Social games maker Playdom has acquired San Diego, California-based virtual world game engine development studio Metaplace.
The company was founded by Raph Koster and John Donham in 2007 after the pair left Sony Online Entertainment the previous year. Since then it has focused on creating a user-generated virtual world platform and social gaming technology, resulting in the launch of its first social titles, Island Life and My Vineyard for Facebook. In December 2009 it was announced that Metaplace was to close.
"We expect that the Metaplace social game engine will form a key part of our unified back-end technology platform for Playdom's games going forward," said Playdom CTO David Sobeski. "We think the Metaplace engine is a competitive advantage in that it will take other companies years to duplicate its capabilities which will streamline and quicken our game development cycles."
"We are thrilled to be joining the Playdom family and contributing to their stellar roster of social games with both new titles and technology," said Metaplace CEO John Donham. "I look forward to running the Playdom-San Diego office while Raph continues his creative design work with Dan Yue, Playdom co-founder and chief product officer, and Jason Hable, Metaplace's VP of business operations, moves to Mountain View to oversee Playdom's company-wide monetization efforts.”