GameLayers
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
GameLayers was a San Francisco game startup co-founded in 2007 by Justin Hall, with an ambitious plan to turn web surfing into a massively multiplayer online game via a Firefox toolbar. It took $2 million in funding and built PMOG (later renamed The Nethernet), a passive multiplayer game overlaid on the web, plus two social RPG games for Facebook, Dictator Wars and Super Cute Zoo. The company peaked at nine people and 120,000 users before shutting down in late 2009.
02 / GameLayers FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
GameLayers failed because its games never found sustainable audiences. Founder and CEO Justin Hall wrote in his postmortem that the company collapsed after three years: the toolbar-based game and the Facebook titles could not build a lasting player base, the company ran out of runway, and it was wound down at the end of 2009.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
in November 2009 GameLayers pulled Facebook games, paid obligations, laid everyone off, and wound down the venture-backed PMOG/The Nethernet studio after failed monetization.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
In 2007 Justin Hall co-founded GameLayers and raised $2 million to turn web surfing into a multiplayer game.
- 02
In May 2008 PMOG, a passively multiplayer online game played over the web via a Firefox toolbar, opened to the public.
- 03
In 2009 the company renamed PMOG to The Nethernet and released two Facebook games, Dictator Wars and Super Cute Zoo.
- 04
The games failed to find sustainable audiences; GameLayers shut down in late 2009.
- 05
No reliable loss figure with a clear subject, period and basis exists, so no loss amount is recorded.