By now you know that Avatar Reality is scaling back development on Blue Mars, abandoning the PC as a platform for it and has laid off a bunch of staff including CEO Jim Sink.
What you’re probably wondering now is why.
If what I’ve been reading is right, basically Avatar Reality ran out of money. There’s still a little bit left to run with, so what is left of the farm is being bet on mobile devices.
Okay, so here’s the thing.
Blue Mars started with the notion of a somewhat more controlled kind of Second Life virtual environment, but with considerably more awesome graphics, and some first-party engaging digital experiences.
Problem one: The graphics engine.
I don’t know about you, but on my configuration, the best that the Blue Mars client could offer me was like treacle soaking into a sponge. It makes the Second Life viewer feel like NASCAR by comparison. Even though Blue Mars frame-rates weren’t actually awful for me, just moving around felt like my environment was pushing back at me at every turn. It would have been nice to twiddle some settings to figure out if I could make things feel faster, but the client never offered any useful options for that. At least, none that made any visible difference. That brings me to …
Problem two: The interface.
I don’t know about you, but I got pretty tired of trying to work the interface. Also of right clicking and getting popups from what appeared to be Adobe Flash Player. What the hell? That was more confusing than getting no response at all.
The interface definitely seemed to be going somewhere but it felt like nobody was really very interested in finishing it off or making it really usable.
Problem three: Engaging digital experiences.
Could not be built and updated faster than even a comparatively modest user-base burned their way through that content, and did little to generate any individual profits. Not cost effective.
Problem four: Rendering costs.
Here’s where things get ugly.
Blue Mars, like Second Life, is a client/server system. The client (or viewer, if you prefer) and the server share the load of making everything go. In practical terms, the system offloads many costly tasks onto the client. They’re called costly tasks, because it costs a lot of money to buy the hardware to do it all yourself for any reasonable number of people. Bandwidth is also a major issue, as bandwidth for highly-detailed meshes does not grow on trees – no, not even mesh trees.
However the engine (prob 1) is actually really bloody demanding and doesn’t seem to be doing that at all that well. Also, the servers don’t seem to be keeping up really well either. Blue Mars has a scaling problem, in that it cannot get enough return for the investment of hardware and bandwidth costs required to run their end of the resource-sharing. At least they’re not paying for the processing being done at the client end, on the PC.
Then we wind up with Avatar Reality’s second most boneheaded decision: Cloud rendering, with OTOY. No offense to OTOY, because its not a problem with OTOY.
What’s wrong with this? Basically, it moves pretty much all the zero-cost processing that the client’s PC is doing and moves it off to a cloud that Avatar Reality pours money into.
If the whole thing with OTOY had gone ahead as planned, the costs of running Blue Mars would have skyrocketed – on the relatively slim hope that pouring oodles of bandwidth at customer PCs to generate a smooth, high-framerate experiences would attract a whole lot of paying customers. Social media integration was supposed to bring the mass market in. It didn’t do that.
So, already running in the red on server-side costs, Avatar Reality decided to shoulder the whole burden of processing costs, rather than just a portion of it.
Wow.
Just think about that for a moment. Wow.
Now we get to the most boneheaded decision…
The mobile market – presumably to go ahead with the OTOY streaming system that Avatar Reality is working on (that has not yet borne consumer-ready fruit) which will stream something like a gigabyte per hour onto mobile devices.
Do you know what a mobile operator does when a user starts streaming a gigabyte per hour through their device from an Internet service – or even a half of that?
They cut it off. They block whichever end will make it stop most effectively, and they point at the terms of use and acceptable use policies if anyone should complain about it.
[EDIT: As it happens - and thanks to the commenters who pointed it out, the iOS product appears to involve neither a world, nor server-side rendering, but is more sort of like Google Lively on an iPhone, as it were]
I’m sorry to see Blue Mars go. I know it isn’t actually gone yet, but I’m just waiting for that shoe to drop.
| By now you know that Avatar Reality is scaling back development on Blue Mars, abandoning the PC as a platform for it and has laid off a bunch of staff including CEO Jim Sink.
What you’re probably wondering now is why.
If what I’ve been reading is right, basically Avatar Reality ran out of money. There’s still a little bit left to run with, so what is left of the farm is being bet on mobile devices.
Okay, so here’s the thing.
Blue Mars started with the notion of a somewhat more controlled kind of Second Life virtual environment, but with considerably more awesome graphics, and some first-party engaging digital experiences.
