Metaplace closes new funding -- personal virtual worlds

I'm pretty chuffed to learn that Metaplace, a games startup that I'm an advisor to -- closed a new round of financing today, netting $6.7 million from their existing VCs and Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Metaplace was started by Raph Koster, who created Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, with the idea of democratizing the creation of virtual worlds and games inside them.

Instead of gigantic, elaborate virtual worlds, like Warcraft and its competitors, Metaplace allows users to create modest, personal virtual worlds the way you'd put together a MySpace page, using a toolkit that unpacks into a series of ever-more-powerful tools that allow greater and greater customization. Users can then link up their Metaplaces, stringing together their worlds to make bigger, more complex ones.

There's an invite-only beta, and Raph's promised to update his blog whenever new invites are made available. Raph's one of my favorite people in the world, and he's a profound thinker about games (see his book A Theory of Fun [free PDF] for more). I'm really excited to see Metaplace thriving, even in the current crummy economy. METAPLACE LANDS $6.7 MILLION IN FUNDING

[#1 posted by Peeter , October 23, 2008 5:56 AM]

You've sure brought some sites down today...
First the SF/F covers one, now this one.
Maybe time to let people know in advance when they'll be BoingBoinged so they can up their quota...

[#2 posted by Peeter , October 23, 2008 5:58 AM]

Oops. It's back up again. Temporary thing. Well well.

[#3 posted by quintiliusvarus , October 23, 2008 6:57 AM]

'designer dragon' had one of the most closed minded and poor concepts of game theory of any senior game designer i've ever met - and i've worked with some truly terrible ones. Perhaps he's gotten better since his days of 'clans and wide open pvp wont get out of control, i ran a mud at UT - i know'... or perhaps his ego is still as big as it ever was

[#4 posted by Robbo , October 23, 2008 7:23 AM]

TechCrunch had a post with an invite code in it:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/22/metaplace-raises-64-million-for-custom-virtual-worlds/

[#5 posted by nerdler , October 23, 2008 9:05 AM]

Raph Koster? Star Wars Galaxies?

Ha ha! There's $6.7 million right down the toilet!

[#6 posted by urshrew , October 23, 2008 10:15 AM]

I like this idea. Its time games get a little more handson editable and sociable. I always liked when a particular series of games came with an editor, but I never found a better way to share my ideas.

As for making fun of someone giving this guy 6.7 million dollars, whatever. Someone wanted to give him their money and he took it to try something new. Have you ever raised 6.7 million dollars for one of your ideas?