Feb 16th, 2023 at 5:58 am
#1480
Blocksworld was a sandbox game for iOS that came out around 2013. I played it a lot back in its hayday when I was fairly young. You could build your own worlds using a drag-and-drop actions system that allowed you to program games & machinimas with no technical knowledge. It was somewhat similar to Freejam's Gamecraft in that it is heavily physics based.

It was purchased by Linden Labs (known for Second Life). There was a Steam release eventually, but it didn't take off and the game had already declined by this point. By 2018 the PC client ceased to function, and in 2020 the game was sunsetted entirely and never heard from again. There are community servers available, but they are not nearly as active.

I found this article on the game's Fandom wiki about it. It's poorly written but still worth reading.

It actually mentions the Worlds lawsuit against Second Life being a potential culprit (and then links that one YouTube video, which is both complete misinformation and irrelevant to the topic), but considering that 1. Blocksworld had nothing to do with this besides being owned by Linden and 2. Second Life is still running, I I'm certain this was NOT the actual reason. I simply believe Linden wanted to focus more resources on Second Life and wasn't interested in giving Blocksworld the treatment it deserved.

I don't really have a concrete explanation for why Blocksworld died. All I know is that, allegedly, Linden didn't care about it and wanted to go feed their cringe furry adult sim instead. You can't make nearly as much money off of microtransactions on a children's block game as you can from an actual MMO, so from a business standpoint Second Life is a priority. The decline of Blocksworld began after I already stopped playing due to technical issues, so I was not there to witness it.

Did anyone else have experience with Blocksworld?