Disney veteran leading Rebel Entertainment's social MMO team

The long-silent Rebel Entertainment has tipped its hand at last, revealing plans for an upcoming Facebook MMO.

Mike Goslin, Disney Online's former vice president of virtual world design, is now general manager of Rebel Entertainment, a relatively young studio formed by InterActiveCorp, parent company of CollegeHumor, Vimeo and Retrogamer, among others.

Speaking to GamesIndustry, Goslin said the rest of his team is composed of fewllow Disney veterans as well as former EA, Atari, Zynga and Insomniac staffers.

"We're targeting building games for Facebook and online and ultimately other platforms," he said.

The new team is working on a kind of MMO, and feels Facebook has an advantage over other platforms because players are already connected to friends, something which makes the developer's job easier.

"If you're playing it against other real people, meeting other real people, building relationships, the experience keeps changing, because the dynamics of interacting with other real people are what's interesting. To build a single-player game that lasts as long as these multiplayer games do you'd have to create a tremendous amount of content. I think it's prohibitively expensive to do that," Goslin noted.

Details of Rebel's first project are quite slender.

"It's an action game, so being skilled does give you an advantage. Right now we're focusing on cooperative multiplayer, so you're not going head-to-head against other players directly, the way it's designed currently," Goslin revealed.

"We may add that later because I think it's fun, but the focus is more on teaming up to go out and adventure. You can do better if you're skilled, but it also has an RPG leveling system in it as well, so you can improve.

"In addition we're selling premium weapons to give you a boost. You can get there from either skill, or leveling up RPG style, or you can buy your way into a degree, or some combination of those three."