On January 14, Avatar Reality issued a statement that it was restructuring. They will now concentrate on the mobile market (Ipads, Iphones etc). In essence they will offer avatar talking heads to customers by using the one single element in Blue Mars that was a failure.
I'm not happy that AR has a hit a wall with Blue Mars. When the world first appeared, I was disappointed that they did not choose to use technology that could run on an Apple (ironic to say the least). But after a semi-upgrade in hardware, I was able to use Blue Mars and see pluses in it's favor. Blue Mars is a VR place built on cutting edge technology. It was beautiful to look at and explore. All of it using a graphics engine that until recently, was only used in action games.
I have a few ideas of where the stumbling blocks occurred. As others have stated before, the hardware needed to run the game was really out of most people's price point. Right away, the AR team cut themselves off from the average George and Jane who were into Second Life and other VRs. Blue Mars could only be comfortably run by hard core gamers who had the hardware. As seen continuously in Second Life, hard core gamers HATE Second Life with the passion of a thousand burning suns. Even an alternative to Second Life with gorgeous graphics wasn't going to change their tune. Looking to profit with a small slice of a tiny subculture within another small subculture wasn't really a road to success.
The world was released too early, it never developed beyond a test pattern. The browser itself never progressed to gold stage/release ready. It began and ends it's life in beta. This hasty release after an intriguing promotional campaign indicated to me the lack of a solid business plan. It seemed as if AR was confident enough in the wow factor of their crytek graphics engine (which runs the game Crysis) that people would come en masse into their world. They put the kabosh on a fully interactive building option for all Blue Mars players and only allowed it for professionals/professional grade graphic designer hobbyists. So the people who did make the leap into Blue Mars were only allowed to passively walk around pre-made environments. Even then they could not take screenshots of these places. The browser had been released with just basic functions without an option for screenshots.
All of this was unfriendly to say the least.
But the one big failure was the world's avatars. The avatars could not be modded with any degree of personal preference. Eventually there was an ad hoc option to change the facial characteristics of avatars but nothing with fine control. The avatars themselves were obviously the fantasy work of a core group of designers. Designers who had specific preference foibles that got in the way of user enjoyment. I read recently some of the team behind the BM avatars were a part of making that "Final Fantasy: Spirits Within" film. That answered a lot of my questions regarding these avatars. Blue Mars avatars look like extras from the Final Fantasy film. Avatars that were plastic and a bit frightening. So hyper-real that they jumped the shark into unreal. At the end there were more designers who created skins and eyes to overlay over the default BM avatars. But their work couldn't erase the problems inherent in the avatars. Mainly that their shape couldn't be modded by their own users. I tried valiantly to work through these problems with the help of professional purchases. But no matter what I did, my avatar's face always seemed a bit cross-eyed. I never could figure out why that occurred. The fact that AR thinks these avatars will attract average people after they were such a bomb with VR users worries me. It indicates to me that they still don't have any kind of plan going forward. They are just grasping at idea wisps.
At about the time I wrote my little post about Blue Mars, Avatar Reality was in the process of marketing a "cloud computing" option for their world. The graphics would all be rendered on their end then piped through to the user. It was impressive but it left a lot of unanswered questions. Mainly who would have to pay for all that computing power and bandwidth cost? Blue Mars was essentially a free to play world. There wasn't even a large enough economy inside the world to support this new option. Talk about this breakthrough disappeared around the holidays and then the January restructuring was announced.
Right now, the world will be left as is. AR will no longer charge city developers for their worlds. The development team for the browser is gone. If any work is done on the browser, it will be only for dire bug fixes. However I'm not too confident that this will last too long. If AR is successful with their phone plan, they will cut off the world as unneeded fat. If AR is unsuccessful with their new plans, the BM world will end. It doesn't look good. But I'm still hoping that they can pull through.
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