Playdom, a social gaming developer and aggregate, has been on a spending spree lately with their most recent purchase being San Francisco-based gaming house Metaplace. Metaplace focused on Facebook games, and currently has over 1.2 million monthly active users on their two main products, My Vineyard and Island Life.
Playdom didn’t just acquire a couple of games and their users, however — along with Metaplace they also “bought” Raph Koster, famed MMO developer. Koster was the lead designer for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, among other titles.
Koster has been a strong proponent of social gaming, arguing on his blog that MMOs and social games are not all that different: “[T]here was a core MMO game that many of the readers of this blog loved that had a farming game where you had to check in every few days to collect your stuff and decide what to try to harvest next. And it wasn’t Farmville. It was Star Wars Galaxies.”
Playdom has not yet released any specifics about their plans for Metaplace and other recent acquisitions. Koster is also vague, but apparently hopeful. His reaction to having a new boss on his blog was simply, “This is going to be a lot of fun. :)”