Raph Koster On How His Upcoming Metaverse Is Unlike Steam

In case you didn't check the blog of Raph Koster's Playable Worlds late last week, he is, as anticipated, building a Metaverse:

We have built a metaverse platform. Oh, it’s not done. We’re probably going to be working on this for years. But I say “built” because, well, we have the basics of this stuff working. We have a working massively multiplayer server... 

And you’ll be able to hop between worlds without needing to switch clients. It permits a single, shardless, ever-expanding, ever-changing online universe.

I've heard that "hop between worlds" promise many times before, but I've been skeptical that this in itself makes a Metaverse experientially different than, say, Steam. After all, the game worlds in Steam are separate, but you can run them within the same Steam launcher (which also comes with a social network, payment system, etc.) Exit out of Skyrim back to the Steam launcher, see that your Steam friends are playing Among Us, jump in to play with them via the Steam launcher, etc. Isn't all that which we already do in Steam, basically hopping between worlds?

Raph Koster tells me that what Playable Worlds is building is quite different:

"In Steam every [game] world is an install. It's a separate app. Steam is just a a launcher. Not in our case. It's one app for all of the worlds."

Raph says it's different from my example of hopping from Skyrim to About Us on Steam: 

"[Y]ou can only jump between Skyrim and Among Us if you have them installed. No install needed in our case.

"A web browser is a much better analogy. One client, any webpage. In our case, one client any world. You don’t need to exit to a launcher either. Just hyperlink from within one world to a location in another."

So that's interesting! And strongly suggests he's building some kind of Stadia-style cloud-streamed experience. But enough speculation for now, back to Raph's blogpost:

Further, it’s a true persistent state world, where everything you do is saved. Worlds change, evolve, and develop based on player actions (or AI or simulation, for that matter). It’s running on the cloud right now.

But it’s not just a server. It’s a network of servers. Whole MMO worlds can bubble up and go away on the fly based on player demand. It’s a heck of a lot more efficient than something like a headless Unreal server.

We’ve already got it working with full server-side game logic. Meaning – each world can have completely different gameplay, without needing to change code or take the server down for updates. We’ll even be able to map your controls from the cloud, because when we say different gameplay, we mean it.

Much more here.  

Comments

[Adeon Writer]

He’s saying the right words.

[Kyz]

What a tease, heheh. Looking forward to see what they're cooking up. GoLang on the microservices for the win. Don't fall into the NodeJS trap of concurrency and asynchronous behavior just because it says so on the label. Get it right the first time ;)

[Kaylee West]

Believe when I see it...

[Kyz]

Good rundown video of Playable Worlds at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWOjWgwDNBE

Apparently Raph has said there might not be NFTs or virtual money games on PW, or as the video author calls them "shit coins".