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Second Life competitor Blue Mars drops PC development for Apple's iOS
If you were hoping that Blue Mars was going to rise to directly challenge Second Life's virtual world dominance, you may be in for disappointment today. In a letter to Avatar Reality's fans, CEO Jim Sink announced that the company is restructuring and dropping Blue Mars' PC development to focus solely on Apple's iOS. As a result, Blue Mars is now Blue Mars Mobile. "With over 50 million new tablet devices projected to reach consumers this year along with tens of millions of iPhones and iPod Touch devices, the market for Blue Mars Mobile is a massive opportunity for our company and our customers. We already have a functioning alpha in house and we aim to release the first builds of Blue Mars on iOS next month," Sink said. Sink also announced that a number of Avatar Reality employees, including himself, have been let go from the company. Unfortunately for PC users, Avatar Reality is limiting development to mere bug fixes for the forseeable future. While the company will not charge users of the PC client, there will also be no technical support for the user client.
Blue Mars experiencing slow but steady growth
Blue Mars entered a scaled open beta back in September, and we've not heard a lot from that quarter since then. It's still there, though, quietly doing its thing and keeping its fans happy. Jim Sink, the CEO of Honolulu-based Avatar Reality, spoke recently with Honolulu Weekly about where Blue Mars stands today. Blue Mars has a fairly small audience of around 100,000 and adds roughly 10% to that figure every month. Part of the reason for the small audience is the limitations given by the game itself, but Sink hopes to change that in the near future: "The current version of the game is slow on older PCs. We're adopting a new technology called the Cloud Fusion Server this summer though that will allow anyone to play Blue Mars online." The team behind Blue Mars hopes that this will open the doors for a much larger player base. Plans for things such as a switch to browser based play and Facebook applications give Sink hopes for a bright future for the game. Honolulu Weekly has the full interview with Sink, and it's well worth a read for anyone interested in the genre. [via Worlds in Motion]
Blue Mars: An interview with Avatar Reality's CEO, Jim Sink
As Blue Mars goes into a scaled, open beta, interest has been rising in Avatar Reality's virtual environment. Inevitably, it's compared to Linden Lab's Second Life and – rightly or wrongly – will probably be wearing that comparison for some years to come. Certainly, Second Life users have found the environment intriguing so far. It seemed only proper that we sit down with Jim Sink, Avatar Reality's CEO and find out a little bit more about Blue Mars.
