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Re: Metaplace
By Cameron Sorden | September 19, 2007
I wasn’t going to comment at all on Metaplace, because everyone and their dog is talking about it right now and you’d have to be some kind of under-rock-dwelling hermit who only scuttled out to read Random Battle for me to tell you anything you didn’t know, but after watching Raph’s demo video which Keen linked, I did have one observation related to the fact that they’re doing a world URL allocation system similar to livejournal or blogspot where the address will be something like “http://www.metaplace.com/tamisponyparlorextreme”…
- Step 1: Use dummy accounts or simple games early on to reserve several hundred or several thousand of what will likely be popular or contested world names (Coca-cola, Final_Fantasy, Gamespot, 1UP, GeorgeWBush, Harvard, UMN, etc).
- Step 2: Wait for metaplace to penetrate the public consciousness and cross your fingers that the popularity explodes.
- Step 3: Profit.
‘Nuff said.
In all honesty, I wonder if they’re going to have some kind of event to reserve your game world name. If not, there will be one hell of a land grab for cool and short names come launch.
Topics: Random |
September 19th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
That’s a good point. What would be a better solution though?
September 19th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Don’t have one.
Just making the observation. I’m guessing that people who are early adopters or who get to play with it in the early stages (like beta) will likely get their game names reserved.
Other than that, it depends what Raph and company want to do. I suspect that when you present the world with simple, inclusive tools to make virtual worlds that connect the same way any social network does and then tell them they can profit off of these, sooner or later the big boys are going to want to get in on that (much like companies do on MySpace)– this assumes that the concept gets a toehold and really takes off, which it very well could.
I’m interested to see what happens.
September 19th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
[...] of the negatives that might occur. Cameron at Random Battle brought up this very point in his post today - because the urls for each game are unique, will there be a “land rush” of [...]
September 19th, 2007 at 11:59 pm
It’s not going to work quite like that. =)
Say you reserve metaplace.com/google. Say Google contacts Metaplace for their URL. Copywrite is copywrite - you’ll have to give it up. You won’t see people needing to sell the big reserved trademarks to companies, because the companies can simply ask for them. =)
September 20th, 2007 at 12:31 am
Okay, but copyright and trademarks aside, what if someone wanted to do something like register a few thousand cool-sounding currently non-existent names for virtual worlds and then set themselves up as a name broker?