Areae and the rise of the Social Networking / MMO hybrid
When I started writing this blog, very few people were talking about the melding of MMOs and Web 2.0. My goal for the last year was to proliferate this concept widely and to help bring together what I observed to be two very segregated, but highly complementary communities. This was my motivation behind putting together a Virtual Worlds/Casual MMO panel at the Web 2.0 Expo and for including the panel on “Virtual Items: Mainstream or Not” at the Virtual Goods Summit.
Yesterday, BusinessWeek published a special report called “Getting Serious about Gaming.” Two of my investments are mentioned in this article, one of which is Areae:
“One of the most high-profile efforts in this area is the L.A.-based Areae, founded by industry veteran Raph Koster (former chief creative officer at Sony Online Entertainment (SNE)) in December, 2006. Still in stealth mode, the company is talking very broadly about its plan to reinvent virtual worlds. But the basic idea is to bring down the astronomical development costs of the popular MMOGs by borrowing from the equally popular and vastly more economical Web 2.0 technologies supporting sites such as MySpace and YouTube.”
Hrm, they don’t exactly get it right. What they do get right is that Areae is still very stealthy. In all seriousness, I don’t like invoking a Web 2.0 metaphor where the sole conclusion is ”cost reduction.” Web 2.0, while an accelerant of more cost efficient development models, is in my mind, primarily characterized by a collaborative and community-driven relationship with your users where “A+B” does not merely equal “A+B.” This is the kind of alchemy all of us technologists strive for – how do we transform mundane, commodity database driven web pages into something that supports life? ;>
And since when was MySpace Web 2.0?
In any case, all my good natured snark aside, I’m very happy to see the transformation in the market that has taken place over the last year. The conversation around next generation social media has moved far beyond Second Life and WoW. Every day, I see new business plans and prototypes of entrepreneurs constantly innovating in this space.
So when does Areae launch? I would be curious to see what it’s like when available. In the meantime I will stick to my current favorite virtual world, http://www.citypixel.com that I recommend anyone reading this to check out.
An effective, MMO/Social Networking hybrid will be clever enough to contextualize user-content across entry-level feeder platforms (free, micro-subscriptions and micro-transactions, for example) into a larger main product. In social media the media tends to be the message, but the message[s] can, in a sense, become/merge/blend into the [primary] media, if well-designed. We’re developing a model like this in our own context, and it’s exciting!
BTW, have been checking your blog for a while now and always find it interesting — appreciate your insights!
hi i enjoyed the read
hi nice post, i enjoyed it
hi nice post, i enjoyed it
Hi Big A – Areae will make some public announcements in the near future. Soon…
Ben – Thanks for your prescient comments. I just posted something last night about contextualizing and micro-chunking experiences into multiple entry level feeder platforms. I completely agree with you.
[...] Labs, a Boston based company that’s focused on building a social networking / casual MMO hybrid. Well, what does that exactly mean? And aren’t there a hundred companies now doing this [...]