Blue Mars reverses several gears in their latest announcement. They are moving to being an app for the iPhone and iPad, this is a real shift and one has to wonder how long this will be a viable model, there is also the horrible issue of job losses, including that of CEO Jim Sink.
Blue Mars seems to have suffered from trying to do too much too quickly, I have read comments from Blue Mars users that they went to open beta before it was ready (as Second Life did with viewer 2, but not on as big a scale), the camera controls and movement were painful. Personally I only visited Blue Mars a couple of times, downloading new cities and the extremely slow performance on my computer meant it was never really a venture I’d pursue for long, had it ran better then maybe I’d have visited more often but that would have meant some of the goals of the company couldn’t be met, that it didn’t run well on my computer is my problem to a large degree, but the success of Second Life and World of Warcraft is in a big part due to them both running an older hardware to a decent degree, you have a wider audience there. However users of World of Warcraft and Second Life do complain about the lack of state of the art graphics, so it’s a double edged sword.
What does this mean for the virtual world model such as Second Life? This should actually be a boost for Linden Lab, there are plenty of people who don’t want to play on their mobile devices and if the new CEO can get his act together and give some impetus, we could see some real growth. There will I’m sure be mumblings that this model isn’t viable or won’t happen and at some point Second Life will have to freshen up and become more vibrant to meet technology changes but, the rise of portable devices has put a barrier in place of companies like Linden Lab, plenty of people these days have laptops and plenty of laptops don’t have great graphics cards, Second Life users probably aren’t where Linden Lab envisaged in 2005 in terms of the average performance of their computers.
I’m sure that having some sort of Second Life app on the iPhone and iPad would be something Linden Lab would like too, the web browser concept suggests they want a lighter version at some point and there is merit in that but one would hope that unlike Blue Mars, Linden Lab don’t throw in the towel and chase a core audience of portable device users, because there’s still a big old world out there who want to sit in front of the PC or Mac and engage in a virtual world.
One Reply to “Blue Mars Reverses Several Gears”