It may be a perfect match, given that Slack has been created by a game dev team too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_Technologies#Initial_fun...

It's rather funny how Stewart Butterfield keeps trying to build games, and ending up with social apps.

His first company, Ludicorp, tried to build an MMORPG called Game Neverending, which never launched, and they pivoted to create Flickr, apparently based on the same platform (which is why ".gne" URLs proliferated Flickr originally).

With Tiny Speck, he created Glitch, another MMORPG, which closed a little more than a year after launch. Tiny Speck then pivoted to launch Slack, based on a chat app they had built internally while developing their game.

It makes sense, in a weird way. MMO's are such huge projects that developers are forced to create supporting subsystems to complete it (e.g. Image/asset processing and storage system - Flickr, in-game chat and collaboration system - Slack).

I'm impressed that Stewart Butterfield is able to look at these systems and recognize which ones could be a viable (and successful!) stand-alone product.

I'm not sure why that would be all that relevant though.

If they wanted to implement a chat feature into a game it might be easier to embed this, though I could be wrong? Or if they just want a tweakable and reusable chat service to be used in-house maybe?

With even the same argument of them building a HipChat or Flowdock clone.

> Don't want to troll you guys here, but if you're a video game company why are you spending so much time building a Slack clone?

I think a better perspective is that this is a tool they needed/wanted and built it - it's really no different than a map editor. Also some companies like Google have a X% time to work on a "personal" project during work hours - and this could be the result of that.

Sounds like a lot of burndown on your non-core competency IMO, but thanks for releasing.

Not all companies track sprints by the hour. :) Dev times for AAA video games are in years, not months. After working for both web and game companies, I find the development mindset for each to be remarkably incompatible.

Have you noticed any other development differences between web and game companies? This would make a great blog post.

I've noticed one difference. Game companies locally are known as sweatshops. I've literally talked to their recruiters who laugh as they share stories about how some game dev. had his wife calling to ask if he could come home for a few hours because she hadn't seem him in a week.

They have this crazy idea called "crunch time" which seems to be the same thing as "all the time". Also, because so many people go into CS programs because they want to make games, game companies aren't forced to pay very high salaries.

I can't tell if you're aware of the coincidence, but did you know that Slack was a pivot from game development just like Stewart Butterfield's previous unicorn Flickr?

"Unicorn" is probably the silliest term of the year. But it degrades to meaninglessness if you include Flickr, which sold to Yahoo! in 2005, for $20MM.

Wow, I got reamed out pretty hard for absent-minded use of a trendy term without thinking about it too much.

In my mind Flickr is up there with the Instagrams and the Ubers of the world because it was a fucking amazing experience at the time. I never even considered the valuation, but Flickr was definitely unique in the UX it brought to the table. I think people forget what the landscape looked like then. Or maybe they just can't get past a knee-jerk reaction to hot-button terminology.

Either way, I think it's fascinating that not one but two companies from the founder of Slack were pivots from game companies, and that's exactly what the GP is complaining about in the clone. Anyone care to comment on that?

> In my mind Flickr is up there with the Instagrams and the Ubers of the world because it was a fucking amazing experience at the time. I never even considered the valuation, but Flickr was definitely unique in the UX it brought to the table. I think people forget what the landscape looked like then. Or maybe they just can't get past a knee-jerk reaction to hot-button terminology.

Absolutely. They stagnated for a while, but when Flickr came out all the other popular photo sites would shrink your image down to a tiny low quality version, ads everywhere. Out of desperation I used to host my photos on a PHP-based gallery app I dropped as soon as I got a Flickr account.

Sorry, my comment wasn't meant to be snarky, but I can see how that's not clear.

I was just musing on the fact that (yes, I don't like the term, but also) "unicorn" was originally a label for startups with huge valuations, generally > $1B. It has mutated since then, but the idea that it would apply to Flickr seemed funny.

I wasn't bothered by your comment actually, it was more that I was at -4 for what I believed to be at least a mildly interesting observation at its core.

Not defending the use of the term, but you have to look at acquisitions in the context of the time. Though $20m seems like nothing notable today, in the post bubble fallout it was a significant achievement.

> Though $20m seems like nothing notable today, in the post bubble fallout it was a significant achievement.

2005 is probably a bit beyond the "post bubble fallout" - nevertheless the previous year Yahoo spent $579M on Kelkoo and in 2003 (which is most definitely "post bubble fallout" era) they bought Overture Services for $1.6B[1].

Creating something that fetches $20M is certainly a success, but let's not pretend this is some amazing acquisition story on par with YouTube.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...!

Text editors become mail clients. Game editors need chat clients. I see a pattern. Things want to talk to other things.

Their game was called 'Game neverending', never launched, how apropos.

They probably had to build similar stuff for some of their games perhaps.

Mattermost team here,

You guessed it, Mattermost is the 3rd version of what started as a portal/community site for our players (first version was forum-like, the second was Facebook-like, Mattermost is now HipChat/Slack-like).

A blog post with that story would be interesting!

They probably pivoted. ;)

Very interested? Somewhat interested? Not interested? Which one? Which one? Which one?

Emperor's Groove reference?

What's wrong with that? Many great products started at companies which are not "supposed" to do that as their core business. Pivotal Tracker is one thing that immediately sprang to my mind. Why do you want to strictly limit what a company is working on, and potentially kill great ideas anyways. I believe as long as they're still functioning, their game development business is probably totally fine. The same applies to a person: I don't believe if you work on something as a full-time job you're then not allowed to have your hobbies, side projects(some of which are quite huge in scale) and personal interests. That would be horrible.