Chobots

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

~ the obit ~

Chobots launched in 2008 out of Vayersoft LLC, a Ukrainian studio, into a market that Club Penguin had already defined and Disney had already bought. The pitch was a browser Flash world where you played a small cartoon robot, a chobot, in cities that floated in open space. The audience was children and teenagers and the marketing word was "family game," which in 2008 meant heavy chat moderation and a filter that would rather block a real sentence than let a bad one through.

It did the things its genre did. Mini-games, a customizable avatar, public rooms that filled up at predictable hours, and a staff presence that posted on a blog and showed up in-world under recognizable names. What set it slightly apart was that the moderation and the community management were treated as the product rather than as overhead, and the people who grew up in it still describe it in terms of the behavior it taught rather than the games it shipped.

There was never a Turkish edition, and the licensing map is the reason this one stayed a stranger. Vayersoft sold regional versions the way a Flash studio did in that era, one publisher per territory, and the territories it sold were Germany and India. Turkish middle schoolers in 2009 were on Habbo Otel, which had bothered to localize, and I was 25 and nowhere near either.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ three countries, three publishers ~

The English game ran at chobots.com under Vayersoft directly. The German edition lived at chobots.de and was operated by SpielAffe, a browser-games portal. The Indian edition was at chobots.in under Zapak Digital Entertainment, which was Reliance's gaming arm and at the time one of the largest web-game operators in the country.

Three publishers on one codebase is a lot of surface area for a studio that size, and it meant three separate sets of credentials with access to the same game.

~ the cracks ~

Somewhere across 2010 and 2011 developer credentials were compromised and the source code got out. Once the code was public, cheating stopped being a moderation problem and became an architecture problem: the exploits were in the client logic, and a small studio patching a leaked Flash game against players who could read it was never going to win that race.

The notice that went up on 8 August 2011 did not dress it up. "Due to hacking attacks Chobots world is closed. We received a technical damage that can't be eliminated." Two final blog posts from the community managers went up the same day and that was the end of the official game, three years in, with no acquisition and no wind-down period.

~ the servers the players built ~

chobots.net appeared within months of the closure, written and run by players who had been children in the original and were teenagers by then. It held a real population until 2014, when it closed for the ordinary reason rather than the dramatic one. Others followed, including chobots.us and chotopia.us, which shut in December 2021 and then reopened and is now the longest-running instance of the game that has ever existed, official version included.

chobots.com itself resolves to a two-line HTML file whose only instruction is to redirect you to a registrar lander. The same 114-byte page sits on several other dead virtual worlds, which is what a parked domain portfolio looks like from the outside.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »