Google has announced via its blog that its Second Life wannabe, Lively, will be discontinued at the end the year.

The virtual world launched in July amid relatively little publicity (nothing like the kind of push that Chrome got). In it, users create avatars and can interact with other people. Like Second Life, it’s essentially a fancier chat room. Users can also design and decorate their own rooms to show off to others, and up to twenty people can occupy a room at a given time.

However, Second Life continues to draw more people because beyond serving as a chat room, it’s also a marketplace. People can set up their own little virtual shop and sell user-generated content or even real-world goods. How appealing any of this is to anyone under 40 is debatable, but the options are nevertheless heftier than those in Lively.

Furthermore, users have reported problems logging in and some claim the experience is buggy. The problems could be because Lively has been in beta, sure, but Google has a penchant for keeping things in beta. Apparently, that was enough for people to abandon Lively.

Google has acknowledge in its blog that when it comes to taking risks, “not every bet is going to pay off.” The company made clear, though, that everyone who has been working on Lively will be moved to other teams, presumably meaning that there will be no layoffs.