Junebud

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

~ the eulogy ~

MilMo went out first on Orkut in Brazil, and Orkut is the cleanest measure of how far this product sat from me. Google's social network took Brazil and India almost completely and barely registered in Turkey, where that slot belonged to Hi5. A Swedish studio's browser game reached its players through a social graph nobody around me had an account on.

Junebud AB was founded in Malmö in 2008 and spent its first stretch on its own money, raising outside capital for the first time in the spring of 2009. Ola Holmdahl ran it. The pitch was console-quality 3D delivered through the browser, which in 2009 was a real technical claim rather than marketing, and the company aimed it at web portals and social networks instead of at a store. MilMo was the result: a casual 3D massively multiplayer game with platforming and action-adventure in it, running inside a web page.

The distribution deal that mattered came through Mentez, a social games publisher working the Latin American market, which put MilMo onto Orkut, where it was among the first 3D titles the network ever carried. A second game, Tuff Tanks, got a trailer in March 2012.

~ the dossier ~

~ the browser plugin years ~

There was a window, roughly 2008 to 2013, when the way to put a real 3D engine in front of someone with no install step was a browser plugin, and a generation of studios built their whole business on that assumption. The plugin was the product's foundation and also somebody else's property, revocable the moment browser vendors stopped tolerating it. They stopped tolerating it.

Junebud went under well before any of that caught up with the industry. It is worth saying anyway, because the studio's entire technical bet was on a delivery channel that no longer exists, and the games it made cannot be run today the way they were meant to be run even in principle.

~ sixteen out of work ~

The filing was dated 1 August 2012. The company's own website carried that date, and Holmdahl confirmed it afterward from a personal Twitter account, which is what a sixteen-person company has instead of a press office. The statement on the studio forum opened "I'm sad to inform you today that Junebud has filed for bankruptcy."

MCV reported it on 3 August: sixteen developers out of work, the company in an unsustainable financial position with a low probability of recovery. Engadget picked it up on 8 August and described the news as a complete surprise, which tracks, because the Tuff Tanks trailer was five months old. The forum post ended on the only honest note available to it: "It is not yet decided what will happen to MilMo or Tuff Tanks."

~ nobody ever answered ~

No source records who, if anyone, took the games. The question the studio left open in its own goodbye has never been closed in print. junebud.com today is a registrar's for-sale page offering the name with secure checkout and a guided transfer, and milmo.com bounces straight to a parking lander.

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