Update: Peter Grey has confirmed with me that Versu and Creatorverse will be removed from the App Store (and the other places Creatorverse had been available) and their websites taken down in the immediate future. The dio website will remain until the end of February, with a message announcing its forthcoming closure.
Linden Lab has just confirmed that three of its products, Creatorverse. dio and Versu have been axed.
The announcement in full reads:
After careful consideration, Linden Lab has decided to cease development and support for dio, Versu, and Creatorverse. We’re grateful for those who took the time to experiment with these products in their early days, but ultimately we have determined that due to a number of factors, we and our customers will be best served by focusing our efforts on continuing to provide exceptional service and compelling new experiences for the users of our other products.
The products have been removed from the footer area of the Lab’s webpages, and from the corporate home page banner and products page.
So Ciaran Laval called it right!
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
NeeeeOOOOooooOOOOOOOO not Versu, that was actually really interesting! pfffttttt
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Because the Lab has axed Versu, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily gone. It came via LittleTextPeople – Emily Short and Richard Evans. Maybe there is an opportunity for it to live on in that direction.
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Versu under the new ToS was a nice sanity test for any self-respecting author.
”
Should I publish through a platform that can take my work and use it in any way they want to without compensation? Hrm… let me think about that for a minute…”
-ls/cm
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Rather interestingly, Versu never moved to the new TOS for some reason, they still had a Versu TOS on their website.
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But if it HAD, then it would have been retroactive like SL and the others… which then would have forced writers to drop it like a hot potato and cancel accounts.
Probably what serious writers should have done with SL… but, hey – when have I ever been accused of being serious?
-ls/cm
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nooooooooooooOooOooOooo Creatorverse ;:(……
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Aw, don’t cry.
I’ll bet you 5L that Rod picks it up himself as part of his severance package.
-ls/cm
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maybe they can now find a spot on the front page of the LL website for their main product?
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It has always been there.
It’s the first thing on the banner after the “corporate skyline” and it’s the first thing listed on their product page.
The only place it is lacking is the “What’s New?” section on the corporate page. Which, arguably, is corrrect, given it is in its 11th year. Desura, Blocksworld and Patterns are fair game in “What’s New” as Desura is a relatively recent addition, Blocksworld a relatively recent launch (although both are past 6 months old) and Patterns has yet to officially launch, but is still “in development”.
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must be me. the page i land on – with my last three computers – including this brand new one – different browsers, etc… makes no mention of Second Life. this has been true for about two years. i have to click something to see Second Life.
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Weird. If you go to lindenlab.com, you should see a banner at the top. clicking on “2” in the icons to the right of it will reveal SL. Not as intuitive as a slideshow, but probably done that way in case people arrive to only see Desura or Patterns or something else displayed and saying, “Oi! Where’s SL?!”
Also the Products (links) page has SL as the first listed product.
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yes, i have to click that 2…or About…or others… i don’t have to click anything to see their other products but i do have to click something to see their main product. that is not a good website nor good marketing.
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i’ll bet it gets fixed. i would not have bet that previously…but it does look very much like things are changing. i say bravo!
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Yes, but it’s kinda hidden, don’t you think? I mean, when you open the LL page, you can’t see it. You immediately see all the other products, except SL. You have to actually click on the second banner to see it.
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Desura, Patterns and Blocksworld are only all visible as they are in the “What’s New” section. Which might actually be more a reflection of exciting news coming out of the Lab rather than saying anything about the company’s attitude towards SL. Not that they should be expected to always have “new” things showin up each tiem we view the page. However, it does mean that should exciting new turn-up, one of them could also vanish.
That said, I’d rather see the top banner done away with, and perhaps more of a clickable image which can include their products and (within reason) have space for two or three more should the company have anything else up its sleeve.
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At the risk of being wrong, the descriptions for both Creatorverse and Versu reminded me of other products that were already well-established and had a well-developed user base. So, I wonder what their placement in the market was. As for dio, I’ve come to believe it never had a chance to be what it (probably) aspired to be.
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Oh I love this Ebbe guy so far.