Problem one: The graphics engine.
I don’t know about you, but on my configuration, the best that the Blue Mars client could offer me was like treacle soaking into a sponge. It makes the Second Life viewer feel like NASCAR by comparison. Even though Blue Mars frame-rates weren’t actually awful for me, just moving around felt like my environment was pushing back at me at every turn. It would have been nice to twiddle some settings to figure out if I could make things feel faster, but the client never offered any useful options for that. At least, none that made any visible difference. That brings me to …
Problem two: The interface.
I don’t know about you, but I got pretty tired of trying to work the interface. Also of right clicking and getting popups from what appeared to be Adobe Flash Player. What the hell? That was more confusing than getting no response at all.
The interface definitely seemed to be going somewhere but it felt like nobody was really very interested in finishing it off or making it really usable.
Problem three: Engaging digital experiences.
Could not be built and updated faster than even a comparatively modest user-base burned their way through that content, and did little to generate any individual profits. Not cost effective.
Problem four: Rendering costs.
Here’s where things get ugly.
Blue Mars, like Second Life, is a client/server system. The client (or viewer, if you prefer) and the server share the load of making everything go. In practical terms, the system offloads many costly tasks onto the client. They’re called costly tasks, because it costs a lot of money to buy the hardware to do it all yourself for any reasonable number of people. Bandwidth is also a major issue, as bandwidth for highly-detailed meshes does not grow on trees – no, not even mesh trees.
However the engine (prob 1) is actually really bloody demanding and doesn’t seem to be doing that at all that well. Also, the servers don’t seem to be keeping up really well either. Blue Mars has a scaling problem, in that it cannot get enough return for the investment of hardware and bandwidth costs required to run their end of the resource-sharing. At least they’re not paying for the processing being done at the client end, on the PC.
Then we wind up with Avatar Reality’s second most boneheaded decision: Cloud rendering, with OTOY. No offense to OTOY, because its not a problem with OTOY.
What’s wrong with this? Basically, it moves pretty much all the zero-cost processing that the client’s PC is doing and moves it off to a cloud that Avatar Reality pours money into.
If the whole thing with OTOY had gone ahead as planned, the costs of running Blue Mars would have skyrocketed – on the relatively slim hope that pouring oodles of bandwidth at customer PCs to generate a smooth, high-framerate experiences would attract a whole lot of paying customers. Social media integration was supposed to bring the mass market in. It didn’t do that.
So, already running in the red on server-side costs, Avatar Reality decided to shoulder the whole burden of processing costs, rather than just a portion of it.
Wow.
Just think about that for a moment. Wow.
Now we get to the most boneheaded decision…
The mobile market – presumably to go ahead with the OTOY streaming system that Avatar Reality is working on (that has not yet borne consumer-ready fruit) which will stream something like a gigabyte per hour onto mobile devices.
Do you know what a mobile operator does when a user starts streaming a gigabyte per hour through their device from an Internet service – or even a half of that?
They cut it off. They block whichever end will make it stop most effectively, and they point at the terms of use and acceptable use policies if anyone should complain about it.
[EDIT: As it happens - and thanks to the commenters who pointed it out, the iOS product appears to involve neither a world, nor server-side rendering, but is more sort of like Google Lively on an iPhone, as it were]
I’m sorry to see Blue Mars go. I know it isn’t actually gone yet, but I’m just waiting for that shoe to drop. | |  | |
Tags: Blue Mars, Business, Cloud rendering, NASCAR, OTOY, Second Life, Virtual Environments and Virtual Worlds
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Ouch. I wonder how many Blue Martians are quietly registering alts after making a loud, dramatic departure from SL?
Problem 5: Exclusivity—Blue Mars did not openly include the Mac community…
For me, and all Linux and Mac users, Blue Mars was dead from day one anyway (no Linux neither MacOS-X client)… I’m actually glad to see it disappear, and hope it will benefit to OpenSim grids where everyone can easily create contents and explore the grid under whatever OS they use.
Graphics and rendering costs are technical hurdles which can be pretty easily remedied with a few generations of advancement in desktop processing power.
The interface is an issue which could have been easily addressed and fixed in-house. If I recall correctly, Blue Mars utilized Flash 10 for its UI elements.
