Crowdfunding our independence from 3rd party services

For almost four years I built and evolved a platform for leaderboards and user created content loved by thousands of developers. Those developers tied core parts of their games to a business and that business failed.

This story is common, it's happened before many times and it happened again just last week with the Google+ platform and the week before those building Flash games on Unity3d got similar news.

There is no happy ending when you build on someone else's service and rely on even more 3rd parties to fill the gaps in the poorly designed platforms the giants devote limited creativity to, relinquishing your players and your data and critical parts of your experience to the point where games may not even function if the service doesn't exist.

It is 2013 and you can deploy complicated infrastructure on Amazon and roll out massive open source systems and clusters with a single command. Entire industries are built around open standards and open source software except when it comes to the services players expect in modern games.

At Playtomic.org I've revived and further developed technology from my failed startup and released it as a self-hosted, open source package for HTML5, Unity3d, Android, iOS, Flash and C# games. This suite of technologies is backed by a NodeJS server any developer can hack around in with ease.

Currently the toolkit includes very flexible, cross/multi platform achievements, leaderboards, user created content, geolocation and dynamic content updates. It is exclusively self-hosted which means you own the platform, you own your database, you own your data, you own your player's experience and this time next year you're not going to wake up to an email saying you need to replace critical functionality with inequivalent alternatives.

I invite you to help make this bigger than it already is.