Raph Koster’s Playable Worlds raises $2.7 million for sandbox MMORPG

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
October 3, 2019
Updated June 20, 2025
3 min

Online gaming veteran Raph Koster has started a new company called Playable Worlds, and it has raised $2.7 million in seed funding to change the way immersive worlds work.

Koster’s team includes a distinguished team of developers with many decades of collective online game experience from Disney, Marvel, Sony Online Entertainment, and venture-backed startups. They built massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.