Why did THERE.com fail? Lessons? Harvey Interview

VoiZod · **Joined:** Thu May 11, 2006 1:47 pm **Posts:** 519

OHB is right~~!!!

There.com when it first started was very much like what URU is!!! There had a storyline and Age like Islands and
areas. You could build in most all these areas and each had several 'FunZones' there was 3 differant type of 'FunZone' too.
Basicly There was a copy of our real world put into 3D!

When it first started it was very expencive to play it had a subscription of 75 usd a month! Later they put it to 50usd a month.
Then 25usd and then 'Black Friday' happened. where all or most of the artists DEVs where layed off or fired.
There ran out of money and was going to close its doors forever. But the Thereians members all cried out NOOOoooo
PLEASE SAVE OUR HOMES!! etc etc. Thats when MW stepped up and gave the members a ultimatom that
He and right hand man Vash would keep There open but the complaining had to stop about unfixed bugs etc.
The Orignal storyline was also just cut off too, ironicly the same thing has happened with URU the storyline just
stops, frozen in time. ( MW and Vash were the main stockholders for example )

Because MW and Vash didn't know the code very well, so they had to do these 'fiddles' MW put it thats when
they tweaked some vertible that ran some aspect in there wether it be the phyics or how to add things or take things out, etc.
There.com went to a Free to play and pay 10usd only once which would get voice and the primium package.

There.com Was My first true virtual HOME! I had many friends and alot of fun doing things.
I remember very distincly that most of the DEVs layed off from the Black Friday went over to work for SL!
The dates and times Im not sure of, but I over heard the Lindens talking about how so much better There.com was doing
There.com was making so much more money than they were! One guy said he was thinking about trying to get his
old job back at There.com again.

Then like 2 months later There.com closed its doors! WAH!!! WAH!!! I'm still shedding tears to this day.

( not sure of the dates or times:) But ONE main thing IMO put the final bullet into There.com and that was a series
of MAJOR bunders made to the GUI, chat KI thingy box, There had voice as well as text chat you could stay in voice chat
while you raced your buggy around a trak made by someone in a funzone, They broke the chat box when they tried to
change it "peter princable" made it so they could not undo what they had done, and that was you could not stay in voice chat
anymore cause every time you'd click , you would get thrown out of the chat, made it impossible to Race buggies and basicly
doing anything and trying to chat at the same time was now broken to either chat or race for an example.

Vash and MW had a Major fight not sure what it was really about but I think it was Vash had desided(spelling) he had, had
enough and wanted to leave to enjoy all the money he had made before he grew too old to enjoy it. IMO.
MW would'nt let him go because Vash was the only one who knew the code on how to emplement and run things better
than anyone. With this chip on his sholder he began doing bad things like just throwing out 100's of hood paz zones
over server lines and just anywhere some of them were pliled ontop of eachother etc.. causing major lag, and avyman crashes
among other anomilies. He then went and sabotaged Space, turned it into a sick looking gray smog color. Lagged out Tyr
with a huge statue of himself in about 5 layers of paz,hood,funzone zones! So Vash was demoted sence he couldn't be fired.
MW was left pretty much holding the bag, and without Vash There.com was like the Titanic and MW just could not afford
to keep it running, While all this was taking place 100's of members left There and even more after the chat box was broken.

I will always wonder why MW couldn't have reduced the servers and brought back the subscriptions per month again.
That could have saved There.com from totaly dieing IMO. There.com was and still is in many ways ahead of its time.
fiery abyss the US Military even used it for training at one time!

I GOT IT! We need a ALL in one type game that has ALL the game genders in it F2P, MMO, SIM, MMORPG, Adventure,
throw them all in! How we get these simple through Ages! D'ni went to other ages and BROUGHT BACK things from them
and visa virsa. Good and bad from G rated to R/X rated R rated linking books could be privet books or in a restricted area
where one would have to meet certain cryteria or status to be able to use them etc.
Cyan's Kelio bone age has creatures you can actualy fly! and have dog fights on etc. But it seems that URU's akillies heel
was infact the Phyics engine Bring back Havok or else URU stays the same as it is now. IMO.

Sorry I have rammbled on for far to long about nothing actualy. not sure why I even try anymore, nothing will happen
We ALL Just go around and around in circles forever, and getting nowhere, How can WE new human D'ni Do anything!?
for YEARS We have waited and WAITED all for not! Watson said Find a way Make a home! well HOW CAN WE
if Cyan doesn't FOLLOW THROUGH with what they said they'd do? So its up to us RIGHT!? thats what Watson said
did he not? SO Lets Hack the caca out of this and start RESTORING THE CITY and MAKING the cavern Truly OURS!
ALL Myst games Cyan actualy encuraged Hacking their games to learn from also finding hidden easter eggs was the motivation.
It was COS Cyan Open Sorce.

IMO, Cyan should and needs to just add in EVERYTHING they got left over, incl unfinished ages etc. and put them into
URU as UNFINISHED, areas, may not be accessable. example like the gareseen wall game. Take apart Myst 5 and
add it into URU the way it was supposed to be added as well. Set up UU/Moula shard network again, and someway
somehow bring back the old phyics engine Havok, Just use the older versions of URU ABM again and then convert all
GT URU new content back to Havok and add it in. Ok now that everything is here We CAN finaly start and
continue with what Dr. Watson said back many years ago at the ending of URU with GT days. I want to help Restore the city!
Not build ages!

Until URU DID AND WAS IN FACT WORKING AND STARTING TO GROW!

Nalates · **Posted:** Thu Sep 16, 2010 12:54 am

Business is always about turning a profit. You seem to it make sound like that is a bad thing.

THERE.com was financed by venture capital. Any project financed by venture capital is on a schedule and is expected to provide some rate of return. When it is realized the rate of return is not there, funds dry up. The articles I've read all say THERE.com could not afford to pay back the venture capital, nor provide a desired rate of return, and continue to operate without further investment. Harvey began selling off parts of the software and still could not find a way to get THERE.com generating the desired rate of return and says as much in his interviews. He closed THERE.com and took his funds to develop IMVU without depending on venture capital as he did with THERE.com.

OHB, where have you read otherwise?

IMVU is making money and has little if any venture capital and therefore has had to be self funding from the start. Harvey apparently learned something form his mistake, which I'm not at all sure we can say about Uru.

Uru has repeatedly run into that problem of having to live on external funding. The UU era and now the MOULa era are the only times Uru has been self funding. Cyan sunk money into the development of Uru and turned to Ubisoft for continued funding. When Ubi could not see the possibility of the return on investment being what they wanted, they quickly turned off the money and put it where it could earn more. GameTap did essentially the same thing, but still they gave it a year. There.com seems to have followed the path of many startup games.

aloys · **Posted:** Thu Sep 16, 2010 12:59 am

OHB · **Joined:** Wed Feb 10, 2010 12:28 am **Posts:** 1247

Turning a profit isn't a bad thing. They owned There and technically they could do whatever they wanted with it. But saying "oh I'm not making enough profit so we'll close it down and screw everyone out of the money they've invested in it." - that kinda blows.

Believe what you want to about There and venture capital. But take what is written by anyone involved with There with a grain of salt. There is stuff that isn't in articles - for obvious reasons. When you talk to former employees...you get a pretty clear picture.

VoiZod · **Joined:** Thu May 11, 2006 1:47 pm **Posts:** 519

Cyan even helped with the hacking!!! back when they were making RealMyst aka Dirt later Dirt was broken off
and turned into URU. RealMyst uses a even earlier version of Plasma and it still used Quicktime, unlike URU
which got away from using QT and switched to Bink. during that time all the files were not encripted and Beta testers
under COS and I believe nda was in effect too. (This is mostly what I'm talking about when I say COS Cyan Open Sorce
but without the nda) when talking about helping Cyan restore the city etc. and going back to UU, TONS of hacking
was taking place back then and alot came out of it too, as to what you said aloys. But now we have the Growers, aka
the Guilds to help and Cyan is still the 'Maker' with the untouched D'mala shard. Each UU shard had its own community
and some of them had even put in the Tpots content before that content was officaly put in by Cyan, which I was told
Cyan used the same way of putting together as a certain shard did back in UU days! I even witnessed that YOU CAN
take a hold of objects in the cavern and phycaly MOVE them around, change their size or position etc. You can even change how the cavern sky looks! I seen it as a sunny blue sky day in the cavern! I will have to turn on my super old computer
(not sure if it will even boot up after all this time) but I have sceen shots of all of this and more! I think D knows about
what I'm talking about here. The site where everyone got user made patches and hacking tools (cyan approved)
was the Clockwork Orange site, now for the most part defunct.

