Rock Band goes academic while Metaplace says goodbye
The new job is keeping me very busy and I unfortunately haven’t had time to write much…at least not here. Two recent bits of gaming news caught my attention:
1. Harmonix, the creators of the original Guitar Hero game and now the Rock Band franchise, is offering courses at Berkleemusic.com.
Say what?
Harmonix announced the Rock Band Network nearly a year ago, a place where musicians can go and upload their own, original music and distribute much like developers distribute software on Apple’s appstore (see an old post for more info). Creating and publishing music to the Rock Band Network is not trivial…it’s actually very difficult. In addition to providing musicians with tutorials online, Harmonix is going to offer courses via Berkleemusic.com (Berklee’s online learning efforts) to help artists and other industry folks get their tunes on the Rock Band Network and, as Harmonix puts it, get paid!
2. Metaplace, the recent brainchild of MMO industry veteran Raph Koster, has shut down. You can read the closing notification and closing FAQ on the Metaplace website. I had high hopes for Metaplace. It was on the web, built in flash. It had multiple worlds, all loosely coupled together. It had massive amounts of user generated content. It had an e-commerce engine supporting it all.
…and it failed. From what I can gather from the announcement, the business model simply was not working. At the end of the FAQ, they do talk about licensing the technology, and that is something they do NOT plan on doing.
Welcome back, Second Life! I’m unsure how Second Life has survived this long, but I have a feeling its relationships with companies such as IBM and government organizations certainly helps. Organizations aren’t exactly licensing Second Life from Linden Labs, but it is somewhat similar. Metaplace never really had a parrallel offering, something where government or academia could pay a small (or large in some instances) fee for virtual property and maintenance. In Metaplace it was all free…but you would think some model existed similar to Second Life to pull in the government, academic and maybe even corporate folks.
I know I was looking forward to exploring and maybe even migrating my College’s presence from Second Life to Metaplace.
