Blue Mars

» see bluemars.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i missed blue mars. the beta opened in september 2009 and by then i was 25, well past the age when i would have signed up for a fresh virtual world just to see what the avatar creator did. the platform's biggest year was 2010 and its biggest year happened almost entirely inside the small english-language virtual-worlds press. metaverse journal, new world notes, the various second life bloggers who covered the neighboring platforms. the news reached me later, mostly in retrospectives about why second life competitors kept failing.

avatar reality was a honolulu startup put together around 2008 by a group that included former square enix and lucasarts staff. the pitch was clean: cryengine 2 for the graphics, per-city hosting so a landowner could operate a separate world on the same client, an in-world currency called blue mars dollars that could be cashed out to paypal. the beta opened on 2 september 2009 as a windows-only download of about 2 gigabytes. the first year of coverage was warm, mostly framed as second life's first credible next-generation challenger.

by the end of 2010 the numbers were about 50,000 registered accounts and a much smaller active pool, described in different reports as roughly 3,500 people on the beta forums. the developer economy never reached the scale that would make hosting a city profitable. cryengine 2 also required a windows pc strong enough to run a mid-2000s aaa game, which cut off a large slice of the second life crossover audience that avatar reality had been counting on.

~ the case file ~

~ the pitch ~

what made blue mars sound plausible at the time was the split-hosting model. avatar reality would run the platform and the avatar system, and independent developers would license their own city space to populate with buildings and events, taking a cut of anything sold in that city. it looked like a franchise pyramid rather than second life's flat landmass. that structure required enough shoppers moving between cities to sustain a shopkeeper economy. the shopkeeper economy never quite got there.

~ the actual end ~

avatar reality announced on 15 january 2011 that it was cutting staff from about 30 to about 10 and refocusing away from the pc client. the plan named was a lighter ios application plus a browser-facing "lite" version that used google street view as a chat backdrop. the pc client was left running but development stopped. by 2012 the company had granted expanded technology rights to ball state university for 3d simulation research, valued in the announcement at $10 million of r&d work. the consumer product effectively ended there.

~ the long tail ~

blue mars sits in a small pile of second life competitors that shipped in the late 2000s and could not build the audience needed to survive their own hosting costs. sony home came from the console side, google lively from the browser side. there.com had been running since 2003. smallworlds and imvu each held their own slice. what blue mars had that most of them did not was the graphics engine and a coherent economic model. what it did not have was enough people willing to install a heavy client and hang around waiting for the shops to fill.

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