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.
I keep scanning through blog commentary. Like blogs about SL, I see a lot of people who are not involved in the platform rendering opinions – most often wrong – about it.
I suggest actually taking a listen to the announcement regarding the mobile plans before rendering an opinion – not the commenting on blog posts by people who *surprise* weren’t there either.
Just like in SL, wandering through once and declaring Blue Mars “too hard” does not make you an expert.
I very much wish it could have been done right, because the potential was there to do a lot that SL could not do. Unfortunately, investors want to see a more immediate return on their dollars and decisions get made based on that – RL sadly.
If anybody here knew the sure-fire way to build a successful world they would do it and sit back and rake in the cash. You don’t, nobody knows what is coming around the bend.
Some of us take a chance, and hopefully learn from it.
Some will just sit on the sidelines sniping and feeling superior.
Wow…such wildly different spins on this story from you and Hamlet
Blue Mars interested me, but other than a group from Ball State, no educators I knew were heading over. The game engine was PC-only and required a bulked-out PC at that. I’ll be curious to see what comes if the company does survive.
[...] Here’s Tateru Nino’s analysis: http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/2011/01/15/the-bluest-mars-what-went-wrong/ [...]
I think Tateru is probably right about cloud computing in general, but I doubt her 1 Gb per hour figure. I mean, you can’t base your expectation on what it requires to run now. If they are changing platforms they might change other things as well to make it viable in the smart phone market (maybe they have some wizard on staff who invented some fancy new file compression, we don’t know).
I thought Blue Mars was doomed from the beginning, not because I’m so smart, but because I never liked their idea of drawing such a hard distinction between creators and users. That is like drawing a distinction between writers and readers and not giving readers access to notepad or word processors. It makes no sense to me.
That said, I really did want to like it. I have a few Woodbury friends who were into Blue Mars, so I tried it every now and then. I never got off the noob island, and it was laggy and full of bots that seemed to be operated by Avatar Reality. If there was in-world creation tools I didn’t find them, except to draw tattoos on my avatar’s face. The interface and lag became a deal breaker for me.
I’m taking a moment of silence and raising a glass to honor the countless hours of hard work Blue Mars residents put into their creations that will now probably poof. It’s always sad to see a grid die and all that hard work get destroyed. I hope somebody took pictures. Destruction is bad, but forgetting what was lost is worse.
@Fogwoman It’s not about the platform, it’s about the delivery of the platform, its been badly handled thus for and now its to the point of being magically impractical. It doesn’t matter what you are doing, 1GB an hour is still 1 huge GIGABYTE an hour, hell, I could be playing wow on my iOS device for the exact same overhead …
@Ignatius Hamlet is a jorno for hire, he is PAID by BM to write shite to make you want to use the product. He isn’t news or opinion, he is MARKETING, he will spin this as the greatest thing since sliced bread till the day they stop writing him a cheque.
[...] The Bluest Mars – what went wrong – Tateru Nino [...]
@Bubblesort Some of us measured the bandwidth when LL did this. It’s a little over 1 GB per hour. Yes your iPhone has a smaller screen and will require less, but your iPad doesn’t. Mobile data rates are about $20 per GB. Wait? really? … you going to have to drop $20 just to connect and BM wont see a penny of that, they will want more from you. Oh whoops.
Network data is funny stuff. So often it gets charged both coming and going.
@Ezra: in the world I keep up with daily, check into at least 4x a day and watch as The Provider Boyz (to borrow from Soror) alter their contracts, show you the fine peint, whine when you actually do what they promise you can do in their ads, suddenly reduce your alloted bandwidth “subject to alteration at any time” and basically pull the same game they’ve been pulling since they stole billions of dollars in the 90s on the promise to roll out fiber and didn’t do it, instead taking the money and running to bloat themselves.
It is the same world that throttles illegally by content, misdirects and hijacks dns requests for their bloated adware “search pages,” keeps making promises of “in the future” while planning to charge you by-the-bit, pretends that you will be streaming all these things on an overburdened and unmaintained infrastructure of aging and flaking routers, craptacular ancient rotting copper segments snapped into “their” network when they snapped up companies left and right and didn’t even check the equipment status; that continue to overload VMs with misconfigured virtual servers…
That world. The real world. What’s happeing right now. Read some technical papers; catch up with the current state. I do, daily. Proof? Do some easy Googling: Comcast; bandwidth caps; ATT reduces…: Windows 7 eats GB of data per hour…; Comcast + lawsuit; Verizon + lawsuit; Comcast/Verizon + illegal… any of those should do for starters.
@Fogwoman
“Just like in SL, wandering through once and declaring Blue Mars “too hard” does not make you an expert.”
Exactly. Rather shocking to see a community that has to spend half its time correcting off-base, condescending remarks about Second Life making a whole lot of off-base, condescending remarks about any other virtual world.
On another note, Gaikai != Otoy. Tateru did well to single out the business sense of using Otoy from Otoy itself. AR ran low on money so its worth questioning the move of picking up the expense. But, let’s not berate cloud rendering itself. On our end, it’s more or less just video, you know.
Want to first of all give certain creds to Blue Mars for one main thing:
“With our focus now clearly on mobile, updates to the PC version of the software will likely be restricted to bug fixes for the foreseeable future. With that in mind, we will no longer charge our current City Developers for the monthly city hosting service. The servers will remain online, city updates and uploads will continue, and shop and residence rentals will still function but technical support for the user client will no longer be offered.”
So while some people may be unhappy the direction Blue Mars is going, and that direction may even prove fatal (although no more fatal than their existing course)… at least they had the honor and decency to say, “Hey, we’re leaving your work online as long as we can, we’re not going to charge you, have fun.”