But the main problem is getting the orignal phyics engine havok back again. with using the old URU ABM
and adding all new content from Tpots and GT etc into it. Now I'm not sure on this or even if this is connected to
the orignal phyics engine or not but URU ABM had problems with large groups of people all in the same place.

Another thing I knoticed is if Tpots was going to be added to URU ABM back then, then how were they going
to deal with the problem of multi users trying to get into a place made only for one? With Moula Cyan just closed it off
as they did with several puzzles and areas, they also made many open to multi users areas now only one can go there
at a time! NOT good! and IMO is what made many leave because they can not finish the Moula like it should be,
and that leaves out a lot of storyline too making URU storyline into swiss cheese.

Is this true I heard a rumor that there is a under ground decentralised UU shard network setup that they are using the old ABM version of URU they have gotten back online to test and also restore the cavern.

Only problem is I can not use dot net framework past v1.1. No other games that I know of use dot net framework
in their games because its so volitile and the fact that it is also sucking up all your bandwidth in the background
acting just like file sharing network microsofts version of a encripted Napster for programmers and devolopers.
This IMO is very bad because some of us have to pay for the bandwidth we use! and some of us are not Programmers
etc. and have no need for dot net framework to even be installed, this is another epic FAIL on microsoft along with
the failed DRM and FAILED Vista OS which made Bill Gates step down , He did not want any part of the Crap the
goverment wanted him to do, but he was trapped into it or eles microsoft was going to be broken up. Vista was apart
of this deal microsoft made, that and also a backdoor that only the goverment can access be put into ALL future
CPU chips. VISTA stands for Virtual Instant Surveillance Tactical Application

It litarly has turned the internet upside down! Maybe along with this above with trying to copy a macintosh and use of DX10
which is not at all compatable with XP in anyway (XP IMO was Microsofts golden high point OS) plus most of
the WHOLE internet was not compatable with Vista. This alone has made it VERY HARD for even seasoned game
devolopers to write compatable code (which has added a ton more hours to litarly have to write in a sniffer to analise
which OS is being used, and 2 separite codings of the same game have to be written side by side, and to get them to
BOTH work with the game machanics and objects, phyics is a chore, oh btw coensadence that games coded for vista
compability, I also have heard you can get a Mac to work on them without much effort. (not sure about that one)
cause I have never owned a Mac. So now Big Windows7 makes its appearance. (Bill Gates had nothing to do with this OS directly) The orignal W7 was all but scrapped. So as I have read about and heard & talked about is a waste of money
even with the Ultimate edition of W7, but even with the supposed backward compatability you get with it, FAIL again.
IMO the only thing I wish they'd write a update for is with XP.
W7 reconises and utilises any amount of RAM you put into it.
to wareas XP only reconises up to 2 gb RAM.

I'm not tying to derail, just trying to explain that I do know how hard it is to make a good playable enjoyable game.
Its not just what the user sees and does 'ingame' There.com is an amazing work of coding art that once did stand on its own
it has been around sence the 1980's! and thats NO LIE. IMVU sux IMO Harvy should intagrate IMVU with There
IMVU could be the outside of There messanger, you could have a choise and log onto the new IMVUTHERE world
and take your IMVU avys from the messanger and be ploped into the 3D World now able to move and fly more freely!
YEAAAA Freedom to move around and everything! in your imvu avy! in IMVU you move by clicking sit tags.

So I thought Micheal Willson owned There.com so how does Harvy fit into it? I missed something somewhere.

.

Nalates · **Posted:** Thu Sep 16, 2010 6:50 am

mszv · **Joined:** Wed May 10, 2006 5:28 am **Posts:** 2266

Lars Nordstrom · **Joined:** Thu May 14, 2009 8:35 pm **Posts:** 59

veralun · **Posted:** Thu Sep 16, 2010 6:48 pm

OK the call is clear.
Try to stay on topic.
If someone does feel the need to bring up something which is not related to this thread, feel free to start a new topic.
Thanks.

DreamingGirl · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 11:22 pm **Posts:** 58

Nalates · **Posted:** Fri Sep 17, 2010 12:29 am

OHB · **Joined:** Wed Feb 10, 2010 12:28 am **Posts:** 1247

Nalates · **Posted:** Fri Sep 17, 2010 9:39 pm

Why did THERE.com fail? Lessons? Harvey Interview

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