Today is the last day to enjoy Cloud Party, the browser based virtual world. The Cloud Party team announced back in January that they would be closing down after the team moved to Yahoo!
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.
Since that announcement there hasn’t really been more to add from the Cloud Party team, there are no end of the world parties being ran, there are no goodbye posts as of yet, the platform is quietly disappearing.
This isn’t like when City Of Heroes closed, I was quite upset about that even though I hadn’t played it for years. Of course the big reason for that was that I didn’t embrace Cloud Party in the same manner that I embraced City Of Heroes. That was part of the problem for Cloud Party, not that I didn’t embrace it, but that enough people didn’t embrace it.
Yet Cloud Party had some nifty features. The voxel based building tools were fun, the fact that you could build in Cloud Party then download the build and edit it in Blender before uploading your model again was another.
They had some good ideas on limits too, you weren’t just restricted by the number of items on your land, you were restricted by bandwidth limits too, which prevented people from going crazy with textures.
Unfortunately Cloud Party couldn’t quite gain traction, the fact that the laws changed around exchanging virtual currency for real money greatly hindered Cloud Party. As we have seen from the Second Life experience, these laws create complications and a lot of work for a company. Cloud Party was a very small company.
Cloud Party also had to face up to the new world challenge and this is a really difficult challenge for anyone to face up to. The sort of people who could make Cloud Party tick were in Second Life, Kitely, Inworldz, OpenSim. Not enough of them moved to Cloud Party.
Those who did make the move, made largely positive noises about the platform, but there weren’t enough people making the switch and Cloud Party wasn’t appealing to enough new virtual world users to plug that gap.
As a proof of concept as a browser based virtual world with sandbox capabilities, Cloud Party was a success. I mean it worked, it worked very well. Unfortunately that’s not enough to create a community and keep a product thriving.
Cloud Party will be missed, but the way it is quietly departing highlights why it didn’t quite make that all important breakthrough.
