One thing no one tells you about startups (or told me, anyway) is that it can be much easier to start one than to shut one down. A truly failed idea that never got off the ground, sure, shut it down, no one is going to bat an eye. Huge success? Hopefully you're not going to have to shut it down, enjoy the ride. But then there's the rest of the field, that to some extent worked out, is in use, people like it, but not the runaway success you were hoping for. Probably not bleeding you dry, as then it would end fairly naturally, but if it makes a little bit of money and can sort of limp on, what do you do?

For Megacool, we have reached the end. The idea generally works, sharing is more engaging when you include personal gameplay, game developers are willing to pay for tooling to help with this, and the shares convert to installs at a way higher rate than usually seen in the industry. But it was never the big hit we were hoping it could be. In October of 2015, we made the first commits towards what ended up being Megacool, and May 1st, 2025, we'll shut it down, a couple months shy of a decade later.

After the team was adopted by Medal, we've had the opportunity to work on a product that has shown much bigger potential and has achieved meaningful growth and revenue, and have let Megacool fall by the wayside. Working on mobile SDKs requires a minimum level of effort to keep up with the landscape as it evolves (not only iOS and Android, but also supported tooling like Unity), which we haven’t had the capacity to keep up with. While the product still works, has (marginally) kept itself afloat, and has seen new customers ship successful integrations on their own, it is simply not as good as it was when we stopped work on it. To prevent it from falling further into decay and becoming a potential liability from lack of security updates, we're pulling the plug before the party ends by any other means.

But what a decade it has been. We're eternally grateful to everyone who took a chance on us, from game developers to funders, advisors, friends and other backers, who extended us so much trust and grace as we tried to figure out what we were actually building, and helped both us and the company become better versions of ourselves. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you!

Onto the practicalities. The SDK was built to be offline capable from the start, so when the backend services stop responding on May 1st, existing integrations will keep working, although in a reduced capacity. Recording and previewing the recording will work as usual. Sharing will partially work. The recorded media will no longer be uploaded to our servers, which means that only the share methods that rely on link previews for the media to be included will stop including the media. The share itself will still include the custom message and share link, and we're going to keep just the link redirect alive for a while longer to avoid breaking existing links in the wild. The API used by the SDK, the dashboard, docs, landing page, and all web properties except the blog will disappear. Deferred deep links will stop working, which powers a lot of referrals. The mgcl.co domain will continue redirecting to the app for at least another six months. If we're still seeing regular traffic by then, maybe for a bit longer. But the page will only have a button to open the game, there will be no media preview anymore.

We will open source the SDK some time before the shutdown, to enable customers that want to keep some or all of the functionality to maintain it themselves, or customize it to fit their needs.

Thank you for embarking on this journey with us. Even as it now comes to an end we’re incredibly grateful for the experience, and hope we’ll see you again in the future.

Onwards,

The former Megacool team