Classcraft

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

~ the goodbye ~

Shawn Young taught high school physics in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and in 2013 he did what teachers have been doing with games since the invention of the gold star, except he could code. Every student in the room got a character with a health bar, and one of three classes to play it in. The classes were deliberately unequal and deliberately dependent. A mage could transfer action points to teammates. A warrior could absorb damage for somebody else. Nobody could survive the semester alone, which is the design trick the whole thing rested on.

The rules hooked into the ordinary business of a classroom. Late homework cost health. Helping another student earned experience. A student who fell in battle triggered a real consequence for the whole team, so the pressure to hand something in on Monday came from the four people sitting next to you rather than from the adult at the front. Behind that, it was a behavior-management system in RPG clothing, and the teachers who took to it did so because it made the tedious part of the job into something the students were running for themselves.

It spread fast for something built by one teacher and his family. By July 2014 seven thousand teachers in fifty countries had picked it up. The company raised $13.4 million from Quebec and Canadian investors and registered as a B Corporation. By the time it was sold it counted more than 8 million students and educators. Free accounts covered the game itself, which is why so much of the user base was individual teachers rather than districts, a detail that turned out to matter enormously.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced the acquisition on 11 May 2023. The press release said current users would keep Classcraft "for the '23-24 school year in its existing form" and that school contracts would be honored, which is the standard promise and which HMH technically kept. In February 2024 teachers were told the platform was coming down completely by 30 June. What would replace it was HMH Classcraft, sold to schools and districts, with most of the gamification stripped out and no path for a teacher acting alone. A petition went up. It did not work. The site was still reachable in mid-July and then it was not: on Sunday 20 July 2024 teachers logging in found it gone, and by early August classcraft.com was redirecting to a product page on hmhco.com.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the acquisition pattern ~

Nothing about this was unusual and that is the point of writing it down. HMH is owned by Veritas Capital, a private equity firm, and it bought an ed-tech company with an engineering team and 8 million users attached. The press release quoted HMH's chief technology officer on wanting the "best-in-class engineering team and innovative functionality", which is the acquirer telling you in advance which part of the purchase it valued.

The individual teacher with a free account was never in the plan. Districts sign multi-year contracts and a teacher signs nothing, so a business being run for a private equity return will pick districts every time. The fourteen months between the purchase and the shutdown were the transition, and what came out the other end was sold to institutions.

~ what the teachers lost ~

Read what the educators wrote that summer and the loss they describe is not software. It is a class culture that took years to build: the teams that had been running since September, and the students who had learned that their own homework was somebody else's health bar. A teacher who had built a semester's worth of quests in Story Mode had no way to move any of it anywhere.

The petition that went up in February gathered thousands of signatures and changed nothing, which is the ordinary outcome when a company has already written the roadmap. What the signatures did record is how much of the user base sat on the free tier, and therefore how many of these people had no contract to point at.

The replacements that arrived afterward tell you how specific the thing was. The alternatives people found could handle points and badges, but nothing else put an interdependent party in the room, where your failure lands on the person beside you and their success pulls you back up. Two years on, the replacement lists being written for teachers still describe what they are replacing rather than what they do.

~ a name that publishes nothing ~

classcraft.com is not parked and not for sale. It has no address record at all: the name is still held and simply publishes nothing, which is what a large company's legal department does with a brand it has absorbed. app.classcraft.com, where the game actually ran, behaves the same way.

The Internet Archive holds the last working capture of the marketing site on 17 July 2024, with a banner across the top advertising HMH Classcraft to visitors who had come looking for the original. Three days later the lights went out, and the first archived redirect to hmhco.com appears on 4 August. What the archive holds is the last thing 8 million accounts ever saw: an advertisement for the thing that was about to replace them.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »