FUN Technologies

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

~ the goodbye ~

Paying an entry fee to play Bejeweled against a stranger for cash was a north american legal arrangement before it was a product. The whole thing rested on jurisdictions where a game of skill sits outside gambling law, and Turkey was not one of them, so the sites geoblocked me before i could have found them. I am writing this one from filings rather than from memory.

FUN Technologies was started in Toronto in 2002 by Lorne Abony and Andrew Rivkin. It grew almost entirely by acquisition, eight of them for around 128 million dollars, and by the middle of the decade it described itself as the largest provider of online casual games and fantasy sports anywhere, with more than 35 million registered customers. It took a full listing on the London Stock Exchange in 2003 and added Toronto in 2004, which made Abony the youngest chief executive of any company on that exchange.

The two properties that mattered were SkillJam and WorldWinner. SkillJam started in 1999 as EGamesGroup and passed through eUniverse before FUN bought it in 2004, and what came with it was an exclusive license to run PopCap's Bejeweled for cash and prizes. WorldWinner was the competitor out of Newton, Massachusetts, also founded in 1999, with a tournament platform and a catalog that ran from solitaire to Luxor. FUN bought it in 2006 and merged SkillJam into it a year later, retiring the SkillJam brand.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the loophole ~

The business existed inside a sentence of american law. Wagering on chance is regulated to death; paying to enter a contest decided by skill is a tournament, and tournaments are fine. So the games had to be things where the better player reliably wins, which in practice meant puzzle titles and card solitaire. Everyone paid the same entry fee, the house took its cut off the top, and the pot went to whoever scored highest.

That distinction was worth a great deal in exactly the years the United States was moving against online poker. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act passed in october 2006, and while the poker rooms were being cut off from their payment processors, WorldWinner was taking entry fees for Scrabble Cubes and paying its winners out. The impulse being served was the same one. The paragraph of the statute was not.

~ the million dollar game ~

In september 2006 FUN staged a competition to find the best casual gamer in the world, with a grand prize of one million dollars. Seventy-one people qualified. They played Bejeweled 2 and Zuma for it, which sounds like a joke until you notice the prize was larger than most professional gaming purses of that era. A player from Odessa, Texas won the million.

Nothing about the event was covered as sport. It was a marketing spend by a listed company trying to convince the City of London that casual gaming was a real sector, six months after Liberty Media had already agreed a transaction valuing FUN at 484 million dollars. Competitive gaming then spent the next fifteen years rediscovering the same idea with better production values and calling it new.

~ the actual end ~

Liberty already controlled the company, so the end was procedural rather than dramatic. On 21 december 2007 FUN Technologies completed a plan of arrangement under canadian corporate law, and Liberty indirectly acquired every outstanding common share for approximately 223 million dollars in cash. The listings went with it.

WorldWinner was folded into Game Show Network, which Liberty also owned, and the FUN Technologies name simply stopped being used. That is the ordinary way a holding company dies. There is no shutdown notice and no farewell post, only a filing saying the shares no longer exist, after which nobody has a reason to print the name again. The games kept running under a television network's logo, which is arguably where they had been heading the whole time.

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