Just five months after the announcement of Lively, Google is pulling the plug on their virtual worlds software.
We will shut down Lively on December 31, 2008. Embedded rooms in blogs and other web pages will continue to show an image, but users will no longer be able to enter Lively rooms and interact.
The Official Google Blog has an entry on the shutdown as well.
In July we launched Lively in Google Labs because we wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways. Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it’s the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people’s lives. But we’ve also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off.
Oh, how many game development studios have learned that lesson the hard way the past couple of years…
At the Austin GDC back in August, Google had revealed that they wanted to provide a Lively API for developers to create actual games, and that Google had a long-term goal of Lively becoming its own gaming platform.
Tags: MMO Gaming
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