VScape:About

From VScape

Our mission and manifesto...

VScape is a small team committed to creating the Metaverse.

We know that many other groups and companies have stated the same thing - we've worked at a number of them. One of the reasons we think we're going to succeed where so many others have failed is our business model. Like the Internet itself, we believe the Metaverse will eventually make a lot of people a lot of money. However, we also believe that in its inception, while it is growing from a game engine and VR platform, it is critical that decisions are made with the driving goal of creating the Metaverse.

Every company we have seen from the inside or out that has started with this goal has very quickly been distracted by the need to turn a profit for investors, or to at least figure out how to extract enough income to cover operating expenses. While this is perfectly understandable, we have seen time and again how decisions and compromises made under these conflicting goals have led to choices which constrain the system into a niche of various but narrow breadth and depth.

In the rare cases where enough VC money was raised to finish the job, bad management decisions and poor technical choices prevented the project from succeeding - we've seen this from the inside too, and it was heartbreaking.

After 20 years of exploring the technical aspects of creating the Metaverse, and quite frankly believing we have an extremely robust solution, we have spent the last 5 years as a very small team implementing the system. The team itself is paying for the development of the platform, and is absolutely committed to bringing it to market with none of the handicaps and shortcomings we've had our work squandered with at past endeavors.

Once we complete this system, we intend to release it and its entire tool chain (equivalent to a AAA class video game, which some of us used to make a living creating and supporting) completely free for non commercial use. We understand that user created content is king, and our tool chains and pipelines will facilitate this to an extent never before seen.

To subsidize development in the future, we intent to include a novel business model for commercial use which we strongly feel will provide the best model for users and game developers, at the expense of the traditional publisher. We don't feel too bad for these publishers, as like the music industry they have historically extracted at least 99% of the profits from the developers, and we've worked in their 100 hour week sweatshops long enough.

In the end, we know we will soon be releasing the Metaverse to the world. Once we've been able to modestly leverage our first mover position with the platform, we fully intend to open source it all. We will maintain stewardship of the embedded military grade PKI that secures the platform and identities within, and continue spending most of our income on expanding the library of free content and free games, doing everything we can to help others create their own objects, animations, games, and worlds.

This is our mission, and we hope you will join us soon on the street. We've seen it, and you can join us there soon.

--Kerry 12:57, 20 July 2010 (UTC)