E2V Retirement on May 31st, 2018

After months of soul searching, I've had to make the very difficult decision that follows. As of May 31st, 2018, the E2V product will be retired, and all online services will be terminated.

What you'll need to know:

Q: Will I be able to export my sales history?

Yes, I'll be implementing a simple data export feature. I'll be sending out info about this in a separate announcement.

Q: Is there any way you can change the retirement date to...?

No, sorry.

Q: I am a self-hosted customer. What does this mean for me?

Self-hosted customers are welcome to continue using your system. I will no longer be able to provide active support or development, however.

Q: Can I move to a self-hosted system?

At this point, it's extremely unlikely. I simply don't have the bandwidth to do a rash of self-hosted server setups. But more importantly, you would be far better served by investing your time into moving to an alternate solution rather than putting that effort into an unsupported, retired system.

Q: Can't you just "leave it running?"

No. The financial cost of renting a high-performance web server is simply prohibitive when there are no system sales to cover that cost.

Until then...

Needless to say, I'll likely be getting an even higher volume of support and other questions than normal. As such, if you IM just to say "bummer" or "can't you just...?" or ask about something covered in this announcement, I will probably not be able to reply - sorry in advance.

All the reasons, in case you're curious.

I decided to retire this product for many reasons that have been brewing for months. Foremost among them is the issue of simply not having the time/energy to put into a Second Life business like this any more.

While many of my customers work in SL full time, I do not, and never have. I have an extremely demanding first-life job that is requiring increasing amounts of my time and energy, including some traveling, etc. This is the job that pays the bills, so naturally it comes first. I just don't have the time for two jobs any more.

I haven't made this decision lightly. It's taken months of soul searching, and investigating alternative ideas. This decision comes only after finding no other acceptable plan.