Chit Chat City

» see chitchatcity.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 1 July 2010 a developer in Montreal put a 3D city on the web and let people draw their own faces onto it. Chit Chat City ran in Flash, and the canvas was the whole idea: rather than picking an avatar out of a wardrobe you painted one, and the same tool let you make objects and furnish a house on land you owned. The site said it in those words, that players could "literally draw their avatar on a 3D canvas and build their own house".

There was one person behind all of it. The contact page listed Développement Beauchemin enr. on rue Saint-Hubert in Montreal, a Quebec sole proprietorship publishing under the name Lumiaware, and the developer signed his posts "Matt". He named Minecraft and Second Life as what he was aiming at and described the whole thing as a childhood dream of building his own game. The credits page listed Away3D for the rendering and Red5 for the media server, both open source, with a Java backend behind them and models built in Blender.

It grew the way a hobby world grows, one announcement at a time. A thousand players in the first months, then five thousand by February 2011. Fifty thousand by February 2012 is the highest number the site ever published. A Chrome Web Store listing went up in August 2011. The forum ran until August 2015, when he announced he was closing it, and iOS and Android versions arrived across 2017 and 2018 which he said had required re-coding most of the game.

The closing notice went up at the end of July 2018 and it is short. The player base and the income had "went down greatly", the mobile version "wasn't nearly enough", and what came in was "barely enough to keep the server running". Then the sentence that actually ends it: "new online regulations/requirements required major changes that prevents me to keep it running." The game closed on 1 August 2018, eight years and a month after it opened, and the moderators organized a farewell party around a hashtag, #rememberccc.

~ the dossier ~

~ the stack one person carried ~

Away3D was a 3D engine for Flash and Red5 was an open-source reimplementation of Adobe's media server, which means this one person was operating a real-time streaming stack for fifty thousand accounts out of a registered sole proprietorship in Quebec. The Flash client and the mobile ports came from the same pair of hands.

I was an engineer with a job by 2010, which is the wrong side of the age line for a world like this, so I never had an account. The part I recognize is the other half of it: somebody maintaining a media server on their own for eight years, paying for it out of whatever the game happened to earn that month. What gets a shutdown notice written is almost always a bill that has stopped covering itself.

~ the regulation clause ~

GDPR came into force on 25 May 2018, ten weeks before this game closed, and the site's recent-posts list carried a GDPR notice sitting right beside the shutdown notice. The regulation was aimed at companies harvesting personal data at industrial scale. What it reached here was a Flash world for children, run by one man who suddenly had to answer questions about lawful basis and data subject requests with no legal department and no budget to hire one.

The law exists because children's data really was being harvested at scale, and nothing here argues with that. The question it raises is who absorbs the compliance cost. A large operator puts two lawyers on it. A sole proprietor in Montreal reads the requirements against what the game earns and writes a goodbye post.

~ the funny part ~

The domain dropped after the game died and spent years in parking, passing through an ebook farm in 2021 and a redirect chain by 2024. Somebody re-registered chitchatcity.com in June 2024 and today it forwards to a location-based chat product called 4chat, a domain continuously registered since 1998 with no connection to Montreal whatsoever. The fan wiki is still up, still recording the closure at midnight Eastern on 1 August 2018.

The forum went first, in 2015, three years before the game. That is usually the order. The place where players talk to each other about a world costs money and attention too, and it is the part a tired maintainer can switch off first. The game itself ran another three years after the talking stopped.

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