Shubham Sawarkar
Sean Fee, the CCO and Co-Founder of Player.me, stated on Medium.com that the social gaming community platform “Player.me” to shut down on April 11th, 2022. I received an email from the Player.me team today informing me that the platform will be shutting down, so I went to their website to see what was going on, and I found this (screenshot below) where the Player.me website shows a shutting down message to visitors, saying: “Unfortunately Player.me will be shutting down on the 11th April 2022 but we recommend you check out Gamecaster if you’re looking for streaming and overlays, or Guilded if you’re looking for gaming community tools.” You can also find the screenshot for this message which was captured this morning, see:
On the company’s verified Twitter account, the company also tweeted a shut-down message, which you can see below:
In the Medium.com blog post, Sean said:
It’s been a while since I last posted and unfortunately I come bearing bad news. We’ve taken the incredibly difficult decision to shut down Player.me after many years of work building the platform.
We’ve achieved so much since we started, including onboarding over 1.5 million new members to our community, building awesome tools to help those community members connect and create content around their gameplay, and working and partnering with some incredible people and companies.
Despite everything, we’ve ultimately been unable to find a way to make the platform self-sustainable and our main business, XSplit, has started to grow in new markets outside of gaming with our streaming, recording, presentation, and camera apps being used to help millions of remote workers and businesses around the world.
So, what’s next?
On the 11th April 2022, Player.me will officially shut down. Unfortunately, all data will be removed and there won’t be a way to port your data anywhere else but luckily there are a number of apps that can help you to create awesome gaming content for your communities on streaming or video platforms and continue connecting with some of the people you may have met on Player.me.
For all your content creation needs, we strongly recommend you visit our brothers and sisters over at Gamecaster. They not only have amazing overlays but the whole streaming and recording app is really the best tool out there for creating videos or live streams around your gameplay.
For your social and community needs, there are all the obvious tools out there like Discord and Twitter, but there’s also the new(-ish) kid on the block Guilded, which is very cool.
All in all, we’re proud of what we’ve achieved but we’re nevertheless sorry we could never really deliver on the full vision we had for Player.me. We appreciate you all for joining us on this journey and hope there was some fun along the way! 🙁
Thanks,
Sean, Mak and the rest of the Player.me Team
The company wrote an important update to the Player.me communities network, see:
Important Update!
As you know, a couple of years ago we released the Player.me desktop app to help players around the world create content around the games they love playing. It was a project we spent years working on and ultimately the vision of combining a community platform with great live streaming and recording tools integrated was something that was just that little bit out of our reach. We never felt that we managed to get the mix right that would allow players to keep using the platform in the way they wanted while giving them the additional tools they may need to become a creator.
So, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down our desktop application and no longer support it. I know this will disappoint a lot of you who use our app every day, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel …and it’s called Gamecaster!
A few years ago some of the Player team and some from the XSplit team banded together to focus on building the ultimate, dedicated streaming and recording app for gamers with Gamecaster. For the last 2 years they’ve been working hard and have built a truly awesome content creator application with tons of additional features that will help you grow your audience. The fact that they’ve built something for creators that’s so much better than Player was another factor in our decision to stop supporting our desktop app. You deserve to be using the best tools out there and we honestly believe that is Gamecaster. They’ve also just launched their first Season Pass with tons of amazing prizes for hitting some of your streaming goals so we thought it was the perfect time to recommend you move your content creation to Gamecaster. And, the good news is their application is 100% FREE too and always will be.
As for Player, we’re weighing up our options for the future. Step 1 for us is to move back towards our roots of being a platform for players to create their gaming profile and discover and connect with new players, games and communities. With that in mind we do have a couple of sneaky updates coming down the tracks so stay tuned to get some more sneak peeks at those.
In terms of timeline, we’ll be removing the desktop application from being able to be downloaded on the 13th February 2021 and at that time we will also no longer be supporting it technically or through our customer support team.
Tl;dr: The Player.me desktop will no longer be supported after 13 Feb 2021 and we recommend you switch to Gamecaster to have a very similar but much better experience.
Thanks for giving our app a try and hopefully we’ll still see you here on the feed!
Player
