Splits.io

» see splits.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Splits.io was built for people who play the same game five hundred times on purpose. I have never been one of them. I have finished games and I have replayed a few, but the discipline of running one route until the difference between attempts is measured in tenths of a second belongs to a specific temperament that I recognize without sharing.

The thing itself is easy to explain even from outside. A speedrun is cut into segments, and a timer like LiveSplit records how long each segment took. Splits.io was where those recordings went to live. It kept your entire history of attempts, compared them against each other and against other people's, and told you which part of the run you were actually losing rather than which part felt worst.

Ben Carlsson started it in 2013 as a college project. It grew into infrastructure without ever being treated as infrastructure by anyone with money: Speedrun.com stored its splits there, LiveSplit shipped an integration to it, and a good part of a competitive hobby quietly assumed it would keep existing. It was one person's side project holding up a category.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

Carlsson took it full time in 2019 and picked up two collaborators along the way. For a stretch it genuinely paid for itself, which for a hobby site serving a niche of a niche is a real achievement and not a small one.

That did not hold. The team went back to normal jobs in 2020 and the site returned to what it had been for most of its life, a thing that lost money every month and got maintained anyway because too many people were now standing on it.

~ the reprieve ~

On 9 October 2024 Carlsson announced the shutdown. Five days later, on 14 October, Games Done Quick agreed to fund the site in exchange for links and event banners, and the announcement was called off. GDQ is the marathon charity event that turned speedrunning from a private obsession into something with a broadcast audience, so the arrangement made sense on every axis.

It lasted about three months. On 22 January 2025 GDQ told the team it would no longer be providing support, citing its own finances. The shutdown resumed with a new date of 31 March 2025. Getting saved and then unsaved inside a single quarter is worse than not being saved at all, because the second announcement lands on people who had already stopped worrying.

~ what replaced it ~

The closure was handled about as well as a closure can be. The site was already open source and stayed that way, Carlsson said he would help anyone running a community clone, and an export-only page went up in place of the service so runners could pull their history down by username or permalink. Nobody was locked out of their own data.

What did not survive is the shared layer. Individual runners kept their files, but the comparisons only meant anything because everyone's attempts sat in one place, and that part cannot be exported. LiveSplit removed the integration afterward, which is the small administrative act that formally ends a piece of infrastructure: not the servers going off, but the other software forgetting the address.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »