With all this trouble, why not just set up shop in one of the many places where online gambling is legal?

I spent 3 years writing the software in my spare time, and launched it on the $20k I had in savings... personally bankrolling the games. When I began the alpha phase, you could still get an "information processing" license to run a casino in Costa Rica that would allow you to host gambling and which the credit card companies tacitly accepted and would do business with. (Those gambling payments to shady jurisdictions are how Paypal got big, and how Elon Musk made his first nine figures). But by 2010/11, all payment processors had abandoned Costa Rica, and there was nowhere in the world offering a license I could come close to affording.

I looked for investment, put together thick books of plans every few months, built 24 games... No one would get behind it, and I couldn't just shelf it, so this was how I launched it without breaking any laws.

A few months in, one existing online casino network offered me $100k to just hand it over to them and then come work for them, but I considered the offer extremely insulting.

This story is fascinating. What ended up happening with the project, did you at least break even?

I would read a book about this, fwiw.

Thanks. I ended up shutting it down around 2013, for a few reasons. One was that large casino software had moved into Bitcoin space and I couldn't compete against companies that were licensed in a way that allowed them to advertise. I wasn't making enough money from it to be worth waking up all hours to handle bug reports and manage the community, while also worrying about my bank account and keeping an eye on Bitcoin fluctuations. And another reason was that the platform / "gaming OS" was built around opening resizable/dockable windows for multiple games inside a single browser tab, meant to run full screen, and written completely in Flash AS3. By 2013 it was apparent that the front end platform was going to have to be completely rewritten for mobile, either native or JS. The site actually had run on iphone and droid before the flash plugin was removed, although it wasn't optimized for touch. But canvas drawing tools to do the kinds of things it did were in their infancy; things like a variable speed embedded video with a 3d ball physics simulation overlayed for the roulette table would probably be hard to accomplish even now. The headaches associated with running tech support, mostly alone on a daily basis, while also holding down a regular job and caring for a sick partner, made the idea of porting half a million lines of code daunting to say the least. And at the end of the day, without an injection of capital to license and white label the software, it wasn't really worth it.

So I went down a rabbit hole of trying to license the software for in-room gaming on cruise ships and Vegas hotel casinos. But Bally and Caesars pretty much dominated that space... if you even want to get a new game certified by the Nevada Gcb you have to put $100k down, non-refundable, for them to review the software (per game) and then they might start a review in a year or two. Bally gets to cut the line. I also had trouble trying to patent my original games. And of course, the world was coming closer to a consensus that Bitcoin would have to be regulated. So one day, I refunded all my players their balances and turned off the lights.