Ex-Lindens Get Funding to Launch Play Anywhere, Massively Interactive Game World Platform With User-Generated Content & Monetization

Control Zee is a game startup which just raised $3 million to develop and launch a platform that deploys "massively interactive swarm games" that 1000s of people can play at the same time:

Creators or livestreamers can use Dot Big Bang to build their own games and play them with their communities during a stream, across any device, simply by sharing a browser link. The company is trying to take the frustration out of getting people to play a co-op game together, which often requires getting everyone to install applications and set up accounts in advance, said ControlZee CEO Rob Anderberg in an interview with GamesBeat.

It was co-founded by Linden Lab veterans Rob Andenberg and Porter Schutz,  along with Jon Stockwell and Jacques Menuet. Schutz credits his time as a Linden for inspiring their approach to social game worlds:  

"There are a few touchstones from Second Life that are reflected in what we're trying do with dot big bang: Creative immediacy -- we want there to be zero barrier to users expressing themselves creatively in multiplayer. No extra tools are needed, everything is available to everyone. Building with your friends is fun and easy -- just share a link. With the creator's permission, anything can be remixed by other users in order to provide a starting point for building."

Would that SL itself worked like that (which I guess is the point)!

Another Linden touchstone Porter mentions is a desire to create vibrant online experiences -- but with their platform, in a way that's much more accessible to many more people:

"The beauty of Second Life is its many communities, and it shows how important sharing a virtual space with likeminded folks can be," as he puts it. "In dot big bang, we're targeting a PG13 aesthetic that's as inclusive as possible. With 'Swarm Games', we're trying to extend the community experience to scale of a stream, where the entire viewership can directly participate in ways that influence the world. While we've created Straits of Danger along with the Day[9] folks to demonstrate this [watch above], the goal is for these types of games to be built by-and-for existing communities. Because no install is required, joining one of these games is seamless."

Future dot big bang games will enable large groups to build together at the same time. That's achieved, Porter tells me, through some clever mass interaction:

"We're still pushing the boundaries of this tech, which we're calling Constellation, so we'll have more and more concrete examples as the months go by (starting first in Straits of Danger).

"For building, the most straightforward thing to imagine is that you'd have a core group of ~20-30 builders working in-world with our existing tools, but thousands more 'interactors' could be actively playing while it was under construction. You could collaboratively lay out a platform game or obstacle course, and see where the interactors were failing to correctly time a jump. These interactors could react to segments with emoji to express their feelings -- this would show up in the session for the builders to see. How the interactors behave and interact with the world is driven entirely by user-script, and their activity is aggregated by the platform."

Similar to Second Life, he adds, they plan to make money via user-generated content:

"Our eventual goals for monetization are broadly similar in terms of the Marketplace (we don't envision land rental). Users should be empowered to earn money from their contributions to the community, and our end goal is that the community is entirely self-supporting in terms of content. The entire suite of creation tools on the platform will always be free, from world and object building to scripting. Everything the community builds is discoverable and playable from the same place, so something you create on the platform has the potential to inspire or impact everyone else."

Much more here. I continue to be impressed by how Linden Lab veterans continue to take what they learned from Second Life (both good and bad) to apply it in new ways, new worlds.

Comments

[seph]

The game engine is very impressive. At least very fast and instant on mobile.

I wonder how they plan to bridge the gap between serious creators needing to earn a living off their creations vs. influencers a.k.a Twitch streamers looking to offer fast, free, brief distractions to their viewers like they do with 'Marbles on Stream'.

Marbles on Stream makes its money via in-app purchases for things like cosmetics and track builders. That's something most stream viewers never see though as they never have to load the game, just sign up for a round via a chat command and watch the streamer. Earning off in-app purchases requires masses of people being in-app, but the most successful stream game doesn't do this.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but there seems to be big disconnects between how Second Life creators create and monetize, and how Twitch streamers and their audience consume content with these kinds of games.

This is really cool though and I like the engine and I hope it becomes clearer how it can work out.

[Adam Nova]

I’m just not a fan of voxels.