My colleague Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat has an exhaustive post on what went wrong with Multiverse, which recently announced its shuttering and continuation as an open source project. The article attributes the underlying problem to development timing and declining revenue from developers working on the platform (if I'm reading that right), though my intuition is another factor not mentioned in the article was key: failure to gain mass growth of users to Multiverse-based MMOs and projects. Had many more users showed up and downloaded/launched the underlying client, likely would more funding, or other willing partners. Anyway, read it all here.
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Everything was going great going into 2007. Until Steve Jobs killed general purpose computing with the iphone in 2007. Cat is out of the bag. Horse left the barn. Nothing left but dumb consumers staring at 3 inch screens buying what they are told to buy. Even Microsoft is dropping general purpose computing for patent trolling. Pathetic but true.
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 02:55 PM
I suppose never actually launching a product with a revenue stream didn't help either.
Posted by: Tateru Nino | Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 03:31 PM
Until all get their eye sight so screwed they will have to use 46'monitors as me!
Posted by: foneco zuzu | Friday, January 13, 2012 at 07:01 AM
vaporwear ...
code demos and mini tools that never worked for anyone but the developer company and their work for hire games for a few pals....
redux VRML...
telling, not a game designer there. shows what a fluke SL was... and that it would also eventually end the same way....
even the one artist On shuts down to the cost of making the toolmaker rich. and the srtist/game designers // eventually unknown and broke..
Posted by: bobo | Saturday, January 14, 2012 at 01:27 PM
In 2007 I installed it, downloaded a few "worlds" but got bored. Nothing to do, not much to see and I only saw one other person there. Only thing that did impress me was the size of the worlds. They were many thousands of meters in width and length.
It was the Blue Mars of 2007. Plenty of promise but no depth.
Posted by: GoSpeed Racer | Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 05:09 AM
I'd never even heard of it till this. Whatever they made, they didn't bother to advertise it or market it.
Sounds like some other company I know...
Posted by: shockwave yareach | Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 06:51 AM