Late last night I was hit with the news that InWorldz has ended up in financial trouble and will close on Friday. Today Beth made an update to her original post. By popular demand she has set up a GoFundMe campaign to save the 10 year old virtual world.
For the uninitiated, InWorldz is a spinoff from Second Life, built on a publicly released early version of the virtual grid. With a team of devoted developers, InWorldz managed to surpass Second Life on every level when it came to technical features and community spirit.
Beth Reichi, the owner and creator of InWorldz, has funded the world through a series of so-called revolving loans. After PayPal purchased the bank she was lending from, things took a turn for the worse. Refusal to communicate and aggressive blaming from their part has lead to the bank stopping all payments and locked the accounts. As a direct effect, payment for the servers that hold the executable files serving the virtual world has fallen behind and unless $17 000 can be raised before Friday this week, the world will be shut down.
Many people said they wanted to help and after setting up the GoFundMe campaign, Beth got to see how true that was. At the moment of writing, 17 hours after the start of the campaign, over 100 people have come together to donate over $13 000.
But they’re still $4000 short of the goal and time is running out. They need YOUR help to get over that threshold!
If you can spare some change, please drop it over here!