So, as I’m sure many of you have heard, Richard Garriott’s new initiative, Portalarium, has announced its next upcoming game: Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale. We have been hearing rumours about Ultimate Collector for a while now…and, sadly, it turns out that the game is not about the Origin Museum’s own Joe Garrity.

Indeed, it’s really nothing like any sort of Garriott-developed game that we’ve yet seen:

In Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale, the quest to find and assemble a wide variety of fabulous collections is easy and fun. Create your avatar and your house and begin the quest for the items you want. With plenty of content to appeal to both males and females, these items might be antique radios, purple stuffed toys, home décor, books, artwork, historical weapons or just a set of tools. Items can be collected as you visit your friends’ or other players’ garage sales, estate sales, markets, pawn shops, storage units, auctions or even from national retailers who will have their own stores in the game.

“There are literally thousands of collectible items in the game,” said Executive Producer Dallas Snell. “You may find an item that you really want, but you may need it authenticated by an expert to find out its true value. Some items might need repair to increase their worth. They are all real world items and we’ve scoured the Internet looking at auction and collectors’ sites to determine authenticity. In fact we’ve provided links in the game so players can go back to these websites to learn more about the items they’ve collected and, in some cases, even buy them for real if they still exist and are available for sale.”

Colour me a tad skeptical on this one, Dragons and Dragonettes. The Portalarium concept itself fascinates me, and I think it’s the path forward for social gaming and cross-platform gaming. Garriott still commands much of my respect, and I still think he has a genuine creative spark in him.

But this? I think I can see what he’s trying to do, and I really should have been mulling this over back with the game was first hinted at. But even though I think I can see what his aim is (and I’ll get to that shortly), I’m skeptical.

What I think Garriott is trying to do here is, in essence, fundraise. That’s the best word I can think to use. Obviously, Ultimate Collector is a game that’s going to have a very particular audience; it’s target is the casual Facebook user.

Particular though that audience may be, however, it is also a very large audience. And the potential certainly exists that it could be a very lucrative audience for Portalarium, if the game is launched and executed correctly, and if it takes off. That Zynga may well be worth more than all of EA is testament to the fact that social gaming can, under the right conditions, bring massive returns to developers.

And we all know why Garriott would need to fundraise. Large, open RPGs — especially MMORPGs (or, at least, online RPGs) — don’t come cheap. I’ve little doubt that most of Ultimate Collector’s profits will go toward the development of New Britannia (or whatever it ends up being called).

That said, with the game finally announced, and with its basic design and play mechanics finally given some explanation…I’m just not sure. To be fair, the game is about more than just scrounging for loot; you can hold your own garage sales, and there is a bit of a worldbuilding aspect that flows from that. The game seems intent on really amping up the social interactions between players, which is (if nothing else) a good foundation to have if you end goal is the creation of an online RPG as well.

But is that all enough to make it stand out…or, rather, to make it stand out enough to show the success of the Portalarium idea?

Update: Via the Wing Commander CIC, screenshots of the game!