MapleStory Worldsmight share a name with the iconic and long-running 2D MMORPG from Nexon, but it’s more of a platform empowered with a set of creation tools than it is a game.MapleStory Worldsleverages the mind-boggling 30 million assets Nexon has built up over the decades forMapleStoryto allow creators to develop entirely new games with a collection of powerful tools, and creators are even provided with a means to monetize these creations and effectively form their own professional studios using built-in social features. Toben Studio is the publishing company behindMapleStory Worlds, and it is dedicated to building a platform that connects creators and players, as well as supporting the next generation of developers.
Game Rant sat down withMapleStory Worldssenior producer Dennis Bernardo to talk about everything content creators will be able to do with the platform. On top of being able to create entirely new games across a surprising range of genres fromtower defense gamesto shooters, artistically minded users can also focus on creating and monetizing assets for use in others' projects. Bernardo also spoke about how Nexon (and Toben Studio) is devoted to fostering a new generation of game developers with various programs and educational material aimed at teaching aspiring creators everything they need to know to succeed.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
How MapleStory Worlds Took Shape In Its Early Days
Q: Can you talk about what you do as a senior producer forMapleStory Worlds?
A:As a senior producer forMapleStory Worlds, I oversee the entire publishing production team, including our team of producers, product managers, and creator program managers, as well as strategically planning, to set a high-level vision for the game. I run that team and oversee and work closely with our development team at Nexon Korea, who is developing the platform for us, and we’re working closely with them to help launch hopefully soon.
Q: You’ve worked onMapleStoryfor a decade. Could you talk about what it’s been like working on this franchise for so long?
A:Yeah, I’ve been at Nexon for 10 years, and most of that time has been onMapleStory. I started out working onMapleStoryPC or globalMapleStoryitself. About a couple of years ago, I moved into a role where I oversee all theMapleStory products:MapleStory,MapleStory Mobile, as well as upcoming projects likeMapleStory Worlds.
We’ve always wanted to seeMapleStoryas a franchise grow, and so that’s one of the reasons why MapleStory Worldswas conceived at Nexon. We’ve been runningMapleStoryfor 20 years in Korea and about 18 to 19 years here in North America, and we built up this large library of assets. We decided it might be nice to put all those assets in the hands of players to create their own experiences.
A lot of players have grown withMapleStory.Some of the people I work withplayedMapleStorygrowing upas a kid in high school and college and things like that; I think, as that maturity has been shown in the player base, there’s a desire to see new experiences and see whereMapleStorycould go.
Q: Can you talk about what day one of working onMapleStory Worldswas like? What were some of those early decisions that stuck with the project?
A:I think one of the things that’s probably obvious is thatMapleStory Worldsis sort of thisnew venture for Nexonin general, and, personally for myself and some of the team members, we had never had experience working on a project like this. It was exciting but also challenging in that respect in terms of trying to determine, “Okay, how do we set up the team, and how do we set up the platform? What kind of features do we think creators would want?”
In a lot of those early meetings, we were deciding, “Who is this platform for?” It’s forMapleStoryplayers, but we also want to appeal to a wide variety of players out there who don’t even knowMapleStory, because, as a game creation and content creation platform, we really want to train up the next generation of game developers and game content creators.
We had to think about allowing people to upload their own content, allowing people to create outfits and things like that, and allowing them to make money off of this. To go along with that goal of training up the next generation of game developers, we want them to learn all aspects of it from running their own community to running their own live operations. We thinkMapleStory Worldsis a great way to do that.
Q: Is there any feedback you’ve been implementing fromMapleStory Worlds’ South Korean launch?
A:Yeah, it’s been available to South Korean players for a little bit over two years, and through that time, it’s been a fantastic learning process in terms of how we run the service and, to your point, the features that we implemented. Since that time, we’ve added things that people wanted and asked for like more social features, more ways to connect with your friends, more ways to see the types of players that are engaging with the world that you’re creating.
