Struckd

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

~ the eulogy ~

Struckd was a game creation system that ran on a phone. You dragged objects into a 3D scene and set the rules that governed them, then published the result into a feed where other people played it and rated it. The whole premise was that you would never see a line of code, which put it in a lineage that runs back through a lot of hopeful software, most of which assumed you were sitting at a desk with a mouse.

Flurin Jenal and Silvan Bauser founded it in Zurich in 2016 and launched on Android and iOS that July. It grew the slow way. By April 2021 the company could say that users had built more than a million games and that it had reached roughly six million players, and that it had done so organically, without buying installs. For a Swiss startup in a category dominated by American and Chinese money, that is the part worth noticing.

I was thirty-two when it launched and writing real code for a living, so I was never going to be the user it wanted. Struckd was for the person holding a phone and no compiler, a group that was vastly larger in 2016 than the same group had been in 1996. Six million of them turned up, and all six million were logged out on 1 August 2026.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The pitch was legible immediately: game creation without programming knowledge, on the device people actually carried. Swiss startup coverage picked it up in 2016 under a headline about building games yourself, and it was selected for Swiss Venture Day that September. Daniel Reichert came in to lead the platform as CEO at the start of 2021.

~ the unity years ~

Unity Technologies acquired the company and its technology in August 2021. Flurin Jenal sold the startup he had built five years earlier, and Struckd carried on as a Unity product rather than an independent one. In 2024 Unity extended the app's user-generated content side, and the thing quietly became a distribution surface for Unity's own ambitions in that space.

The Zurich company itself was struck from the cantonal commercial register on 27 June 2024, two years before the service stopped. That date is easy to mistake for the death, and it is not one. It is the paperwork of an acquired company being folded into its buyer while the product keeps running.

~ what you could take with you ~

Unity ran the ending in phases and told people in advance, which is more than most shutdowns manage. The final phase began on 30 April 2026. You could play and create until 31 July. After 1 August 2026 the login stopped working and every service behind it went with it.

The one real mercy was the export: before the cutoff you could pull your projects into the Unity Editor and keep them. That turns a decade of other people's games from a deletion into a migration, for anyone who read the notice in time. Everybody who did not read it lost the lot, which has been the standing arrangement for user-generated content since the first free host switched off.

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