Spil Games

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

~ the goodbye ~

Spil Games was founded in Hilversum in 2001 by Peter Driessen and Bennie Eeftink, and the whole strategy was visible in the domain names. Spelletjes.nl, from the Dutch word for games, launched in 2004. Agame.com and GirlsGoGames.com came afterward, along with portals for the US and the UK in 2007. By 2012 the company ran more than fifty websites in twenty languages and averaged 190 million users a month, which put it among the biggest gaming audiences in the world while remaining a company almost none of those users could have named.

The player it built for was eleven years old with an hour on a school computer. GirlsGoGames was pointed at girls between roughly eight and fourteen, which is about as narrow as targeting gets, and it worked largely because nobody else was bothering with them. I was twenty-eight in 2012 and working as an engineer, seventeen years outside that demographic. When I actually was eleven there was no web to put a game on. My own version of the free-game-in-a-browser habit happened in an internet cafe in Ankara around 2003, on Counter-Strike, paid for by the hour.

Then the layer all of it ran on stopped existing. Every game on every one of those portals was a Flash file, and as browsers switched the plugin off the network's entire inventory became unplayable in the place where people had been playing it. Spil Games spent 2014 onward trying to become a mobile publisher instead, cut ninety of its 240 full-time jobs in May of that year and closed the Dutch development studio in September. Azerion bought the mobile division in June 2019 and the remainder of the company in February 2020, and spilgames.com has pointed at azerion.com ever since.

~ the chronicle ~

~ fifty sites and one back end ~

The portals looked like separate businesses and were not. A single platform served all of them, so a game uploaded once appeared across the network in whichever language and under whichever brand fitted the visitor. A title could be tested against a Dutch audience before being pushed to Brazil. The domains were the marketing budget. Type the word for games in your own language into a browser in 2009 and there was a fair chance you landed on something Spil Games owned.

That is also what made it invisible. Nobody said they were going to Spil Games, because nothing was called Spil Games. They said they were going to Agame, or to whatever the local site happened to be, and the company behind it was a Dutch back end collecting advertising on 190 million sessions a month. It is a fine business right up to the point where the layer underneath you is a browser plugin owned by Adobe.

~ when the plugin went ~

Steve Jobs published his open letter on Flash in April 2010 and the iPad shipped without it. That did not hurt Spil Games immediately, since its audience was on school desktops and home PCs rather than tablets, but it set the direction. Adobe stopped developing the mobile Flash player in 2011. Chrome began blocking Flash content by default across 2015 and 2016, and Adobe announced the end of the plugin in July 2017 with a shutdown date of December 2020.

For a portal network this was not one failure but a slow subtraction of the only thing it sold. HTML5 could run games in a browser and part of the Flash catalog could be ported, but porting thousands of titles that belonged to hundreds of small developers was a different job from hosting them. Kongregate had the same problem, and so did every site that had been built on the plugin.

The mobile pivot produced real numbers. Spil Games reported 50 million installs in 2015 and 300 million cumulative by March 2018, with 95 percent of that described as organic. What it could not produce was a business the size of the one it replaced. A publisher shipping individual apps into two stores it does not own has to win every download on its own, which the portal network had never needed to do.

~ what azerion kept ~

Azerion is a Dutch roll-up assembled out of casual gaming and advertising. It bought Spil Games in two pieces: the mobile division plus a five percent stake in the portals in June 2019, and the remainder in February 2020. The sites did not go dark. Agame and GirlsGoGames still resolve under the new owner. What got retired was the name on the office in Hilversum.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »