Former Outback Online Head Announces Imperial Galaxy for Facebook

Randal Leeb-du Toit is known in the virtual worlds space as the  former CEO of Yoick, which most recently announced the cancellation of its virtual world Outback Online. He is now chairman of Creative Enclave. Creative Enclave builds social media applications. It's first will be Imperial Galaxy, a science fiction MMOG built on top of Facebook. The game, based on the upcoming novel "A Confusion of Princes" by Garth Nix, is now in open beta and is set to launch in February 2008. "The whole principle of what I wanted to do with Yoick was an open platform," Leeb-du Toit explained. "And then Facebook came along a few months later with their open platform. And it was great. And it was kind of like 'Why replicate it from scratch when you can build on others?'"

Imperial Galaxy straddles the line between full MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, though operates in an unsharded environment, and the games that already exist on Facebook like Zombies or Scrabulous. Leeb-du Toit believes that the mass market might not be ready for full immersion in virtual worlds--a notion which has helped SceneCaster gain success on Facebook--but that it still wants more interaction. Likewise Imperial Galaxy is based on the idea that even fans of World of Warcraft want more social interaction than is initially given them.

"Most MMOGS that are out there are 3D first-person highly-graphical games, and are nearly all pretty much direct descendants of fantasy role-playing games," explains Nix. "Friends typically play these MMOGS together and thus create social networks that exist within the game, and the game mechanics typically offer guilds and similar groupings to allow players to play together. But apart from this, there is no social context and there are also no shared goals for the whole community of players. [Imperial Galaxy] fits on to a social network platform in such a way that the characters created for the game have a social network that is analagous to the real person's social network, presuming that their friends also add the game. One of the things we are trying to do is to create a game that has more social context because it mirrors an existing network, in this case that of Facebook."

 

We looked at a similar trend when more and more social networks started popping up around games and when more games started popping up on social networks. It seems users want a mix of the virtual world social environment along with competitive gameplay.

While the point of interaction is for gameplay, the goal of Creative Enclave is to create an environment for social interaction. While in many massively multiplayer games, the largest level of interaction is a raid of 5-60  people or a guild with several hundred,  Creative Enclave wants to  reach the entire social network.

"In Imperial Galaxy we have mechanisms that leverage off the social graph to create larger and larger groupings," explains developer Phil Wallach  So for example there may be hundreds of others players in your home sector.  The largest possible fleet would contain almost 30,000 players, and it may be that to defeat the bad guys every player in the game needs to be, on some level, co-operating."

As far as looking back to virtual worlds goes, Leeb-du Toit says his focus is purely on using existing social media right now to expand on his older goals.

"It's a pity the whole Yoick, Outback Online thing didn't work, but it was a good experience," said Leeb-du Toit. "Yoick is still there. I still have the brand, so it's not dead. At the right time or sliding in at the right projects, it might be useful. I think the whole Web 2.0 experience has shown that the idea of mashing up or leveraging off of what other people doing is probably the better way to go. Why build a e-commerce engine when you can pick up an open source one from someone else? There may come a time somewhere down the track that you want to do that again, but I don't think so right now." 

Comments

[Rand Leeb-du Toit]

Thanks for the coverage, Joey. Looking forward to seeing you all in the galaxy!