at launch?

Raph Koster: I’m sure we will need to have some policies, because that broadly offensive category actually is essentially trying to respect laws of places where the client can be played.

We can be as idealistic as we want about—and we are—about freedom of speech and so on, but we still also have to operate inside countries, and countries have laws. We will, I’m sure we will have to have a variety of policies, and they may change over time as we start existing in different territories. Obviously, child pornography would be a great example, that has to go away. That’s a great example of the kind of thing I was referencing earlier, it’s just plain illegal, so it’s just go to go away. In terms of people stumbling across offensive content, we do have a rating system for maturity and all of that kind of thing, one of the beauties of having the portal indexing stuff is that as users come across stuff it can get surfaced, and it can be reported, it can be not displayed in the search results, until enough people have visited it and said that it’s Ok, for example. So there’s lots of things that we can do in order to make sure that the experience at the website doesn’t even necisarily show you the entire universe unless you’re—it’s kind of like SafeSearch, kind of stuff.

The MMO Gamer: Final question. I’m not wishing any ill will on you here, but, companies in the gaming industry have a tendency to, shall we say, go out of business. What would you say to a potential world builder who’s steeling himself to create War and Peace in game form, but is hesitant to do so over concerns for the longevity of the system?

Raph Koster: To some degree there isn’t anything I can say, because they can always just not trust it.

We are well funded, we’ve got backers who are excited and passionate about this space and about what we’re doing. We are opening a fair amount of the platforms, I’m sure if we disappeared somebody could use it to reverse engineer from the other direction. That happens even in the closed-off game industry where stuff isn’t shared.

But even then, I think for us a lot of the excitement here is that we see this as essentially opening up a new segment, opening up new opportunities. And if we don’t succeed somebody else is going to build this, frankly. If we really do flame out then more power to them, I hope they avoid our mistakes.

The MMO Gamer: Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us, Raph, we enjoyed it. We hope we can do it again some time.

The MMO Gamer will have continuing coverage of Metaplace in the days ahead, including a companion piece to this interview detailing the particulars of my visit to Areae.

In the meanwhile, you can visit the official website: http://www.metaplace.com

Or, there are also several community sites already established, such as: http://www.metaplace.info

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