I haven’t yet listened in full to Ebbe Altberg’s meet and greet with the likes of Daniel Voyager, Inara Pey, Mal Burns, Saffia Widderins, Jo Yardley and Draxtor Despres. However one part that has caught my eye was posted by Inara Pey as a blog of its own: Lab to announce product portfolio “simplification”
Ebbe is quoted as saying:
I’ve already helped support some decisions of simplifying our portfolio a little bit, and there will be more news on that later this week. They won’t have significant ramifications for us with regards to resources and stuff like that, so it’s more lightening the load on our minds more so than the work we do every day, but it’ll be a little bit simplified.
I’m very interested in Blocksworld, because it’s very aligned with what we do in Second Life, which is empowering users to create things, to share things, and hopefully over time to monetize their creations.So that one is clear to me.
Some of the other products, I’m sort-of still getting up to speed on, I haven’t even necessarily had product reviews or anything like that on those. but there will be a little bit of … a simplification of our portfolio later this week.
This isn’t the nicest thing to speculate about, but I strongly suspect that Dio, Versu and maybe even Creatoverse will be shown the door as part of this simplification. I do have reasons for my suspicions, they aren’t however backed by any firm evidence, I am merely speculating here.
I could be miles off base here but Versu looks like a self contained product in the main. I haven’t seen much talk about the product from Linden Lab, but I do see talk from Emily Short on her own blog. Versu looks like the sort of product that could go its own way, it may even turn up with Rod Humble’s next venture.
My speculation for suggesting Dio might be near an end is because Dio just looks a tad neglected, it hasn’t so far made up its mind what it wants to be and appears to be limping along. Apologies to those involved with Dio, but that’s the way it looks and there’s even less talk of Dio than there is Versu!
Maybe Dio will be merged with Versu, Dersu or Veo may be born!
My reason for suggesting Creatoverse may be nearing an end is purely because Blocksworld and Patterns appear to be more flavour of the month.
Obviously I’m speculating, I know nothing, although I do know that five is less than eight.
I originally considered Creatorverse going, but in looking at App Annie’s stats, I’m now not so sure.
While it isn’t a stellar performer, it still seems to be chugging along in terms of downloads (at least in the USA). There was a time when it had appeared to have fallen right off the charts (“no data available” for days on end), but at the moment, it is there and can be tracked. As such, there might be a “leave it lie” attitude from the Lab, particularly as there doesn’t appear to be any further dev work going on (not since May 2013).
Of course, as a freebie app, this doesn’t mean that people are necessarily letting their kids go buy all the expansion packs needed to make it work, and that may weigh against it.
I don’t know what the costs are off keeping an app updated, I’m sure I read somewhere recently that you can’t just leave apps on the App store without updating them, seems to ring a bell from the Flappy Bird stories.
Take a look here: http://lindenlab.com/products
I can’t see Dio, Versu and Creatorverse there, already.
Yes they moved quickly to make the changes.