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Thanks for all the fish, There.com

"At the end of the day, we can't cure the recession, and at some point we have to stop writing checks to keep the world open." (Mike Wilson, CEO, Makena Technologies)

Another large, well-renowned virtual world is shuttered next week: There.com, a virtual platform co-developed by Forterra Systems and the U.S. army, and later acquired by Makena Technologies. There attracted large business-partners like Coca-Cola, CosmoGirl, Bebe, K-SWISS, and SPIN.

As CEO Mike Wilson announced, Make will continue with “some exciting educational projects in process, which [it] will continue to service. The entertainment-driven, branded space, though, will close.“ Wilson gives the bad general economical situation as reason for the closure of There.com:

“While our membership numbers and the number of people in the world have continued to grow, there has been a marked decrease in revenue, which, in these economic times, is no surprise… Before the recession hit, we were incredibly confident and all indicators were ‘directionally correct’ and we had every reason to believe growth would continue. But, as many of you know personally, the downturn has been prolonged and severe, and ultimately pervasive.“

According to Alexa (taken with a large grain of salt), There’s traffic spiked during early 2008 and then gradually fell back to a meager daily reach within 2009 and early 2010.

With the closure of large virtual worlds like There and Metaplace and several MMOs changing their revenue-model to free-to-play, the field of online worlds appears to be volatile at the moment.

Via VirtualGoodsNews

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