Mugobi

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

~ how it landed ~

Habbo Otel had a Turkish version when I was already too old for it, and that is roughly the relationship I have to every product in this category. Mugobi was Israel's entry: a browser-based virtual world for children aged six to thirteen, where you built an avatar, played games for coins, decorated a house and talked to other kids. Eyal Shamy said afterward that the format came straight from Club Penguin, and that what he wanted was something with educational value that children would still choose to pay for.

The route to launch was not smooth. Shamy, one of the founders of Compedia, started development in November 2007 inside his own company Pecan Productions. In March 2008 a company called Worlds For You was set up to build and market it, and by the end of that year it had run out of money and stopped operating, with the intellectual property passing to a company called LTN. In January 2009 LTN contracted Pecan Productions to carry on. Dror Havusha, who had co-founded Akademon and eTeacher, was in it with Shamy from the start.

The company's own about page dated the official launch to early June 2009. A Globes piece that July said the site had already been running about three months, which puts the real opening nearer April, and reported roughly 75,000 registered users by the time it was written. The content leaned local on purpose: activities built around Israeli holidays and the country's own geography. The first players were the classmates of Shamy's eldest son, handed access codes, and the thing spread from there after an ad campaign on the Israeli children's site Tipo.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the good years ~

In November 2009 the Walla! portal signed a content and commercial partnership and built a children's channel on Mugobi's world, which is a serious distribution deal for a site that had existed for six months. By 2012 the reported numbers were about 800,000 registered users in Israel with around 320,000 of them unique visitors.

Then it went abroad, which almost no Israeli children's product of that era managed. A Russian-language version launched in 2012 in partnership with Mail.ru, and by December the company was reporting about 100,000 children signed up in roughly two months, from 65 regions of Russia plus other countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States. Brazil came next: a Portuguese version was live at mogobe.com.br by July 2013 and still selling subscriptions that December. An Android build arrived in 2014, letting existing players log in and keep the same character and the items they had accumulated in the browser, and an iOS version followed in March 2016.

~ one petty customer ~

In December 2017 an application was filed to certify a class action against Mugobi Ltd. The claim was that the company had automatically extended fixed-term monthly subscriptions without getting subscribers' consent for the additional period, in breach of Israel's Consumer Protection Law. That is a small and specific allegation about billing mechanics.

In February 2018 Shamy wrote on the official Mugobi blog, under a title that translates as good things come to an end, that the servers would close on 1 May. He said the operators wanted to continue and that one petty customer was stopping them, and he did not name the person. Subscriptions would be discontinued during April, and anyone holding a subscription that ran past the closing date would get a proportional refund.

The servers went off on 1 May 2018, nine years in. That September the two sides filed an agreed request to withdraw the class-action application, on the stated ground that the activity which prompted the proceeding had stopped and the application had exhausted itself. The court approved it. A billing dispute worth a modest sum in a Tel Aviv district court is the only cause of death on the record for a children's world with three national versions.

~ what got buried with it ~

Nine years of accounts, avatars, houses and collected items ended in one evening, and unlike a social network there was no export and nowhere for any of it to go. A fan project called reMogo formed in 2022 to rebuild the world from the outside. It opened to the public in March 2023, ran a beta, and in October of that year the team announced the end of the beta and the end of itself as a team, a game and a community.

mogobe.com is listed for sale on a domain broker's site today. mugobi.co.il does not answer, and neither does the address reMogo used.

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