Google Terminates Lively

FornaxChemica writes "In a surprise move, Google announced today, both on-site and in its blog, that it will permanently shut down its 3D virtual world, Lively, by the end of the year. This makes Lively one of Google's few scrapped products, and one of the most short-lived, too, barely lasting 6 months. No official reason was given, only that Google wants to 'prioritize [its] resources and focus more on [its] core search, ads and apps business.' Lively might have taken too much and given back too little, even by Google's standards."

Comments

Mis-quoted

[daybot]

The odd gender usage is a mis-quote:

TFS:

prioritize his resources and focus more on his core search, ads and apps business

TFA:

prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business

Not surprising...

[new_breed]

..as this idea was laughed at multiple times on slashdot;)
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/10/1428221
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/09/1210218

Re:Dear Google,

[kripkenstein]

If you're just going to outright shit-can it, why not open-source it? At least then people can benefit from the energy you put into it instead of just throwing that all away.

Probably not an option for several reasons.

The first is that the Lively client is based on Gamebryo. This is closed-source, and extremely expensive at that (it's a top-tier game engine, these things can cost $100,000 or more, easily). So the client code is essentially useless for open source purposes (as part of a derivative work of Gamebryo, doing so might even be prohibited according to the Gamebryo license, but I don't know).

As for the server, Google generally isn't in the business of open sourcing server components of theirs (although exceptions have happened), so I doubt it will happen in this case.