Craig Keefner homepage

Hollywood producers are taking notice of Multiverse, a startup that makes a massively multiplayer online (MMO) video game possible for a tiny fraction of what they typically cost.

Filmmakers James Cameron and Jon Landau have proven their interest by joining the company's board of advisers. Multiverse co-founder, president and CEO Bill Turpin said that Cameron intends to introduce one of his upcoming movies by launching a related MMO game before the film comes out.

MMO games are virtual worlds in which players interact with one another and engage in adventures in real time, for which they typically pay a subscription fee of about $15 a month. Multiverse, which gives away its technology free, lets developers eliminate the fee if they want but takes a share if any revenue is generated.

Turpin said he is in talks with a TV network to introduce an MMO game that would allow viewers to remain engaged with the show's characters even between seasons.

The genre is dominated by Sony Online Entertainment, NCSoft and Blizzard and is not for fainthearted businesses. Turpin cited industry guidelines that the games cost $20 million-$55 million to create and can take three or four years to launch. And many of them fail. But success can be staggering: Turpin said Blizzard's "World of Warcraft," for example, has 5.5 million global subscribers paying about $16 a month, which calculates to about $50 million in monthly revenue that will bring in about $1 billion in a year.

Multiverse offers the alternative of enabling any IP owner to create an MMO game for as little as $10,000 and in about half of the time to market. It does so by using common technology with open standards that are expandable. Developers also may host their own games and use Multiverse's tools to handle subscriptions and billing.