Well, you be the judge on if that may be a bit strong: Blue Mars, which until today was positioning itself as a Second Life-style virtual world with better graphics and less rampaging genitalia, announced that they were ‘refocusing’ on their iOS-based clients and halting work on their PC version.
The first versions of Blue Mars Mobile will be an extension to the PC client but over time, the mobile version will absorb many of the features found in the PC version. With our focus now clearly on mobile, updates to the PC version of the software will likely be restricted to bug fixes for the foreseeable future. With that in mind, we will no longer charge our current City Developers for the monthly city hosting service. The servers will remain online, city updates and uploads will continue, and shop and residence rentals will still function but technical support for the user client will no longer be offered.
Given the inherent limits of iOS as a virtual world platform (touch screens not being terribly efficient for moving around 3D spaces, and virtual keyboards being painful to use for communicating) it’s pretty easy to see this as good news for Linden Lab, whose primary competition remaining now appears to be third-party open source servers using the Second Life client.
More on this here from New World Notes, whose writer, W. James Au, was until recently a consultant and writer for Blue Mars’ developer.
Discuss: Who will save the cat people now?