One of the cool things that we’ve implemented since those early days that we learned from some of the creators that we worked with is that they want more information. Who is playing their game? How are they playing their game? These are basic things that we do as a publisher, so we wanted to give some of those stats and some of those abilities to creators to see that themselves and make those decisions that a professional publisher and developer like we would do in terms of, “Oh, we see players engaging with this product more, so maybe we should add more content for that,” “We see players dropping out early in the game so maybe we need to beef up our tutorials,” and things like that.
One of the main goals of this is to create content and build up that library of content, and, in turn, that will bring the players right to those games and make money for thosepeople who make the content. To really plant that seed, I think we as a platform maker and a service provider have to enhance the features for the creators to be able to realize their goals, so we really focused on that in those early days.
That’s where we’re landing now, and even with this soft launch that we’re doing for October 16, we also think that some of the players in other regions outside of South Korea are probably going to have much, much more feedback and much different feedback. We’re also taking that as a learning experience to try to continuously improve the platform as we go.
Q: You mentioned that moderation is expected to be a challenge but that you already have a lot of tools implemented. Can you talk a little about those tools and what they can do?
A:With anyuser-generated content platform, moderation is always going to be an ongoing battle. We have tools in place, we have measures and processes in place, but they’re always going to continuously improve. What we’ve started with and sort of built over the past few years working on this platform is when you upload content, we have specific automatic filtering that tries to detect whether the content you’re uploading is appropriate for the platform or not.
There are several steps in there where maybe human intervention might be needed to review, and then we also have robust reporting tools. We’re going to rely a little bit on our community to report to us, and I think any sort of responsible content generation platform has these types of tools where sometimes the players and the creators might notice something that we haven’t seen before, or maybe they find objectionable. There are a bunch of different areas that we’re trying to tackle, both sort of at the filtering stage when you upload a platform, but also robust content reporting channels as well.
Q: A lot of fans have comparedMapleStory WorldstoRoblox. How do you feel about these comparisons? Do they hold weight? What do you thinkMapleStory Worldsdoes differently in the realm of social elements?
A:Most content creation platforms out there are going to be compared to one another and I think it’s only fair. But what we really want to lean on withMapleStory Worldsis, as you mentioned, social aspects in terms of creating games with your friends. We have a really cool group creation mode where you may create your own groups, invite your friends to it, and you guys can work on the same game together.
It kind of mirrors a professional development studio, but it allows players to build a community. That’s one of the things that we want to do, and we’re focusing on as well during the global soft launch: launching channels where players can build that community on our Discord, on our platform website, live streams, things like this where players can find each other and try to figure out common goals that they want to achieve and games that they want to create, worlds and experiences they want to create and create that themselves.
On top of that, the 30 million assets that we provide forMapleStory,I think, is a huge benefit to making it accessible and making it easy for people to just jump right in, especially with our design mode. You just drag and drop. You don’t even need to know coding, so it mirrors some of the simpler and more easy to learn content creation platforms out there as well.
Q: How exactly does a group of creators collaborate on a world?
A:Players can form their own groups. Within the platform creation tools, we have a native user interface where you may add your friends to the same Creator Group as we call it, and then when you launch the creation tools, you guys don’t need to be in the same space. There’s no need to be sitting around the same computer. It’s not some sort ofcouch co-op type of situation, it’s just a natural collaboration tool where anybody around the world who joins a group can add things to the same project.
You can build levels independent of each other, you can build different features independent of each other, and then it all comes together because you’re in the same group and working on the same project. I think it’s a really cool opportunity to make their own littleMapleStory Worldsstudio.
Q: A large portion of the community looks atMapleStoryas “FashionStory.” How do you tap into that key element of the fandom?
A:Yes, FashionStory is a huge part ofMapleStoryI’ve learned over the years. Earlier, we showed off a little bit of thatavatar creation and avatar customizationthat we thought was core to theMapleStoryexperience. You can look through all the outfits, hats, shirts, pants, and everything that we’ve ever released fromMapleStoryand customize your character in a variety of different ways.