I’d venture to say that Avatar Reality has been so hyper-focused on OTOY cloud rendering that it has consumed most of their development time. With only a few million dollars in venture capital sitting in the coffers, it made sense that they would halt development of their native PC client (which only a very niche group of users with high end computers could use.)
The biggest problem with Blue Mars was the lack of intuitive content creation tools available. UGC is so important, and Avatar Reality underestimated this to a fault. I’m not sure CryEngine2 was the best choice for a dynamic virtual world.
In the end it lacked the addictive qualities that Second Life managed to pull off. It was not fun. It was painfully boring and the low user concurrency showed this.
LOL
I suppose we’ll be seeing more of a certain VW writer who made such fanfare of his Martianization?
It’s really ironic to see a company that treated Mac users as such third-class citizens for reasons of platform convenience suddenly announce how much they love iOS. It should also be amusing to watch the content control-freaks at Avatar suddenly realize that AAPL regards *them* as “content”, and awards them the traditional serfdom role AAPL accords its fanbois.
I remember seeing the first teaser video, which was gorgeous and very tantalizing. It contained the phrase “millions and millions of commited users”. To me, that meant the experience would have to be extremely compelling from the start. Not just really good 3D but something completely different. Unfortunately, that is not the way things worked out.
the only thing left for me regarding blue mars is to find the “cancel account” link.
preferrably paired with the “unsubscribe from all mailings” link.
I got several nudges from friends to move over to BM, but resisted. Then I relented, and downloaded the client and also found it to be lagged to buggery and looked for anything that would be effective to tweak. That’s when I noticed the other thing – bandwidth. This thing chewed up even more of the precious stuff than the SL client! Then I uninstalled the BM client and never went back. Given that I’m somewhat more likely than the average person to stick with new technology, that pretty much says it all for Blue Mars.
so android device sales soar pass iOS and which direction is Blue Mars taking!
/me thinks someone has a niche fetish lol
I don´t know if I should be happy or sad about the failure of Blue Mars. On the one hand another non-game virtual world is closing down, on the other hand some talented Blue Marsians may come back or spend more time in SL. I didn´t spend a lot of time in Blue Mars, but the failure was obvious. The most basic functionality was not working: navigation. It was just no fun at all to walk around. Basic WASD navigation and camera movements were not working well, besides from the inability to travel larger distances by teleporting, flying or by kind of a vehicle. The second thing was something that SL is often accused of: there were no people. A simple display next to each city about how many people are there currently would have made it much easier to find people. The third reason is costs. It was too expensive to build something and too difficult as well. Many places in SL may not look that good. But average people built them. It is their proud creation and that is what makes them attached.
It is not easy to explore Blue Mars and navigate, it is too difficult to build content for average people, there are almost no people to meet and there is nothing fun to do. So what is the reason for being there? But as I saw at the inworld meeting yesterday, there were still many enthusiastic Blue Mars fans. But now the reason why I called it a failure at the beginning of the comment. With shifting to another platform, they will loose a large part of their only valuable asset: their core fans and content creators.
The funny thing about all this is that the same mistakes are being made that have brought game companies to their knees time and time again: releasing a half-baked app and expecting paying clients to rush in to do the heavy lifting/investing in finishing an architecture; closing an architecture to the Feted Few (thx Proky lol) and willfully ignoring the continued long-term user base growth of the modding/tweaking community (Freelancer and Oblivion are good examples) and the total pretend/ignorance regarding bandwidth moderation by service providers (don’t these people even read the news?).
As we’ve seen numerous times recently, the Gatekeepers of Bandwidth make promises of “watch tv/get radio/download movies/play hugely-immeresive games on your iPhone!!!” to make you buy and then cramp, crimp, squeeze and monstrously overbill anything that requires bandwidth above Grandma checking her Yahoo email 1x a week, making their promises just so much BS and bait-and-switch.
Also another example of why “cloud computing” syncophants should do a little reading about the history of computing, particularly the “dumb terminal” phase, and figure out why people were so anxious to get away from this model and get some reliable and secure processing power on their own desktops.
I agree with you about the problems with their technology, but think the deeper reason for their failure was a “build it and they will come” attitude. They focused their resources on building their management’s vision of a high-end, resource-hungry, super-scaling world that proved to be not very compelling to their market. Instead of first focusing their development priorities on what would be most compelling to users, they took a few years trying to create a state-of-the-art platform that proved to be beyond their ability to pull off.
@Botgirl: Though apparently without the “super-scaling” part.
