We liked metaplace. We are sorry to hear it’s going to pass into the pages of game history. What we are even more sorry to hear is that a small indie company is letting a really great opportunity pass it by. Again.

I realize that sometimes it’s just impossible, legally to do what I am about to suggest. But, it’s something every game developer should commit to. Raph and Metaplace should release the source. Why? The prevailing attitude is to shut things down, and lock out the players who were there for you. The common attitude of “If I can’t make money off this, then nobody can” needs to go away in the game industry.

Games like metaplace are about the content. They are not about the code. Metaplace was many things. But above all else, it was a unique content channel. Where is the harm in releasing the machine that projected the content? It’s like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It makes less sense when you analogize it like this:

Imagine if a movie theater, having shown a really bad movie decided not only to not show the movie again…but to lock up the projectors so nobody else would ever risk looking at that film again. It’s ridiculous. It’s the content. As much as we admire Raph, we are left wondering why he has not figured this out. Or maybe he has, but is legally obligated not to release anything in the way of source. Either way, it’s a loss for indie gaming.

Indie game studio’s lose when someone’s great new idea goes bust, and all is lost. Metaplace could not make a go of it, okay. Who’s to say nobody else could? That is the tragedy here.

Emerald Kingdom will be a Flash client, with some extra’s. One of the things we discovered early on is, the real only Flash oriented multiplayer server was one that cost more money than we felt it was worth. To that end, our programmer decided to do our own. While some of it will be Emerald Kingdom specific, the code may be reusable to others. When we stablize Emerald Kingdom, and get into our regular release groove, the day will come when we release the source to our servers. Maybe even some of the nifty AS code we are coming up with for the client. Why?

Because: it’s the content, not the code. People don’t pay you because you run a Linux, or FreeBSD backend with some clever code. They pay you for the content, the enjoyment you provide. Yes, the client server makes that possible. But the fact is, without content…a server and a client are just arbitrary bit of code that run.

The server that runs WoW, nobody cares about it, (Except maybe shard operators) and it would be a meaningless bit of code without the content. Same with any server code out there. It’s about the content. It’s about creating avenues for people to create or play in content. The code is worthless without the content to draw and drive people. But, here again, we have another company shutting the doors, and locking out the people.

None of the regular folks who play Metaplace care about *how* it works, only that it *does* work. There are also many folks in Metaplace, programmers, designers, artists who have spent a great deal of time scripting, drawing, etc…there are also people capable of taking the code, and running with that ball where someone else could not. That’s the true tragedy of this. The ball, having been dropped…has been taken by the referee and locked in a vault so nobody can ever play again. We feel this is the bigger loss, the larger tragedy in all of this.

From one indie to another, we hope whatever Metaplace, Inc has in store for the future works out well. We wish Raph Koster luck. We admire the hell out of the man. We use “The Rules” as one of our guides.  This can be a nasty business, but it can also be a rewarding one. We don’t expect Emerald Kingdom to be the next WoW. But we know it will be fun.

We also know that we enjoyed Metaplace, and were seriously contemplating its use as a business channel. Godspeed, Metaplace.