Comments on: Farewell, Metaplace

By: Craig Timpany

Craig Timpany — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 07:37:42 +0000

Yeah, I had that reaction to the client as well. “Surely AS3 is faster than this?”

I’d love to read a technical postmortem of metaplace. No doubt there are a lot of difficulties in a user-editable MMO that aren’t obvious until you try building one.

By: LunarRaid

LunarRaid — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 03:19:47 +0000

Am I the only person here who disagrees with about 90% of this article?

By: Andrew Crystall

Andrew Crystall — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 11:18:03 +0000

Yes, I had hopes as well – honestly, I’ve always wondered what would of happened if you’d of had an store where you could of sold NWN1 modules you made.

Ah well, next time I guess.

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 09:38:51 +0000

It was a shame, I had some high hopes for metaplace originally but even as a professional games developer I found their API confusing and the docs were very poor.

They definitely had the right ideas – create a marketplace where scripters can provide modules for non-scripters and artists can provide assets for non-artists; am open protocol so that people could create their own clients etc. But sadly they never quite got the execution right.

Sounds like the are not quite dead yet though, I wonder where they are going now? My guess is white-label virtual-worlds/games for corporate sponsors. A little sad, but where the money is I should think.

By: Steven Davis

Steven Davis — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 18:29:27 +0000

I would add as a downside – no clear business model for content creators or way for third parties to reliably tap the infrastructure.