Raph’s Website » Casual Connect





By N2H

blog · games · writing · music · art · shop · about Raph · contact

Casual Connect

July 21st, 2009 (Visited 1326 times) Tags: casual games, speaking

I will be at Casual Connect on Thursday, on a panel:

Casual Virtual Worlds & MMO

David HELGASON CEO Unity
Sibley VERBECK CEO The Electric Sheep Company
Robin CHAN Founder & CEO XPD Media
Raph KOSTER Co-founder and President Metaplace

Discussion led by
Mark FRIEDLER Founder GameDaily

The World of Warcraft gets all the press and attention, but the truth is millions of gamers are logging on to casual MMO’s and virtual worlds every month. Over the last 18 months, more investment capital has been poured into this segment than any other in the games industry. Come and learn which companies will be winners of this growing category.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Casual Connect”

Jump to reader comments » | Leave a reply »

Trackbacks & Pingbacks

Reader Comments

Derek Licciardi said on July 21st, 2009 at 10:17 am:
I find the inclusion of Unity3D on that list interesting. They’ve adamantly stated that they were opposed to helping Unity3D become a MMO kit even though there’s a long line of forum posts on their website asking for just this. Recently, they announce that off in the future, a server version of their engine would be available but they specifically stated that it is not meant to be a MMO engine at all. So their inclusion in this panel is to say the least interesting. I’m looking forward to the notes from this session.
Dave Nichols said on July 21st, 2009 at 10:52 am:
I’m curious, where can i find Unity’s posts about this? I’m surprised to hear this, and am concerned as a Unity Pro licensee.
Derek Licciardi said on July 21st, 2009 at 2:02 pm:
The first is in their support of a headless server on Windows. It’s specifically not meant to be a MMO backend.
http://feedback.unity3d.com/pages/15792-unity/suggestions/164004-networking-headless-server-support

Then this post talks about how Unity + a back end can do it.
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=27942&highlight=mmo

Here’s a thread I took part in.
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=21929&highlight=mmo

Now this might change with the release of 2.6 but using Unity for an MMO is the same as using Gamebryo or Torque. All three are just the client front end, one of the many headends connecting to a server that is custom built. It would be just as odd to see John Carmack sitting on the panel. His company makes 3D engines and doesn’t have expertise in virtual worlds. They can speak about casual games but Unity doesn’t come from a position of expertise on virtual worlds.

Now, if Unity is announcing things by being on this panel then great. I actually think it could become a good platform for MMOs. The engine seems well constructed and the tools are there for lots of things I’d like to see in a MMO.(Web based streaming of assets and such) Right now server side, there’s next to nothing and the engine’s just the tip of the iceberg for a MMO implementation.
Guy Russon said on July 22nd, 2009 at 2:52 am:
I take it this Unity 3D is nothing to do with the Game Engine (Unity 3D) for WWIIoL / Battleground Europe then?

Anyway, I hope KingsIsle gets a mention. Quiet achiever there.
Dave Nichols said on July 22nd, 2009 at 2:58 pm:
Ah, ok. A little confusion there, as your reference to mmo kit and “engine” left it sounding like Unity was anti-MMO in nature. I’m aware of the need for a back-end, and have looked at net dog and others. I’m happy with the functionality Unity provides to artists for MMO production — their import pipeline includes full FBX support. The C++ plugin functionality is also nice because it lets one avoid a low-level license fee, yet still allows low-level integration of middleware.
Nicholas Francis said on July 27th, 2009 at 5:16 am:
At Unity, we are certainly very keen on being used for MMOs – and Cartoon Networks’ Fusionfall also shows that Unity is certainly able to deploy MMOs. With our web deployment and 14million installed plug-ins, I think Unity makes perfect sense as a platform when making an MMO.

There are currently over 10 MMOs in development that use Unity, so we’re by no means anti-MMO – (can’t give you names, NDAs and all that

What Unity does not currently have is the full MMO stack (with backend servers, billing, lobbys, etc) – instead, we’ve partnered up with various companies that specialize in this. I’m currently aware of integrations for Neutron SDK, SmartFox and NetDog. Quite a few of our users have asked us about providing the complete vertical stack but we feel that it is a task best left to people who are dedicated to doing that.

Hope this clears the confusion up.

Cheers,
Nicholas Francis
Unity Chief Creative & Co-founder

Recent Trackbacks

Twitter @raphkoster

@cuppy It could be worse -- could be called Wang Chung. in reply to cuppy 9 hrs ago
@cuppy I see piles of people with active LinkedIn status update streams... someone must be using it that way! in reply to cuppy 4 days ago
Connected LinkedIn to Twitter. Let's see if it's annoying or not. :) 4 days ago
More updates...