Everyplay

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

~ the last words ~

Everyplay was the piece of a mobile game you used without ever seeing its name. A developer dropped the SDK into the project, the game kept a rolling recording of what was happening on screen, and when the player did something worth keeping there was a share button that turned the last stretch of play into a video on everyplay.com. The company behind it was Applifier, founded in Helsinki in 2008 and run by Jussi Laakkonen, which had started out doing cross-promotion for Facebook games and moved to replays when phones got fast enough to record themselves.

Everyplay went into beta in 2012 and Applifier raised a $4 million round that December, led by Lifeline Ventures, to push it. The pitch to developers was not really about video. It was about retention and free marketing: a player who shares a clip brings back the two friends who watch it, and the SDK cost nothing because the money was supposed to come from GameAds, Applifier's video ad network sitting alongside it.

Unity bought the company on 13 March 2014. At that point Everyplay was in around 300 games and had carried 650,000 shared videos in February alone. Unity's David Helgason said the goal was to make adding replay sharing a matter of clicking a checkbox, which is close to what happened: for the next four years, gameplay video on mobile was a line item in somebody else's engine.

The ending arrived quietly. On 27 June 2018 Unity shipped a final SDK that stripped out the social half and added a way to pull the raw recorded files, which is the software equivalent of handing you your coat. The service closed on 1 October 2018 with 38 million videos on it by its own shutdown notice. Unity's reason was that uploads had been falling and it was time to sunset the thing gracefully. everyplay.com does not answer at all now.

~ the record ~

~ a checkbox in the build ~

The clever part was where the recording happened. Everyplay hooked the rendering layer rather than the screen, so a phone from 2013 could capture its own gameplay without turning into a hand warmer, and FaceCam let the player stick their own front-camera reaction in the corner of the clip years before that became a universal format. Developers got all of it for free, under one integration.

That generosity is also why the shutdown hurt so widely. Three hundred studios had outsourced a user-facing feature to a company that had been acquired by a company, and none of them owned the servers the feature depended on.

~ 38 million videos ~

Unity gave people a window to download their own clips from the portal before the hosting went away, which is more than most shutdowns offer and much less than the number suggests. Thirty eight million videos is a volume nobody downloads one at a time, and the people who had made them were mostly teenagers who had long since changed phones. Archive Team marked the result lost.

~ what Geometry Dash lost ~

The game most people connect to Everyplay is Geometry Dash, which used it as the replay system for levels, so a huge amount of what the community traded with each other was hosted on infrastructure belonging to a Finnish ad startup that Unity happened to own. On 1 October the share button in those games became a button that did nothing, and in the games that had stopped getting updates it stayed that way permanently.

Independent developers started building their own recorders almost immediately, which tells you what the SDK had actually been worth. I was in my late twenties and thirties across Everyplay's whole run, working on software for a living, and the audience it served was the one holding a tablet in a back seat. The distance here is an age one.

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