We just announced our recent Series A investment in Conduit Labs, a Boston based company that’s focused on building a social networking / casual MMO hybrid.  Well, what does that exactly mean? And aren’t there a hundred companies now doing this exact same thing? 

This new space - the intersection of Web 2.0 and online gaming - is a very difficult one to define.  This categorization encompasses companies like Kongregate to Areae to Three Rings - each of whom is vastly different from the others.  To make it even more confusing, Conduit Labs is not really like any of the three companies I just mentioned.  They’re inventing an entirely different interpretation of what it means to sit at this intersection. 

Conduit Labs is building a gaming environment.  That is to say, the primary driver of user interaction is game mechanics.  This gaming environment lives in an immersive, graphically rich world.  But the gameplay Conduit Labs is building isn’t exactly like other online games we’ve all now become familiar with: there’s probably not going to be much kart racing or princess saving or dragon slaying.  We aren’t yet disclosing what the gameplay or graphical metaphor will consist of, because that’s part of the secret sauce. 

Leigh Alexander from Worlds In Motion wrote up a great interview with Nabeel that provides more insight into what Conduit Labs is up to.

Nabeel: “I think probably every other day now over the last couple months, I see a new casual MMO or virtual world startup; it’s been constant…and what I saw was the same kind of dichotomy — two types of startups. There’re hardcore MMO gaming guys trying to make that experience more accessible, sort of like World of Warcraft meets the web. And the other side of the coin is a bunch of web guys who want to build a web site with virtual gifting and more gaming.”

While Hyatt recognizes the value in both of those approaches, he adds, “I think they’re missing the larger point – which is that there is no interaction on the web that is like a social game. I don’t mean a single-player game, which is based on a legacy of, really, only video games; it doesn’t last hundreds of years. There’re actually thousands of years of games that are primarily social activities like dancing, or bowling. And those are about you bonding with your friends, and there’s nothing like that online right now. And I think the web and social networks provide a whole new medium to create something that’s never been seen before.”

Just like the Wii and Guitar Hero reinvented the social gaming metaphor for a broader audience, Conduit Labs is trying to do the same for your web gaming experience.  I’ve also seen innumerable business plans in the last year for startups in the online gaming and virtual world space.  But most of them have been rehashes of things we’ve already seen, building things like “making the MMO even more casual” or “putting casual games into Facebook” or “Club Penguin but with chimpanzees.”  (disclaimer: I actually like chimpanzees quite a bit, probably more than I like penguins.) 

We invested in Conduit Labs because I believe the team there really gets it: there’s an entirely new type of immersive experience waiting to be built.  It has less to do with technology (although we are building on the basic assumptions/principles of the zero-barrier MMO and all that entails), and more to do with social engineering.  This is a great team that has the right blend of experience that includes Web 2.0, hardcore MMOs and the scalability expertise that comes from supporting tens of thousands of concurrent users, and understanding how to design “fun” for a mass market audience that comes from building groundbreaking social games like Guitar Hero. 

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)