I’m sad though for the teams behind these projects. I hope they can quickly find jobs and excitement elsewhere within Linden Lab or outside of it.
In time Blocksworld and Patterns will stop receiving support as well. Blocksworld has already slid hundreds of spots down the Games category on iTunes, and Patterns never got the hype other Minecraft-esque games like Cube World did. Even if both were wildly successful, even the most successful of games average only a few years of lifespan. Neither product can become a ten year solution to Linden Lab’s revenue woes.
Desura I don’t see much a future in either unless it receives heavy, heavy investment, which I would love. I’m not anti-Linden Lab pursuing other revenue streams moreso than I’m anti-Linden Lab doing things the present CEO’s old company may’ve done before but the company itself has never done before, i.e. make games themselves. Hopefully Linden Lab does a whole heck of a ton with Desura soon, or sell it off. So far, they haven’t done much at all, which won’t do when the top competitors are Steam and soon PS4 and Xbox One’s indie platforms.
More than anything hopefully this is a step in the direction of shifting focus squarely back onto reversing Second Life’s shrinking grid. Now that Linden Lab has had a taste of trying to compete in markets with actual competition, I hope they have new found gratitude of being lucky to be in a market with no real competition.
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I am rather surprised that Patterns survived the culling. The “official” patterns site: https://community.buildpatterns.com/patterns shows it has been 3 months since an update, but that is only half the story, the last update posted there was 8/22/2013. There has been at least one partial update and I think 2 TOS updates without an official announcement (Second Life is not the only place where LL communication fails).
I understand that the Patterns developers are the same code jockeys working on SL and they have been appropriately busy there, but it has been a very long time without a release or comment from the Patterns community, for all intents and purposes it seems to be on hold.
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They’re more recently active on their Steam Early Access community page. The last patch was in January.
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Patterns seems to be far more of a fit for the “shared creativity” ideal at the Lab, so not surprised it has survived. At least for now.
It also is actually still under strong development. Desura is perhaps the best place to get the latest news, and the last update was on January 27th, 2014, with the one prior to that on January 17th, which I reviewed here.
There’s a roadmap for the product in terms of remaining feature sets to be added prior to formal release, and the community appears vibrant still. There has been a series of livecasts from the 3-person (think it is three) dev team on a regular basis since around September 2013, and there are also tutorial videos and the like coming out on pretty regularly, the last one being February 10th.
The problem is, the Patterns website (or at least the front end of it) isn’t really being updated (where have we heard that before?). All the updates are now contained within the Patterns community site, which is maintained by Curse.com.
It is here that you’ll find the latest info by:
So, like another certain product we could mention – but won’t – the channels of communication appear to be getting a tad confusing, with information spread shotgun-like.
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While I like the move, I feel that it’s much faster than I would have expected for a CEO who’s only just poked his head through the door.
It’s a move that must have been planned in advance of the appointment – there is just no other way that the analysis required to shut down a product could have been done in the time available, which again suggests an extremely close working relationship between Ebbe Altberg and the board.
All of which only speaks of positive steps for the Lab to come, and I remain cautiously optimistic that they will also be good steps for Second Life residents.
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I think it is clear from Ebbe’s comments at the meet-and-greet that the decision had already been made. Here’s how he started his response to the question about them:
“I’ve already helped support some decisions of simplifying our portfolio…” [My emphasis.]
The real unknown here (and it may well remain an unknown) is when the initial decision to move in this direction was made. If it was reached prior to early January 2014, might it have been a contributing factor in Rod Humble’s decision to depart the Lab?
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Ah, yes – thanks for pointing that nuance out!
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Easy to miss! 🙂
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I was thinking about the same thing: doesn’t it have to do with Rod Humble’s departure? Either the decision to shut down those products or the prior decision to invest in them (like: “sorry, the strategy didn’t work, we need a change”). I know it’s just speculation, but if we keep that possibility in mind it may help us understand the next moves of LL.
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Indeed. And the fact that a product review still appears to be ongoing is interesting, even if it is purely due diligence on the part of an incoming CEO and may not ultimately result in further changes.
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