Metaplace closing on January 1st

Metaplace will close on January 1st, what does this mean for virtual worlds as a whole? Metaplace seemed a little too much like lively, it was better than lively and had more to it but it was still very basic to look at. One of the reasons cited is "Unfortunately, over the last few months it has become apparent that Metaplace as a consumer UGC service is not gaining enough traction to be a viable product, requiring a strategic shift for our company."

Full message:

Today we have unfortunate news to share with the Metaplace community. We will be closing down our service on January 1, 2010 at 11:59pm Pacific. The official announcement is here and copied below, and you can read a FAQ guide here. We will be having a goodbye celebration party on January 1st at 12:00noon Pacific Time.


Over the last several years, we here at Metaplace Inc. have been working very hard to create an open platform allowing anyone to come to a website and create a virtual world of their own.

Unfortunately, over the last few months it has become apparent that Metaplace as a consumer UGC service is not gaining enough traction to be a viable product, requiring a strategic shift for our company.

We’re sorry to announce today that Metaplace.com will be closing to the public at 11:59pm on January 1st, 2010.

This is a bittersweet moment for us. Metaplace Inc the company will be continuing on – in fact, we have big plans – but what you the users have known as Metaplace will be going away. We are also losing some friends and colleagues here as part of this strategic shift.

We’d rather dwell on the good than the sad. You, the users, have done amazing work here, and we want to celebrate it. We may not have managed to reach our goals with Metaplace.com and Metaplace Central, but we still had a lot of fun, watched creativity flower, visited amazing places, and made a lot of friends. We’ve had amazing guest speakers, more parties than we can count, live concerts, movie premieres and art shows; we’ve seen you make adventures and schools and churches and games and countless other sorts of worlds that would otherwise never have been created.

In that spirit, we want to treat these next two weeks more as a celebration of the good times. We invite you all to come back to see all of the amazing worlds that you have made. Registration will remain open, so you can show off to your friends. Remote embeds will remain active until the last day as well.

We’ll be turning off billing immediately, and refunding everyone for all purchases in the month of December as well as subscription payments that apply to December and future months. This month is on us. We are suspending regular customer service, but the support site will remain open for now in case there are any critical billing issues.

We know many of you have done work here that you would like to preserve. Please do use this time to capture screenshots, data, scripts, movies, and assets. We have a FAQ that explains how to retrieve assets from the service.

When other worlds have reached a sunset point, people have lost touch with each other. We’ve made a lot of friends here and we’re sure that you have too, so we don’t want that to happen. We have created a forum site athttp://www.metaplaceveterans.com that will be operational soon, so that you can all keep in touch with one another.

Finally: we want to treat the 1st of January as a celebration, rather than a sad moment. Please join us on that day for a party, starting at noon Pacific time. If Metaplace.com has to go, we want to go out with style, with joy, and with the same sense of fun that we have always had. Let’s celebrate the journey, not the ending. There will be meeps – count on it.

We’re sure you have many questions about all of this – and there’s a detailed FAQ that we hope answers them. Click here to read it.

In the meantime, we want to thank you all for your support, your effort, your creativity, and your loyalty. We know that many of you will be disappointed by this outcome. We are too. We are embarking on a new and exciting direction, and it feels strange not to have you all along for the ride.

It has been a privilege to have had you here with us on this great adventure, and we hope that this community – this wonderful, engaged, passionate, friendly community – lives on and on.

We’ll miss you -- and we hope to see you again.

Metaplace Team

The url for the FAQ is
http://www.metaplace.com/forums/posts/listing/4872?

I wonder what this means. User generated content virtual worlds aren't worth the money? 2.5D orthogonal projection worlds aren't worth the money? ???

I'd hoped to see a 3D client for Metaplace. Oh well.

It's all my fault.. I rarely logged in.

I'll have to share the blame. I didn't log in much either.

I just don't like 2.5D orthogonal projection. I don't even like to look at pictures drawn that way.

If it had even just let you change your viewpoint to a different diagonal that would have been a great improvement.

Neither did I.

And 2.5d orthog hurts my eyes, too.

I think there were a couple of issues:

a) it was far too much about making your own world. I complain a lot about "having to be special" in SL, but in MP it was ten times worse: to even have your own avatar or your own scripted attachments, you had to get people into your world and not theirs - and since they all had worlds too for the same reason...

b) .. and on top of that, everyone got a free world. The main reason to subscribe was to have a larger one, or more. Honestly, though, I'm pretty sure that even the very top builders there never managed to build 20 worlds!

c) it didn't advertise as child friendly, yet at the same time didn't permit sex. This reduced its appeal to parents and adults. Whenever I visited Central, the majority of users there were teens who didn't have any money. If they wanted multiple worlds, they just created alts, but a lot didn't care about that aspect (a survey a few months back stated that teens are very skeptical about social media)

Never heard of it.

But, then, they've never heard of me either, so it's even.

Maybe they have heard of you and were worried you would show up.

But I never heard of it before either.

What I find strange is that most of the news about virtual worlds these days involves these cartoony type worlds, not reasonably sophisticated ones like SL.

You're probably right - so it's my fault they are closing. Heh! That'll teach 'em.

I logged into metaplace once. Then I kept saying I'd visit later when it got popular. Alas.

I wanted to be a land baron there.

And given even the slightest avenue to monetise it, I would have been.

And in doing so, woulda brought a Caledon colony and a thriving market economy to the people out there with low end computers or no graphics cards.

There was _no_ way to do it.

I think the problem was that the steps were scrambled.



2. Everyone starts working on these cool tech toys

1. Come up with a business model

3. Profit!

Wow. I think you nailed LL's business plan there! O.O