own3D.tv

» see own3d.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

own3d.tv was where you went to watch other people play, live, before that was just a thing everyone did. my counter-strike years were the internet cafe ones, 2002 to 2005, sitting in a room in Turkey with the game in front of me and not the faintest idea anyone would ever want to watch a stranger do it. by the time watching a stream became normal, i had aged out of those rooms. own3d belonged to the crowd a step younger than me.

it started in Austria in August '09, co-founded by Oleg Kogut, and it grew up alongside the esports boom. it went hard after the starcraft and counter-strike scenes and paid its bigger streamers well, and for a stretch it genuinely looked like it might be the home for competitive gaming on video. it was not a sideshow. for two or three years it was one of the two names that mattered.

the other name was Justin.tv, which became Twitch. that is the whole story really. two platforms chased the same audience, and video is brutally expensive to serve, and only one of them could keep bleeding money long enough to win.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

where i was, own3d was a name you saw in the corner of a tournament stream more than a place you had an account. its real life was the English-speaking esports world, the forums and the ladders and the people who followed pro players. it mattered to them a great deal, which is why the ending was not quiet for that crowd even if the wider internet never noticed.

~ the postmortem ~

they confirmed the shutdown for 31 January '13. the reason was plain and unglamorous: they had tried to reach profitability in a business too capital-heavy to sustain, and the competition had only gotten stronger. there were payment problems with streamers on the way down too. the cruel part was the exit. every video on the service was deleted within about a day, so there was not even an archive left to mourn. Twitch simply absorbed the audience and never looked back.

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