Goodnight, Volity

[prog]

Sunday evening I "launched" a project I've been quietly focusing on for a few weeks: the shutdown and dissolution of Volity Games. The fact of it's been an open secret for a little while, especially to those closer to the company. But the farewell page (with text written by Zarf) finally went up on Sunday night, replacing all Volity and Planbeast web content.

The Volity Network games -- Fluxx and Werewolf and all that -- are all taken down and packed away as well. I saw that someone was playing a game of Fluxx right up at the very end. I took a screenshot before updating the DNS records and then pulling all the game servers down.[1]

When it was all done, I was surprised to find myself feeling bone-deep tired, though it was only 8 PM.

This was, finally, the public acknowledgment that this project that obsessed me and consumed so much of my life from 2001 through 2007 is essentially dead.[2] And though it's a relief to put it behind me, and though I can point with pride at the good work that went into it, it's unavoidably painful and saddening just the same.

It's also confirming that it was a total failure as a business, and that the financial investment that our friends put in years ago will never see any returns worth mentioning. (We broke the news to the investors weeks ago, in email. Number of surprised responses we received: zero.)

Every member of the core Volity team has gone on to more successful projects, with Zarf and I both getting involved in much saner-scaled game work, shipping a lot of neat stuff with more to come. And honestly, I don't have much love left for Volity, which I will always regard as a nadir of nerdism for me, one I spent far too long in. And we probably should have shut the company down two years ago, honestly.

But it still hurts to see it go. (Where by "see it go" I mean "bury a shovel in it." Sigh. Enough.)

[1] The volity.net jabber servers continue to run (on a different machine), for those what care.

[2] At least one person I know hopes to keep Volity's (significant) open-source portions alive and moving forward. I honestly think that's awesome and with them luck. But just the same, I don't plan on being involved in any significant way.

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

There's no better education than actually going out there and doing it, so well done.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

I still disagree about the "nadir of nerdism" thing.

[karlvonl.livejournal.com]

Was it me that you saw playing Fluxx? I was perusing my hard drive, and noticed that I still had the Gamut sources. I hadn't launched it in years, but was curious to see whether the servers were all still up and running. It's only by the most amazing of coincidences that this happened on the very last day that it was working!

Why take down Planbeast, though? The last time you blogged about it, I got the impression people were actually using it.

[prog.livejournal.com]

It might have been you! I didn't see who it was. That someone was playing Fluxx wasn't in and of itself weird; we ran the only Looney-endorsed internet-capable Fluxx game in the world (as far as I know), and never stopped receiving a steady trickle of new-user registrations just to play that.

Planbeast did go through a phase of moderate usage at around this time last year, when I promoted it on a web forum that I was hanging out on. But it didn't catch on very far beyond that, and its momentum inevitably died away.

I'm still thinking about it, though. I keep finding new evidence that the problems that Planbeast wanted to solve still exist, and I've collected some invaluable encouragement from the Boston indie-gamedev community. I'm quite convinced that last year's planbeast.com simply didn't quite provide the right answer; it was far too complicated, and lost sight of the question. I aim to try again.

[xijumist.livejournal.com]

Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.