Today marks the end of an era. High Fidelity is essentially shutting down its platform today (more details here). Longtime user Dr. Fran noted that the HiFi user forums have already been taken down:
But we are not leaving without one last epic dance party!
Xaos Princess posted the following message on Twitter:
Today we’re gonna party like it’s 1999 in VR! Fire up your Steam or Oculus client one last time or download it at https://highfidelity.com/download and join us at 3:00 p.m. PST in https://metaverse.highfidelity.com/places/ThePalace to say farewell to the best virtual world ever!
All are welcome to join us, but if you have never set up a High Fidelity avatar before today, you are simply out of luck, as High Fidelity has also shut down their official website, so you can no longer create accounts:
While privately-hosted domains such as ThePalace will continue to run for a while, eventually usage will dwindle down to nothing, as older users move on, and no new users can create accounts to take part in any events. Eventually, even the domain names will disappear as they expire, and you will no longer be able to visit them, even if you still have a working account.
UPDATE 5:48 p.m.: Well, after a few technical difficulties (including having to replace a hand controller battery and rebooting my computer twice), I made it into The Palace! The party is still going on, and there are about 25 avatars in attendance—the largest crowd I have seen in HiFi in quite some time.
It was wonderful to see and talk with old friends like Thoys, Piper Peppercorn, Xaos Princess, and Flame Soulis.
Like I said, the end of an era. High Fidelity is the first victim of the social VR wars, but I suspect it will not be the last platform to fold in this rapidly-evolving and ever-changing market.
UPDATE Jan. 18th, 2020: After I left the party, High Fidelity CEO Philip Rosedale himself showed up (see red arrow)!
Thanks for the picture, Carlos!
To late as I removed their app long ago is disgust. I guess Sansar is next. I guess I’ve given up on virtual worlds at this point as they seem to be economically unsustainable in the broken billionaire owned economy of the 21st century. Fun while it lasted and the Bingo parties were entertaining.
This is a bit inaccurate. You can’t create new accounts, but you can still get in: an account isn’t needed to connect. So anybody who wants can still participate in events.
And here at Project Athena we’re working hard on replacing the few bits that are going away. This isn’t like say, Inworldz, HiFi has very little in the way of central architecture, and what little there is, isn’t 100% necessary.
This situation makes it quite easy to keep going as a volunteer effort. In fact in the later days the organization didn’t provide much anymore and everything was user run anyway, so all we’re losing is a few not especially complicated bits.
I think this is ultimately for the better: with HiFi gone we’re no longer slowed down by them.
Yes, I should have made it clearer in my blogpost: if you do already have an account/avatar on High Fidelity, you can still visit. Thanks, Dale!
Not sure I would say High Fidelity is a “victim” of social VR wars as the war seems to be between consumers who don’t care and developers that can’t get their marketing together to attract the small but growing VR community and to create loyalty. I was very enthusiastic until they decided to abandon the public channels and like all these companies are trying to attract the elusive “business” market that hardly exists but I suppose it sounds good to the investors they have left. It all very discouraging.