I think what’s really cool and going to take FashionStory even further is the ability to create your own avatar items. We have so many talented people in theMapleStorycommunity who create their own designs. We’ve run contests in the past for globalMapleStory, and some of those user designs have actually made it into the game, but now you can actually do it natively withinMapleStory Worlds. You can create a hat, create a shirt, create a weapon, upload it, and then make money off of it. That opens up another avenue for creators in addition to creating worlds and full-fledged games. If you just want to create art, and if you want to just create avatar items, that is another avenue and another option for you as well.
Q: Can you talk about the process of developing the creation features? How many iterations did it take before it got to what it is now?
A:We could talk about that all day. If you’re familiar at all with game development, things change drastically from when you started the project and where it lands in the hands of the public. We learned a lot through internal testing of what kind of features would really enhance that creation process. We did a bunch of focus tests internally and externally over the past few years, and then we also used that soft launch experience in Korea to gather feedback from the public.
I think one of the biggest things that we learned when it launched in Korea is that we wanted to see and encourage a wide variety ofMapleStoryexperiences. But I think naturally, those first few games that people gravitate towards were closer to a classicMapleStoryexperience. We think it’s really cool that players now have the tools to create their vision of how they want to experienceMapleStory. We are also going to further expand on our goal of trying to create different experiences, and we’ve seen that from the beginning of the project to now in terms of different types of games and different genres like shooters, survival games,and tower defense. Those are the things that are exciting for us to see, and we’re really hoping to see that creativity come out from the players and the creators in our audience.
Q: There are two different modes of creation, the easier drag-and-drop mode and the more robust Pro mode. What can someone make in each mode? Is it possible for someone to make the same thing in Pro mode as someone else in the basic mode?
A:With the Design mode, which is sort of the drag and drop mode, our focus there is to make it accessible and provide templates for players. We’re providing different templates for different types of games and differentgenres like RPGs, platformers, and more so that amateur players and amateur developers can have an easier starting point. They have a basic idea of a game they want, and they can go in, pick a template, add a few characters, add some text, and then just publish that game within minutes.
With the Pro mode, we’re really heavily leaning into giving players more advanced tools to create a much wider variety of options and genres that is only really limited by their imagination. I think there’s probably going to be some differences in the types of games that you’re going to see coming out of players using the Design mode versus the Professional mode, and I think that’s okay. I think one of the goals that we have is to onboard creators to use whatever mode feels comfortable to you.
MapleStory Worlds Is Training The Next Generation of Developers
Q: Earlier you mentioned this idea of training the next generation of developers. Can you talk a little about the importance of this to the team and what it means to effectively train developers onMapleStory Worlds?
A:One of the goals forMapleStory Worldsis that we want players to enjoy theMapleStoryassets that we’ve created over the past few years, but also enjoy the process of making games, and I think that’s really core to some of the programs that we’re running outside the platform. I manage a creative program team, and through this team, we are partnering with different organizations, running different challenges, game jams, contests, and things like that, to really introduce people to the concept of making games.
As somebody who works in the game industry, I want everybody to do what I do. We want everybody to love the games that they are playing but also love the process and learn about the process of making games. We want to make that easier, so a lot of the things that we’re doing are centered around that. We’ve partnered with organizations that teach kids to code, and we want to introduce the concept of game development in a fun way for people even as young as elementary school. We’re running programs that target people who are in college ingame design programs, introducingMapleStory Worldsinto their curriculum. We want a wide variety of people to learn about the process of game development and if that’s something they really take a liking to and want to create their own experiences, and they have all this creativity but they don’t have the tools to do so. They can hopefully make a career out of it, and that’s what we’d love to see.
Q: SinceMapleStory Worldsdoesn’t limit players to just the 2D platforming MMORPG genre, has there been anything from players in Korea or in playtesting that has really stood out to you personally?
A:We’ve seen so many different experiences and games. I really enjoyed first seeingGetting Over Itimplemented in the platform because that’s something in my wildest dreams. I didn’t think it could be implemented with that same aesthetic, you know? So that was really fun to see. We have a wide variety of games that we’ve also created internally that started off as passion projects for the team, and so we wanted to officially support it. You’ll see some of those games when we launch.
