Vivaty Closing Down

The party is over for Vivaty virtual world.
Virtual world company Vivaty announced on its site today that it will shut down its user-generated “virtual scenes” site on April 16. Jay Weber, chief technical officer and co-founder, announced on the company’s blog that the site will close because its business of letting users create their own 3D virtual spaces just hasn’t taken off. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company received $9.5 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mohr Davidow Ventures. It was founded in 2007.

Recent closings include Forterra, Metaplace, and There.com. Virtual worlds been hit hard and many industry experts are predicting that virtual worlds just didn't meet the expectations and hype created and started by Second Life. Glimpse of hope will be that IMVU and Linden Labs’ Second Life have boasted continuous growth. But Google Lively never got off the ground back in 2008. By contrast, social networks such as Facebook and social games such as those made by Zynga have taken off, leaving stand-alone virtual worlds in the dust.

Here's what Vivaty said of what went wrong ?

"Why it didn't work out. That is a long story. But I think the fact that we were targeting casual (web) virtual world users that still wanted a higher quality and 3D experience rather than 2D Flash was a key challenge. And then requiring the user to download a plug-in further made the proposition challenging. And as you pointed out in your article, virtual worlds are just not growing as a market segment, and may be shrinking. And social gaming has taken all the consumer interest.

In the end I think we can say Vivaty worked out as a technology platform to enable 3D avatar community experiences on the web. Which was our stated goal. I think the acquisition proves the technology is best of breed and desirable. We thought there would more consumer demand for a lightweight web based 3D avatar community along the lines of a simpler Second Life, and it just didn’t turn out that way.

When we started, Second Life was all the buzz. We thought that if the web was going to flourish with hundreds of Second Life like experiences, then someone would have to build the infrastructure. That was our goal. But it turned out Second Life was a single product and definitely not a foreshadowing of the future transformation of the web. At least not for a good while."

"LOOK DEEPER"
If you think you are the marketing experts then think again as Vivaty tried various key methods I would have suggested them to do to get success including ...

1.) Vivaty's was the first virtual world to lock into Facebook using Facebook Connect. So it's not about putting yourself on to a big crowded space to acquire and share users. They did it and tried it but failes.

2.) UCG contents ? Vivaty's had plenty to go ...

3.) More payment methods ... nope again !

Some industry experts mentioned ...

• Not cool enough aesthetically and not convenient enough for the users too of course.
• It's not about the economy, ONLY. If you have a product that people can truly enjoy, and for cheap - it won't matter what the economic conditions are, people will pull out their wallets.
• Virtual world without online MMO games, e-commerce and other content will never work.

What's my say ?

View - What Virtual Worlds can Succeed ?