The thing that grabbed me about this story was what appeared to be a lot of condescending remarks about Japanese consumers. The Japanese digital media company, Transcosmos Inc., is hoping that their upcoming virtual world, meet-me, will be a G rated alternative to Second Life for Japanese consumers who are so “well behaved and conformist”, passive, and not interested in individual creativity. Well, I suppose a Japanese company would know better than I what the Japanese are like. But it still comes off sounding a bit condescending. Perhaps something was lost in the translation but it appears that some folks at Kotaku feel the same way.
There wasn’t any technical information in the CNN article about what platform(s) meet-me is supposed to run on. The picture in the article showed someone holding a Game Cube controller, so who knows? It makes sense to guess that it will run on PCs initially. But what I would really wonder about is how it hopes to compete against Sony’s virtual world, Home on the Playstation 3 due out in 2008. Consoles enjoy much more popularity in Japan than PCs do, so that alone would seem to doom meet-me to a small niche in Japan. In order to avoid total obscurity, I think meet-me is going to have to get out the gate before Home does and steal away many of the Japanese residents of Second Life.
Update: I found an old (June 2007) article in the Japanese ITmedia News that says meet-me will run on PCs and is slated for a winter release. They’ll still have an uphill fight against Second Life and Home, but I, for one, look forward to their efforts. Here’s a link to the Google translated story and my own rendering of the article title.