SecretBuilders

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

~ the obituary ~

SecretBuilders was a virtual world for children between six and fourteen, and its hook was that the other residents were people out of books. You took quests with Huckleberry Finn, and Macbeth and Dracula were in there somewhere too. The company had been founded in 2006 by Umair Khan and spent two years building before the site went public in December 2008, which was late into a gold rush that was already crowded.

How crowded is worth stating with a number. By January 2009 more than two hundred kids virtual worlds had launched, almost all of them started after Disney bought Club Penguin in 2007 for a sum that convinced every investor in the category that children's browser games were the next thing. Most of those two hundred were gone inside five years. SecretBuilders lasted twelve.

The reason it lasted is that it was built to be defensible in a way a penguin is not. It sold itself to parents and to school librarians on a literature and art curriculum, collected safety seals and awards, and lined the bottom of its homepage with partner logos from HarperCollins to Oxford. That is a slower business than a hit game, but it survives quarters where a hit game does not.

This was an American product for American nine year olds, and by 2008 that was two demographics away from anywhere I have ever stood. The only part of it I can claim is the technology underneath, which killed it: Flash was the reason a small studio could ship an animated world at all, and then Flash was the reason the world could not be moved anywhere else.

~ the case file ~

~ the land grab ~

In March 2010 SecretBuilders raised $2.3 million from The Entrepreneurs Fund III and Launch Capital, plus a row of angels. Nine months later, on 17 December 2010, it bought the assets of Dizzywood, a rival kids world with 1.5 million registered accounts, and tried to migrate them across. SecretBuilders had more than a million unique players a month at that point, which was its high-water mark.

That deal was the whole category in miniature. The land had already been taken, the only growth left was buying somebody else's users, and the users mostly did not follow.

~ the partners page ~

By the end the footer carried a row of partner logos that ran from HarperCollins and Oxford at one end to Samsung, Microsoft and the Kindle store at the other. Some of those were publishing deals and some were distribution for the mobile games the studio shipped alongside the world. Read as a group they say something specific about the late years: a Flash virtual world could not grow anymore, so the company had been quietly turning into a maker of small story apps for other people's stores.

~ the day it died ~

Adobe ended support for Flash on the last day of 2020 and browsers began actively blocking the plugin in the first weeks of January 2021. For a twelve year old codebase animated entirely in Flash, that was not a deadline you could negotiate with. The team announced the closure on 31 January 2021 and closed the world the same day. There was no wind-down and no months of countdown.

~ the note on the door ~

The farewell page is still the site, more or less. "We started out in 2008 as an online world where young adults played among fictional and historical characters," it says. "At our peak we were a top 5 virtual world with millions of users across a hundred countries, all of you taking quests into great books, dressing up, caring for pets, hosting parties, submitting stories." Then: "It has been the privilege of our lives to welcome you to the SecretBuilders community." Signed, The SecretBuilders Team, January 31, 2021.

The domain has since been recycled and now serves an Indonesian calculator app, which is a stranger ending than being parked. Former players have spent the years since building a fan revival called Super Builders, with the blessing of the original founders. The note promised "see you later" and somebody else went and made it partly true.

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