I didn’t know about this company (Multiverse) until I read about them in a New World’s Notes (a blog about Second Life and Virtual Worlds). Here is some info about them:
“Founded in July 2004, Multiverse created a new technology solution, the Multiverse Platform, to change the economics of creating high-quality online games and virtual worlds. With the Multiverse Platform, development teams would be able to build and launch their projects more quickly and for less money than ever before. Multiverse released the first version of its platform to developers in 2006.
In 2008, Multiverse extended its platform to support the creation of web-based games and virtual worlds. As a proof of concept, the company released Battle, Team Battle, and Battle: Realms at War on Facebook and other Flash game portals. Multiverse also created promotional games for McDonald’s and Coca-Cola to support the release of the Avatar motion picture in December 2009.
Although thousands of developers showed interest in the Multiverse Platform, Multiverse wasn’t able to achieve a profitable business model. As a result, Multiverse ceased operations in December 2011 due to lack of funding.”
Some companies are in a bad moment right now, because the world economy is not at the best. There is one nice thing that the multiverse company did and you can read in here:
“A group of individuals is creating an online community to support developers who wish to continue using the Multiverse Platform. They are in the process of creating a non-profit foundation to take over support of the platform. A project has been created on SourceForge to provide access to the platform and facilitate further development by community members. Multiverse has contributed source code for the last released version of the 3D client, server, and tools as the initial starting point.
This website will stay operational for several months to allow an orderly transition of the master server, user registration system, and other infrastructure to the foundation. In the meantime, access to these services is available via the menu links at the top of this page.”
Even the company is closing, they are giving away the technology and the code of the platform to a group of developers and individuals that wants to continue for the development and use. This is very good example of what some companies should do for programs or platforms they don’t use anymore or for those companies which are going to close because they don’t get profit from their programs.
Comunity projects or Software Foundations are useful for keeping programs alive, that can be used by new users or for people who need them. For those who doesn’t known there is program used in the metaverse for 3d creation, I am speaking about Blender. In the next post, I am going to speak how Blender became as a “open source software” from a company who owned.
Metaverse4Me 