Meteor Games

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

~ the goodbye ~

Adam Powell had the idea for Neopets as a student at Nottingham, started programming it with Donna Powell in September 1999, and launched it that November. The site reached over 140 million accounts, Viacom bought the company for $160 million in June 2005, and Powell stayed on through the transition until 2007. Meteor Games was what the two of them did next, out of an office on North Maple Drive in Beverly Hills, with a stated plan of crossing social networks with the kind of engagement a browser pet site could produce.

The first project was an MMO called Twin Skies, demoed in 3D at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle in 2008 and then rebuilt as a 2D Flash game in January 2009. Kotaku and the MMO press treated that as the retreat it was, and the game never launched. What paid for the company instead was Facebook. Island Paradise went live on 25 August 2009, had roughly 6.8 million monthly active users by that November, and passed 10 million users in 2010. Serf Wars and Ranch Town followed, and the staff count grew to nearly ninety under Zac Brandenberg, who arrived as CEO in the summer of 2010.

Then Viacom came back as a customer. Meteor built Neopets: Treasure Keepers for the company that had bought its founders' first company, and that was the game that went first. Twenty six people were laid off in October 2011. By the end of November everyone not maintaining a live Facebook game was gone and Brandenberg had left. Treasure Keepers was switched off on Wednesday 14 December 2011.

~ the chronicle ~

~ seventy two thousand dollars ~

On 27 January 2012 three individual investors filed an involuntary Chapter 7 petition against Meteor Games. The claims were $50,000 from Illinois, $12,500 from Connecticut and $10,000 from Illinois again, $72,000 total in promissory notes. The studio that grew out of a $160 million exit was pushed into liquidation by three private lenders over a sum a mid-size studio spends on office chairs.

~ the island ~

Island Paradise was the one that worked. You raised animals and grew crops on a tropical island inside Facebook, and in February 2011 the Wall Street Journal used it as its example of an older social game still making money, which in that market meant a game more than a year old. It outlasted the company: the last remaining staff were let go in March or April 2012, after Island Paradise finally went dark around April, two or three months after the bankruptcy filing.

~ what these studios were selling ~

Facebook game requests reached Turkey the same way they reached everywhere, as notification spam from relatives, and the name everybody here knew was FarmVille. Meteor's titles sat a layer below that in visibility, built on the same mechanic for the same audience, with nothing localized for anywhere near where I was sitting.

The studio is worth a marker for the shape of its ending rather than for its games. Ten million users on one title did not produce enough cash to see off a $72,000 claim, which tells you what a 2010 Facebook hit was actually worth once the virality bonus stopped.

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