The genius of Philip Rosedale, was in realizing that if you let people come and create your content, they will. Blue Mars’ biggest mistake, in my view, was a business model that made the content creators pay for the privilege. Why should we? Second big mistake was not designing for the low-end laptops, which the vast majority of consumers have.
One criticism I don’t think is fair to single Blue Mars out: bandwidth consumption.
It’s not like Avatar Reality would’ve been trailblazing unknown territory of essentially streaming adaptive quality video to mobile or even PC. We as users are already accustomed to managing Netflix, YouTube and etc. data consumption on our iPhones and iPads.
So it’s not like lumping one’s fate in with Netflix and other video giants on iOS in that specific regard is a foolhardy decision.
Everything else I mostly agree with. My BIGGEST complaint with Avatar Reality has to do with what you didn’t mention in the post: the fact that it was in beta. It’s like they wanted the fruits of launch but cover of saying “we’re still in beta”. Users of software tend to be much more forgiving of software that’s explicitly in beta than they do something pushed to them as any kind of done.
All Avatar Reality ever did though was urge developers for production ready stuff without any definitive dates on ‘launch’, without any real glimpse of a launch time marketing plan that’d go beyond the tweets of bowling for BLU.
Truly I believe Blue Mars’ developers were the most brilliant part of this whole thing, and exhibited areas where Linden Lab has only promised to go. The Flash interface you mentioned for example: that’s scriptable UI via Scaleform. Not exactly an unusual choice, triple A games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age use Scaleform, and however many thousands or millions of developers use Lua and ActionScript for different reasons.
I believe the biggest problem was Jim Sink, or if not him, whoever thought the things that came out of his mouth. Whomever first saw that Crysis demo on iPhone on TechCrunch and decided that’s how Blue Mars was going to get on TechCrunch as well is probably to blame.
Blue Mars rendered to a thin client on desktops may’ve still been a mistake for all the financial reasons you listed, but at least it would’ve been an attempt in the right direction to rectify some of the real issues mentioned: Mac support, minimal hardware support. Yes there’d still be the bandwidth issue, but again, that’s a fate tied to all video that streams on the web for hours at a time.
@Botgirl
The thing is, they did build it, just no one came. Why would they? It was beta, so what incentive was there for developers to pump out these huge worlds without any kind of clear launch date in the foreseeable future?
Maybe their problem was catch 22: they needed users to entice developers with, but needed developers to entice users with. I myself believe all they needed was to properly involve developers with the gamble of a launch window rather than just trod along pushing meetings and doing this and that for BLUs and so on.
I just wonder how many people were like me willing to at least open a store in Blue Mars or rent a block, invite a few friends over to try whatever I made…but only when it ‘launched’. I don’t know why AR was expecting people to invest money and time into something without any kind of “its done” window. It’s like they were afraid of the make or break.
I would’ve happily lumped my efforts into Blue Mars if I felt the gamble was worth it, but to throw money and time on the table without any knowledge of when the crap shoot would come and how it would come wasn’t all that appealing.
@Miso
Exactly what world do we live in where its laughable to think about streaming video for hours a day mobile? That a future we don’t want, a present we don’t already have?
Everyone on AT&T right now with Skype on their iPhone already has the common sense not to make a video call over 3G, and instead do it over WiFi in any long stints. Same goes with Netflix and everything else bandwidth intensive.
You could eat your bandwidth allotment on iPhone AT&T and other bandwidth capped mobile plans browsing images on Flickr if you want, but that’s no reason to ostracize the idea of images.
Really, Blue Mars completely aside I believe cloud-rendering is being kicked for no reason here on the consumer end of things. We already have to deal with this, and do so effectively.
Blue Mars closing is hardly a surprise. Lack of content, some weird pay-to-develop model, horrible horrible horrible content creation tool, that weren’t even collaborative (as far as I’m aware), form WAY over function and all the reasons noted made it inevitable. Can’t say I’m either sorry or pleased to see it go. I didn’t really spend any time there.
What does worry me slightly, however, is yet another company getting its fingers burned in the VW market. With Google still having the bitter aftertaste of Lively (remember that?) and Linden Lab’s continued slow motion implosion; who now is going to want to take the leap of faith to develop a decent platform?
In the early days of Blue Mars, the patterns of their public communication against implementation had all the hallmarks of funding targeting.
It stands out if you look for it.