VentureBeat

When Raph Koster spoke to us in December about his startup Areae, he implied that independent games had a greater earning potential than traditional studio-produced games.

Now he’s putting his money where his mouth is, launching the website Metaplace and launching today at the TechCrunch40 conference.

Metaplace, launched by San Diego-based Areae, is a site on which amateur designers can create their own games. The concept may sound familar; similar ideas are in operation at Kongregate and the Casual Collective.

The difference is that both of those sites rely on flash coders who, although they are called amateurs, have a level of specialized knowledge an ordinary person does not. Metaplace aims to enable anyone to create their own game.

The other difference is the amount of detail. When Koster showed me one of the virtual worlds his site can create, I immediately thought of the Sims; the appearance was quite similar. Games on Kongregate, by contrast, rely on extremely simplistic graphics.

Metaplace has a two-pronged strategy: Coders and designers develop gaming platforms, and users build atop the platforms to invent their own environments. They can pull in games, images and videos from other places.
Metaplace’s approach, helping star developers show off and sell their wares independently, is similar to another private venture that was just bought by IAC, Garagegames.

Although quite a few individual games have allowed users to build atop their worlds, Koster hopes that his startup will be able to grow into something exponentially larger. However, big questions remain for this company. Do people really want to mashup their worlds? Other, bigger virtual worlds like Second Life have APIs that give developers and users more options.

As of its launch today, Metaplace only has about four different templates for game creation, created by the Metaplace team. The number could someday grow to thousands. With that many designs available, users would have a nearly infinite array of tools at their disposal to create their own games.

Metaplace will open today, following the end of the TechCrunch40 conference.

Areae is backed by Charles River Ventures (previous coverage) and Crescendo Ventures.

D2C Games (also known as Bigdog Games) and Areae are two of the latest game start-ups boasting “next generation” technology, and they’ve just raised millions of dollars in venture capital.

D2C, of San Mateo, has raised $1.5 million in a first round of funding (Dan Primack broke the news), but there’s no sign it is moving in the direction of the more recent start-ups, Red 5 (see our story here) and the just-announced Areae. Both of these aim to merge multi-player games with the Internet and its full Web 2.0 glory. For now, D2C doesn’t specify what exactly about it is “next generation.”

D2C is is run by Madden Football architect and Glu Mobile founder Scott Orr, and is backed by new Silicon Valley firm Rubicon Ventures, which earlier invested a seed round of $1 million into D2C. All we know is that it is focused on “casual games for a variety of platforms.” It also is a licensed Sony publisher, and plans to offer at least two games next year. (More background on backer Rubicon, its partners Mark Wilson, Paul Sherer, potential partner Ravi Chiruvolu and their apparently tortured efforts to raise $30 million for an inaugural fund, can be found here.)

Areae, of San Diego, is also being cagy, but it is overtly trying to merge Web 2.0 with games, just like Red 5. Chief executive Raph Koster told VentureBeat last weekend he has raised a fraction of the $18.5 raised by Red 5. From the sounds of it, Areae got in the low digit millions, though Koster hasn’t confirmed. Investors are Crescendo Venture and Charles River. Koster says he’s working in the virtual world area, but cautions that its different from Second Life. He distances himself from Red 5, saying Red 5 appears to be like a traditional game development studio, allocating most of its capital to developing a single (or perhaps a couple) of titles. While Red 5 says it will take years to develop its games, Koster says we’ll be hearing from Areae in 2007.

Koster is a pioneer in the multiplayer online gaming space. He was lead designer of Ultima Online and the chief creative officer of Sony Online Entertainment, and wants to merge the Web 2.0 and multiplayer game worlds from the outset — but apparently wants to invest a lot of cash into developing a few titles. Koster shares some of his views here.

Here are a few questions we asked Raph and his responses:

VentureBeat: If you’re not developing games like Red 5, what *are* you going to do? Where are you on the spectrum between Red 5 (on the game-making side, with Web 2.0 baked in) and Shawn Fanning’s Rupture (on the full Web 2.0 side, with games backed in)?

Koster: Oh, we are firm believers in entertainment and in games. But as I have said many times before, games fit inside virtual worlds — not the other way around. I think that’s a difference from Red 5, probably. The straight-up games business carries with it so many assumptions about production styles, scope, approach, and so on, all of which are in fact already disproven by the indie games movement. The largest game world today, Runescape, is an indie, not World of Warcraft.

I would describe it as marrying the Web 2.0 elements to the game elements, rather than saying that these things are on a spectrum. Rupture seems like it’s a business layered on top of existing games, and we’re definitely interested in the games themselves as well.

VentureBeat: Where do you plan to monetize?

Koster: We’re staying quiet about that right now.

VentureBeat: If you’re opening up to Web, you’re even more vulnerable to a CopyBot, no? Where is the value?

Koster: I think I hinted at this even in the original article I did for you, in the concluding paragraph. Anything that streams is vulnerable to CopyBot. But there’s a host of things that aren’t: server-side content and value, service-level value, and so on.

Plenty of rumors have circulated about BitTorrent, the popular San Francisco file-sharing company, speculating on its latest funding round and the fate of its brilliant chief executive.

Here’s word from the horse’s mouth: BitTorrent has raised $20 million in its second round of capital, led by Silicon Valley firm Accel Partners, the company told VentureBeat earlier Thursday. Existing investor DCM participated. And while we don’t know what will happen with Bram Cohen, we came away from a conversation with the company thinking he may be stepping down as CEO soon.

BitTorrent is a hot company because it’s at the center of a revolution in video file-sharing. It is controversial because it is still a distributor of predominantly pirated video. Its peer-to-peer technology defies centralized control, and so controlling piracy on its platform is a hard thing to do — but it is working on it nonetheless. BitTorrent has millions of users, and says its traffic accounts for as much as 40 percent of all worldwide Internet traffic.

BitTorrent is also working with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to remove copyright infringing content from its independent website. Over 20 film studios and television networks, including 20th Century Fox, MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, expect to publish thousands of movies and TV shows on BitTorrent.com, the company says.

As VentureBeat reported earlier, Ping Li, a venture capitalist at Accel led the investment. In that earlier piece, we wrote about the challenges BitTorrent still faces in becoming an easy, useful consumer-oriented site. Those challenges remain.

Separately, we asked BitTorrent’s director of communications, Lily Lin, about reports that there is an executive search underway to replace Bram Cohen as chief executive. She said everyone knows BitTorrent had become a large company, with 35 employees, but then she repeated what she told us Wednesday, that Bram was “here to stay.” We noted she was not saying he was CEO to stay. She paused, and said again, “he’s here to stay.”

So with the clues, we now believe Cohen will stay at the company but will step down as CEO. She referred to a bigger company, a hint that organization was needed. This Wired piece from more than a year ago suggests organizing people may not be Cohen’s forte. It is a snippet from a part about his wife’s view of him:

She pats her husband affectionately on the head: “My sweet little autistic nerd boy.” (Cohen in fact has Asperger’s syndrome, a condition on the mild end of the autism spectrum that gives him almost superhuman powers of concentration but can make it difficult for him to relate to other people.)

We may be wrong. Who cares about titles, right? Cohen could stay CEO, and the search may be on for a chief operating officer who effectively runs the company. Doesn’t really make a difference.