Cloud Party

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

~ the obit ~

You opened a tab and you were in. There was no viewer to download and no plugin to approve. Cloud Party ran a multiplayer 3D world that its own users built, on WebGL, inside an ordinary browser in 2012, back when the thing it was aimed at still shipped as a desktop client you had to install and update.

Four people started it in June 2011. Sam Thompson was CEO. Conor Dickinson, the CTO, had spent five years as a lead programmer at Cryptic Studios on City of Heroes. What they originally set out to build was a cloud game engine for WebGL, something in the Unity direction, and it was their backers who talked them into pointing it at virtual worlds instead. One of those backers was Cory Ondrejka, who had co-founded Second Life and knew exactly what the download was costing it.

The public beta opened in June 2012 and the Second Life press took it seriously straight away, which was the real compliment. You logged in with Facebook and got an island to build on. The tools were good enough that experienced Second Life creators moved work across, and it ran on machines too thin for the desktop viewers of the day.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

Cloud Party's users were overwhelmingly people who already had a Second Life account. That was not my crowd, and it is also the catch in the whole proposition. Taking away the download only wins you new people if those people wanted a virtual world to begin with, and by 2013 the ones who did mostly wanted it on a phone.

~ the funny part ~

Yahoo bought a browser-based 3D world in January 2014 and then did nothing visible with browser-based 3D worlds. The announcement on 24 January said the team would be joining Yahoo and the service would close the following month. A Yahoo spokeswoman said they were excited to merge the team's perspective and experience with a group just as passionate about gaming. Yahoo's games division was itself shut down afterward.

To their credit the four of them did not just pull the plug. Between the announcement and the closing date the company shipped export tools and wrote a guide so that people could take their builds out with them, which is more than most acqui-hires manage in four weeks.

~ what got buried with it ~

The world went off on 21 February 2014. For most of that year cloudparty.com served a small page headed "Cloud Party Joins Yahoo", which thanked users and said the team had been continually amazed by the creativity and the worlds people had built and shared. It also called it two years, which is about right if you count from the engine rather than from the beta.

The domain now redirects to the German edition of Yahoo's news portal, which is a stranger fate than a park page. A dead San Francisco world, pointed at a homepage in a country that had nothing to do with any of it.

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