I think there are going to be a lot of games that are going to be available on day one of the global soft launch that I thinkMapleStoryplayers are going to be surprised by like, “Wow, I can’t believe thatMapleStoryassets could be used in this way,” and also people who don’t knowMapleStorywill be surprised to see this type of genre on this type of platform.
Q: Can you explain the difference between World Coins and Reward Coins?
A:World Coin is sort of the main currency that we’re using inMapleStory Worldsthat players can purchase with cash. That’s the currency that you use to purchase avatar items in the avatar shop, and also in-world items that are maybe created by other creators or other players. It’s also the currency that players are going to use to cash out, so if creators create their own experiences and put something up in a shop, players use World Coin to purchase those items. They can cash out that World Coin into their own revenue and their own cash. That’s basically how players can earn their own revenue, right fromMapleStory Worldsand their own creations.
Reward Coin can be used for basically the same types of things, but this currency is something that, traditionally, we’re going to give out as promotional events, contest giveaways, and things like that. It’s also going to be used for purchasing items both in the avatar shop and in-game, but it’s a currency that players are going to acquire through in-game events for free.
Q: Can you talk about how creators set things like prices?
A:In terms of the business model that creators could set within the world, they can set whatever type of model they want. If they want tosell season passesor they want to sell single packages, whatever you see in other online games, I think you’re able to do it inMapleStory Worlds.
Q: How do creators earn income on MapleStory Worlds?
A: Creators earn income from World Coin sales. Creators can sell items for World Coin within their Worlds. Similarly, creators with registered avatar products can sell their items for World Coin in the Avatar Shop.
Q: How much can creators earn on MapleStory Worlds?
A:Creators can expect to earn 35% of revenue related to their World Coin sales. The remaining percentage goes to app store and payment processing fees, platform hosting, operations cost, and Toben Studio’s share. While there’s no limit to how much you can earn on MapleStory Worlds, the maximum withdrawal amount within one month is $10,000 USD. As the revenue share policy is unified across all regions, creators will have access to this same opportunity regardless of their country.
Q: When can creators start earning income?
A:In order to withdraw your World Coin earnings, you will use a feature called Cashout. Withdrawing your earnings with cashout requires a minimum of $100 USD in earnings. The cashout feature will be available starting in November 2024.
Q: When you’re talking about making season passes and all these various systems, how exactly do you go about supporting content creators in developing these things? Creators might be familiar with the concept of a battle pass but might have no idea how to structure one.
A:For the most part, we want creators to jump right intoMapleStory Worlds. We’re trying to make it a little bit accessible with the design modes and giving players access to assets immediately, but we do recognize that some creators might want a little bit more guidance or a little bit more direction toward what has been successful out there. “How can I create success within my world and my game?”
One of many things that we’re doing to support this front is that we’re going to have a lot of guides on our website to teach people best practices. We’re trying to create a creator community in our Discord and through various other channels, so players can share things that work or things that don’t work for their type of stuff.
Another way we’re also supporting this is through some of our creator programs. Some of our creator programs are going to be things like contest challenges. We’re challenging the community to build a certain type of game or build a game in this genre or with this type of criteria. Some of the creative programs that we’re thinking about in the future, like workshops and things like theCreator Circlethat we’re going to have at launch are more geared toward giving one-on-one guidance.
The Creator Circle is a program that we’re going to announce at launch where we’re going to financially support some of these creators that we think have the potential to create really meaningful experiences for players, but we’re also going to give them marketing support, operation support, design guidance, feedback. We’re going to playtest their games for them so that we can give people a little bit more guidance not just on how to create a game, but how to run a game and be successful.
We’re also going to be doing similar types of things in different programs that we’re going to be doing in the future, things like workshops where we might provideguidance on work-life balance. How to manage a project, how to manage stress, and things like this. We want to not just provide guidance on how to create a game, but how to be a successful developer. We have a lot of plans for that and a lot of plans to expand on that in the future.
