A multitude of worlds - the Multiverse platform
by Tateru Nino 
Nov 9th 2007 at 10:15PM
Filed under: Business models, MMO industry, Opinion
Back at the beginning of August, MMO/VW platform developer Multiverse released the 1.0 version of their Multiverse platform. With Multiverse, tools and platform tech is available for any team to build a world, from 3D chatrooms to game-based MMOs.
According to Multiverse, their platform has so far attracted 11,000 registered development teams/individual developers. Twenty-eight of those are featured on the Multiverse site, in both game and non-game genres from chat-rooms to victoriana.
11,000 registered dev-groups potentially means up to 11,000 MMOs - although practically a lot of folks just registered to get a look at the Multiverse tech platform first-hand, some are building solely private enclaves, and probably less than 30% of the MMOs in commercial development ever make it to release - so we wouldn't necessarily expect better from the garage bands - or would we?
Even so, there's a good chance that we'll see a couple of top-notch MMOs come out of the Multiverse platform if the tech is really all that it promises.
Multiverse have two sample demo worlds you can connect to - neither one is complete - they've been assembled quickly to show off the possibilities of the platform. One is a simple social VW, and the other is a simple fantasy MMOG.
Multiverse aren't charging for non-commercial use of the platform - if you're not making money from your customers, or from advertising, then they aren't either - otherwise developers can pay up front or go for a revenue-sharing scheme, where Multiverse get ten percent of your gross.
It will be interesting to see how many tech-teams make it to release with the lowered barrier to entry. It seems to be easy enough to put something sloppy together. I'm wondering how many will really shine.
