Vostu

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

~ the obit ~

Brazil got social gaming the way almost nowhere else did, because Brazil had Orkut. Google's social network never mattered much in the country it was built in and became a national utility in one it was not aimed at, and by 2009 a farm game called Mini Fazenda was sitting on top of it. That game was Vostu's.

The company started in May 2007, put together by three classmates out of Harvard, and ran out of Brazil with a studio in Buenos Aires. It shipped a catalog rather than a single hit, with Mini Fazenda at the front of it and a football game called GolMania close behind. In November 2010 it raised thirty million dollars at a valuation TechCrunch put at three hundred million, and Forbes was calling it one of the ten best startups in the country. Vostu's own line was that one in every four Brazilians played something it made.

None of this reached me. Orkut had a thin Turkish moment early on and then lost the country to Facebook well before the games layer got interesting, so the entire Brazilian social gaming boom happened on a platform that, where I was, had already emptied out.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the copy ~

In June 2011 Zynga sued. The complaint listed most of Zynga's catalog, FarmVille and CityVille among them, and the detail everyone quoted was that the copying went past features into structural glitches, the same bugs showing up in the same places. That is a hard thing to explain by coincidence.

The fight got strange in August when Zynga sued Google over the dispute and a Brazilian judge granted an injunction. On 6 December 2011 the two companies settled. Vostu paid an undisclosed sum and agreed to change four of its titles enough to tell them apart from Zynga's.

~ what the settlement did not fix ~

Layoffs came in February 2012, and heavier ones in March 2013, when about two thirds of the staff went and two of the three founders resigned. Reporting at the time put the blame on internal politics stalling any new feature work, but the structural problem was underneath all of it: Orkut was dying in Brazil and Vostu had built its distribution on Orkut.

The archive dates the collapse cleanly. Through October 2013 vostu.com was a full Portuguese games portal weighing around twenty-four kilobytes. The November capture is four kilobytes with a footer that reads Vostu 2007 to 2012, a copyright line nobody had updated in a year. From February 2014 the address served a Spanish marketing page describing the company in the present tense, fifteen hundred bytes of it, unchanged for two years. In July 2016 it became a redirect.

~ the founders' next company ~

Two of the three went on to start Oscar Health in New York in 2012, a health insurance company that later went public, which is an unusual second act for people whose first company made a farm game for Brazilian Orkut users.

Mini Fazenda itself lasted longer than the company. It moved to mobile and stayed downloadable until around 2021, and there is a Change.org petition asking for it back, signed by people who were children when they planted the first crop. The valuation and the lawsuit are footnotes now. The farm is what people miss.

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