If this was Linden Lab I believe they’d have taken the servers offline, destroyed the archival copies and given their officers bonuses with the remaining investment capital.
That said, let’s be frank: Blue Mars was doomed from the beginning. Tateru is right. That clunky dinosaur-level interface was terrible from the start, the graphics static and unimpressive, the community near non-existent. It struck me from day one as one huge marketing gimmick designed with one thought in mind: buy our goods.
Maybe I’m wrong… but that’s how it struck me… a potential customer. When I visited again a year later, nothing had changed. Not the interface, not the community, not that feeling of having to buy in to even explore the system. After slamming around into walls for an hour or so, visiting a couple of rather unimpressive gardens and being bored to death at little or no interactivity, I finally wrote it off.
In discussions with others, I have met very few people that were even mildly enthusiastic about Blue Mars. The vast majority of comments amounted to “Not impressed” and “Clunky interface”.
VR entails several things. As one other blogger wrote, it’s about a feeling of ownership (in which even Linden Lab is stabbing its customers in the back and shooting themselves in the foot). It’s about community. It’s about creativity, and setting goals, and succeeding. In short, it’s about being things that in real life we cannot be. In my time on Blue Mars, I found nothing there that I *wanted* to be. Frankly, real life was far more interesting.
So there are many things that are hampering Blue Mars. It strikes me as a failed experiment, a business started by folks who pretty obviously have no idea what the market wants or needs. We wanted a Second Life that had a friendlier, more customer-responsive company, an easier enterface, and more enjoyable experience. What we found was definitely not easier, the company created a “clergy-laity” environment, and it wasn’t all that enjoyable. In short, it missed the desired target by a mile… and then some.
As Tateru points out, cloud computing has severe disadvantages when it comes to graphics programs. It might work for smaller-screen cell phones to an extent, and thus may appeal to people who are so glued to technology they can’t stand in a line for five minutes without texting someone. But in general it will predictably be a fail (which is somewhat humorous because Second Life has ventured into making the same error. I mean, duh).
So sorry Blue Mars, it seems to me you’re on the path to no-go… and have been from the start. The fatal error: you gave people what you felt they should have rather than what we wanted and needed. Like Linden Lab– you simply didn’t listen.
Wayfinder is spot on!
I followed Blue Mars right from the beginning and I loved the graphics. It was a big download but once there I had no problems and found it a smooth and easy experience (I do have a good PC and DSL). Second Life is way behind on both performance and graphics so I had high hopes for BM. The client was crap though and never really improved much over time and, apart from a casual wander around, there was never really anything to do or much to buy. And it was PG. The early adopters obviously enjoyed working with it and the mesh-based avatars looked great from a clothes designer point of view but for the fact everything had to be approved. It certainly was never a start-up and go world like SL or Opensim.
I think the secret of any successful virtual world is they have to have something so compelling that one must go there or they must let you make the world what you want it to be and give you the tools to do it right there in the world. That was Second Life’s slogan “Your imagination, your world” and I think Opensim has the potential to actually deliver on that slogan simply because it’s open source while Linden Labs seems to have pulled too far away from it too qualify now. Blue Mars never had if from the word go.
[...] The virtual world that was going to be an upscale shopping and resort destination for those that had tired of the unmitigated chaos of Second Life has fallen on hard times. Tateru Nino examines the reasons why Blue Mars failed to excite virtual worlders, and its perhaps dim prospects in its afterlife on the iPhone. [...]
Spare a thought for the residents of OnLine, many of whom have committed real time and entrepreneurial endeavour into developing workable immersive vitual 3D solutions…
Like my Virtual Learning Zone.
As a real participant on Blue Mars, it worked for me.
I’m afraid Tateru and other commenters are misinformed about what the new Blue Mars Mobile is. It will be an iOS and Android Application, not a streaming service. It’s aimed at avatar dress-up, 3d chat room, integration with social sites, and possibly casual gaming. Download size is probably going to be in the few tens of MB. The avatar itself is 3MB, clothing items are under 500kB each, rooms are max 1.5 MB each. Content creation pipeline will likely be the same as now: 3d model to .dae file to .cgf file then upload to BM inventory. There is a small chance of spillover from the Mobile to PC – if someone is done dressing their avatar, and furnishing their chat room, and wants to expand to a full house and landscaping. But you would need a LARGE mobile audience to have enough spillover to make the PC version viable.
Wow. They’re not salvaging much of the extant system then. Ouch.
Starting to sound very much like Frenzoo – and that does fairly well. Mind you, you can create your own clothes within Frenzoo.
So this sounds essentially like avatar puppetry on mobile. Not what anyone would consider a virtual world.
Well, I prefer the term “virtual environment” myself, as it is much easier to get people to come to some agreement on what is and what isn’t one.
It still fits within the boundaries of that, but it is so far from what Avatar Reality have been building to-date, that I think this qualifies as wholesale abandonment of that style of thing.
More like Google Lively on an iPhone, I guess.
“Virtual environment” is easier to agree on because it says less. Just about anything can be an environment, as long as it logically surrounds and contains something else. I’m typing this in an HTML textarea environment.
I wonder what makes a “virtual environment” virtual? A “virtual world” is not a real world, but surely the new Blue Mars will be a real environment.
The phrase “genuine imitation” comes to mind…
Well, technically “virtual” does in fact mean “real/true in all respects but name” or “having the essence or effect, but not the appearance or form” – from the latin virtuālis and virtūs meaning… well, virtue (which itself has more meanings than many words have a right to, really).
These days “virtual” has been given the additional meaning: “temporarily simulated or extended by computer software”.
Take your pick of either.