Raph Koster, is widely recognised for his work on the MMORPGs Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. He quit his position as chief creative officer at Sony Online Entertainment in March last year to form his new studio
Areae, to take virtual worlds into the mainstream arena. His interest is in the intersection of social websites like MySpace, virtual worlds, and Web 2.0 sites. He believes the truly popular Massive games of the future will not be about orcs and elves, but be very much based on hit television shows, movies, and products:
In an interview with
Gamasutra he says:
Consider the statistics. Webkinz, 2.5 million uniques in December; you buy a plush toy. Runescape: we still don't think of Runescape as being part of our industry, but it's probably the most popular MMO in the world, more popular than WoW. Toontown is up to more than 2.5 million uniques now. We never talk about Toontown because it's web deployed. Then of course there’s was Club Penguin, with 4.5 millions uniques in December alone...When you compare the numbers, all of those are larger than the number two MMO in the western world, every single one of them.
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