In a not that surprising announcement, Sam Thompson has announced that Cloud Party will close on February 21st. I say not that surprisng because Cloud Party users had been commenting on the lack of updates during December, prompting Sam Thompson to say on the forums:
We see you’ve noticed how quiet we are. Things always seem to slow down around here this time of year, and this year is no exception. We’re going to pick it up a bit on the bug front over the next couple of weeks and make sure we are catching those. Be sure to use the in-world bug report feature, we try to follow the forums but sometimes bugs reported on the forums slip through the cracks.
Right now we are having another time of introspection while we figure out where we want to go next with Cloud Party. We will be talking with everyone more before the holiday break, so please be patient with us. Hope you are having a great holiday season so far!
Cloud Party had some wonderful concepts, some excellent building tools and being browser based meant that people didn’t have to fuddle around with a client. However they couldn’t quite gain enough traction to make an identity of their own for enough people to embrace the product in my view. Content creators were also shy of investing too much there as cashing out proved problematic due to new financial regulations.
The blog post says:
We’re excited to announce that the time has come for the Cloud Party team to start our next adventure. We are joining Yahoo! The last two years have been an incredible experience for everyone here. We’ve been continually amazed by your creativity and the worlds you’ve built and shared with us.
Cloud Party will continue to run until February 21, 2014. We want to support our community during this transition. In the interest of preserving your extraordinary Cloud Party creations, we’ve added export tools and written this guide to help you export your content. If you have any questions, please contact support.
We are privileged to have had so many wonderful users share ideas and creations. We are excited to bring our vision and experience to a team that is as passionate about games as we are. Thank you all for sharing in this journey with us, and we hope you stick around for what’s next!
I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I’ll stick around to see what they do with Yahoo! considering the steaming mess they’ve made of Flickr since May 2013, Yahoo! are not a company I have great faith in, but I will give anyone a fair chance and it may be that Yahoo! with the Cloud Party team do come up with something useful.
Cloud Party wasn’t lively enough whenever I visited, but I really did enjoy their voxel style building tools and I felt there was great potential there. Time of course is always a challenge and so it proved with my time within Cloud Party, I never had enough to properly explore the place.
Any virutal world venture faces huge challenges and with a small team, Cloud Party couldn’t quite make the breakthrough they so desperately needed. However one cool concept of Cloud Party was the ability to build something with their inworld tools and then export it and open it up in Blender. This meant you could build with the excellent inworld tools and then try and fine tune it in Blender or other 3D programs and therefore use said model in other virtual worlds.
I don’t know if all of the Cloud Party team are going to Yahoo! but I do wish them all the best, ex Linden Cyn Skyberg was part of the team and I really do wish her well in her future ventures. I wish things had worked out better but onwards and upwards and if you haven’t visited Cloud Party before, there’s still plenty of time to do so.
I’m still not happy with this move to Yahoo! though, I mean Yahoo!, good grief Flickr is a mess these days, please Sam and the team, please make something to make me love Yahoo! again!
That is so sad. I always had plans to build something in Cloud Party but never got beyond my starter home, because of lack of time.
Yahoo was always my main e-mail account, but I cancelt it because of that NSA stuff, like most other people that I know. So even if Yahoo doesn’t close Cloud Party down, joining Yahoo again would be a no go for me. I suppose Cloud Party just run out of money, but instead of selling out to a dying corporation, they should have tried a crowdfunding approach and open source the whole thing.
I think Cloud Party is closing and the team are moving to Yahoo, what they are going to do at Yahoo I’m not sure but I don’t think they’ve sold Cloud Party to Yahoo.