End of life for Google's Lively
by Tateru Nino 
Nov 20th 2008 at 9:00AM
Filed under: MMO industry, News items, Virtual worlds, Lively
One of the good things about Google is that they try stuff. They can afford to try out projects, and don't stick with what isn't working. Well, it appears that their Lively virtual environment chat-rooms haven't worked out. Google will be shuttering the Lively service on 31 December 2008, less than six months after launching.
Lively's Web-site -- launched to the public on July 9 this year -- will remain up, and the images of the rooms preserved, but the rooms themselves will no longer be active. This seems to also end Google's plans to leverage Lively as a games-platform. It isn't clear at this point what it means for Google's partner, X-Ray Kid Studios who has been working on Lively for the last two years, and was increasingly positioned as Google's games division.
It likely has other projects on at the moment, but the decision to put Lively on ice must have been a hard one, nonetheless. No specific reasons have been given for the decision to close, though being targeted at ordinary people all the sex and griefing might have had an influence on the decision.
For those of you who missed out on Google's Lively, it was a software download that enabled sort of 3D chatrooms in your browser. It's essentially what you'd get if you mixed IMVU or Vivaty with Metaplace. Not a virtual world style of environment like Second Life or Entropia there were still ambitions of both gaming and microtransactions. In the end, perhaps, Lively simply overlapped the turf of too many existing competitors without delivering on a compelling experience of its own.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Winterblink said on 10:03AM 11-20-2008
Yeah, and one of the pathetic things about Google is how they barely ever market efforts like this. I think I heard about it ONCE, and there's been almost zero buzz since.
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PN04 said on 12:44PM 11-20-2008
HAHAH that was a dig on Home HAHAH! I saw what you did there! ooooh good one!... oh wait, no it isn't BECAUSE HOME ISN'T MEANT TO BE AN MMO.
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Nerolus said on 1:28PM 11-20-2008
Uhh, it was actually a "Dig" on Second Life. So is home. Neither will succeed. They just can't compete with the wide variety of stuff in Second Life. It has an Economy, it has Sex, it even has its own building engine. Unless there's another Virtual World that can provide these things, they are all doomed to bore people which will probably end up spending more time in Second Life anyways.
Tateru Nino said on 8:18PM 11-20-2008
A dig on Home? Where?
Yo Brewster said on 1:54PM 11-20-2008
This was actually to be expected. Google did the right thing by closing it down as the plaform was REALLY bad. The next one to close down? Let's see how long Metaplace will survive as their implementation is simular to Google's. Sure you can do more in Metaplace but the navigation and implementation is simply once again not good enough to survive.
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