Q: Can you talk about the MapleJam and how it differs from a typical game jam?
A:For MapleJam, we are recruiting developers in a wide variety of sectors. Obviously, theMapleStoryfans know this look and have known this IP for such a long time, but we also want to expand that audience to players who are interested in game development or are just interested in different types of game experiences as well. For MapleJam, we’re partnering with a company that’s done tons of different game jams and hackathons for a bunch of different companies, and reaching out to their network of developers to attempt to invite them to tryMapleStory Worlds.
One of the things that’s not on the website yet that we will reveal in the future is that we’re challenging creators to create games that fit certain criteria. Things likesingle-player games, multiplayer games, and games that use unique assets. We want to encourage that creativity not just in creating a game, but also in the genre and the type of game that they’re creating. That’s really one of the goals of MapleJam: we hope to see a wide variety of games with a wide variety of experiences and a wide variety of worlds by the end of it.
Hopefully, some of those creators that join find success and an audience with some of the worlds that they create. Some of them we may even consider for additional support for things like the creative programs or the other sorts of programs that we do. MapleJam specifically is designed to find those people who are interested inMapleStory Worldsand find their audience onMapleStory Worlds, and then use that as a way for us to find talent that we want to support and creators out there and a community out there that we want to support and continue building their success with them.
Q: How often do you see MapleJams and workshops happening? How frequently will this kind of support be available?
A:We definitely have a robust plan to provide challenges, workshops, game jams, and these types of things on a regular basis. We want to plan game jams and things like at least once a month, multiple times throughout the year, but we’re still determining the right cadence. I think that’s part of the learning process that we’re going to discover during the soft launch phase, is what is the appetite from the audience and what they want to see from us.
If they want to see us do these types of challenges and things more frequently, that’s something we want to respond to and react to. I think right now we have a loose plan where we want to provide something for creators to do or take part in every month whether it be a game jam, whether it be a challenge, but I think we want to quickly see that expand and increase based on creator feedback and player feedback for sure.
Q: What do you hope to see as the result of that support for the player base if they’re engaging in these programs a year, two years, or five years down the road?
A:The main purpose that we wanted to stress withMapleStory Worldsand these creative programs is building that creative community, building that game development community, and introducing more people to that game development world. We want to see creators having success on their own and that’s one of the things that we’re trying to provide more feedback for the creators that take part in these programs, through those tutorials, through one-on-one support, through feedback to their games, and things like that.
We want them to take away both success in the projects that they’re working on, but also a better knowledge and professional working relationship so that they want to create bigger, better games on their own. As long as they take away some of those learnings that we help them achieve through these creative programs, being responsible developers, being professional developers, and being able to understand what it really takes to build a game,run a community, build a plan for generating revenue and react to player feedback, but also managing their mental health and work-life balance and all these other aspects that go along with being a game developer.
Q: With the soft launch in the Americas coming up, if you could say something to the community as they dive in, what kind of advice would you offer them?
A:I think one of the things that I want people to understand aboutMapleStory Worldsis we’re providing these tools and assets for players to jump in with lower barriers. I just want players to feel like, if you have an idea for something, just try it. Obviously, it may not be good the first time, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be good sometime down the line if you continue working on it. We really want creators to jump right in and make your game and just continue working on it and making it better, because you’re able to create success.
You can find something that players can latch on to, and you never know, you can make money off of it. I think that’s really cool, and it’s a really good opportunity for anybody to jump into that game development world with the programs that we have. We want people to take part in those programs and have us help them along their journey.
Q: Do you have any last thoughts you’d like to share?
A:The goal ofMapleStory Worldsis to see the creativity of our community as game developers and game creators ourselves. Obviously, there’s creativity in what we do, and there are specific projects that we put out there that we hope players will latch onto, but we know that there are hundreds and thousands and millions of people out there who just want to see something different and create their own experiences and have that idea in their mind, andMapleStory Worldsis our way of giving them the tools to realize that. We’re very, very excited for sure.
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MapleStory Worldssoft launches in North America and South America on October 16 for PC.
