Yeah, it's jarring. In the linked post from 2016, they clarify:
> The real-time collaborative editing feature that we’ve been working hard on over the past year is finally ready! Our implementation is called “multiplayer” since it was inspired by cooperative multiplayer games.
But real-time/collaborative editing (or "live editing") had already been a thing for years. It's weird that they felt the need to rename it and slap a cool backstory ("videogames!") on it.
> Multiplayer is a better name than 'live editing' anyway.
Right now, three of the top four comments in this thread are people criticizing and/or being confused by the term they used.
You may think that, say, "internationalization" is an awful, unwieldy word. As a guy who used to work in an i18n department, I'd agree. But if you're making internationalization software, and you decide to just call it "multiplacing" instead to save typing, you're going to confuse and put off a lot of your target market. That's not, generally, a good idea.
Multiplayer is already an entrenched term. Multiplayer actions have nothing to do with collaborative live editing, other than there are asynchronous events and state. This is true of all sorts of live analytics platforms.
"Figma didn’t start out with multiplayer editing support." - In the same vein, Uber has multiplayer. It's barely coherent marketing noise.
> Multiplayer is already an entrenched term. Multiplayer actions have nothing to do with collaborative live editing, other than there are asynchronous events and state. This is true of all sorts of live analytics platforms.
What is multiplayer gaming other than multiple players mutating a global, shared state at the same time? Seems close enough to collaborate live editing to me, especially when you consider games like Minecraft or Factorio (MP). The only confusing thing for me was that I had no idea what Figma even is and it took me a few paragraphs in to figure out what the article was actually about.
> The real-time collaborative editing feature that we’ve been working hard on over the past year is finally ready! Our implementation is called “multiplayer” since it was inspired by cooperative multiplayer games.
But real-time/collaborative editing (or "live editing") had already been a thing for years. It's weird that they felt the need to rename it and slap a cool backstory ("videogames!") on it.