There's an interesting and inspiring (in my biased opinion) update to Blue Mars, which recently made a major shift in direction that led to layoffs at Avatar Reality, the company behind the CryEngine-based world: Top developers in Blue Mars' user community have come together to revitalize Beach City, a main shopping hub. They want to turn Beach City into a new welcome area that best showcases the world, and while Blue Mars developers usually work on their separate city projects, collaborate together on this one spot. You can read about the project in this Blue Mars forum thread, and this topic on SL Universe. In response to this grass roots effort, Avatar Reality staff says they'll soon offer free blocks in Beach City.
As regular readers know, I was a consultant at Avatar Reality for a few months last year (hence the bias), but I can say from that experience that there's a relatively small but passionate and talented user community in Blue Mars, so I'm not totally surprised by this effort. I recently talked with one of them, who does enterprise-level building in Mars, and he's optimistic that Avatar Reality's move to make Blue Mars an iPad app has great potential. I agree. More updates hopefully soon. Meantime, the company just announced that the app will be submitted to Apple this week, which suggests it should be available in the App Store in a couple months or so.
Image credit: Eddi Haskell.
It's going to be interesting to see what they come up with. They do not have the burden of a large userbase to upset. Although if LL was ever to ask the large passionate and talented user community in SL, amazing things could of been done.
So is Blue mars going to be centred around shopping and chatting for avatars in Beach City? Like an ultra advanced IMVU?
I best just wait and see what they come up with.
Posted by: Loki | Tuesday, February 01, 2011 at 11:29 AM
That's a very good idea....why didn't they do it back in 2009?
Posted by: CronoCloud Creeggan | Tuesday, February 01, 2011 at 08:07 PM
I now think I was premature in saying that Blue Mars is dead as a PC-based platform. If the current strategy of keeping investment to a minimum until the mobile application takes off, while supporting community based efforts works, Blue Mars may start to take off.
What I cannot understand is why the announcement on January 14 announcing suspension of new PC platform developments and concentration on mobile apps was made in such a negative and pessimistic manner by having Jim Sink solely make the announcement on his last day.
Posted by: Eddi Haskell | Friday, February 04, 2011 at 07:20 AM