HouseParty
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Epic Games to shut down Houseparty in October, including the video chat ‘Fortnite Mode’ feature
Houseparty, the social video chat app acquired by Fortnite maker Epic Games for a reported $35 million back in 2019, is shutting down. The company says Houseparty will be discontinued in October when the app will stop functioning for its existing users; it will be pulled from the app stores today, however. Related to this move, Epic Games’ “Fortnite Mode” feature, which leveraged Houseparty to bring video chat to Fortnite gamers, will also be discontinued.
Founded in 2015, Houseparty offered a way for users to participate in group video chats with friends and even play games, like Uno, trivia, Heads Up and others. Last year, Epic Games integrated Houseparty with Fortnite, initially to allow gamers to see live feeds from friends while gaming, then later adding support to livestream gameplay directly into Houseparty. At the time, these integrations appeared to be the end goal that explained why Epic Games had bought the social startup in the first place.
Now, just over two years after the acquisition was announced, and less than half a year since support for livestreaming was added to the app, Houseparty is shutting down.
The company didn’t offer any solid insight into what, at first glance, feels like an admission of failure to capitalize on its acquisition. But the reality is that Epic Games may have something larger in store beyond just video chat. That said, all Epic Games would say today is that the Houseparty team could no longer give the app the attention it required — a statement that indicates an executive decision to shift the team’s focus to other matters.
While none of the Houseparty team members are being let go as a result of this move, we’re told, they will be joining other teams where they will work on new ways to allow for “social interactions” across the Epic Games family of products. The company’s announcement hinted that those social features would be designed and built at the “metaverse scale.”
The “metaverse” is an increasingly used buzzword that references a shared virtual environment, like those provided by large-scale online gaming platforms such as Fortnite, Roblox and others. Facebook, too, claims the metaverse is the next big gambit for social networking, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg having described it as an “embodied internet that you’re inside of rather than just looking at.”
To some extent, Fortnite has begun to embrace the metaverse by offering non-gaming experiences like online concerts you attend as your avatar, and other live events. Ahead of its shutdown, Houseparty also toyed with live events that users would co-watch and participate in alongside their friends.
An Epic Games spokesperson tells TechCrunch the Houseparty team has worked on (and continues to work on) a number of other projects that focus on social. But some of the “multiple, larger projects” Epic Games has in the works remain undisclosed, we’re told.
In terms of social products, Houseparty’s technology now underpins all of Fortnite voice chat and the features they built are widely available for free to developers through Epic Games Services. They also worked on building out new social experiences, which have ranged from the social RSVP functions for Fortnite’s global events, like the recent Ariana Grande concert, to the upcoming “Operation: Sky Fire” event for collaborating quests and other game mechanics. More social functionality and new experiences are also being built into Fortnite’s user-generated content platform, Create Mode.
While it may seem odd to close an app that only last year experienced a boost in usage due to the pandemic, it appears the COVID bump didn’t have staying power.
At the height of lockdowns, Houseparty had reported it had gained 50 million new sign-ups in a month’s time as users looked to video apps to connect with family and friends while the world was shut down. But as the pandemic wore on, other video chat experiences gained more ground. Zoom, which had established itself as an essential tool for remote work, became a tool for hanging out with friends after-hours, as well. Facebook also started to eat Houseparty’s lunch with its debut of drop-in video chat “Rooms” last year, which offered a similar group video experience. And bored users shifted to audio-based social networking on apps like Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces.
Image Credits: Apptopia
According to data from Apptopia, Houseparty has been continually declining since the pandemic bump. To date, its app has seen a total of 111 million downloads across iOS and Android, with the majority (63 million) on iOS. The U.S. was Houseparty’s largest market, accounting for 43.4% of downloads, followed by the U.K. (9.8%), then Germany (5.6%).
Epic Games, meanwhile, said the app served “tens of millions” of users worldwide. It insists the closure wasn’t decided lightly, nor was the decision to shutter “Fortnite Mode” made due to lack of adoption.
Houseparty will alert users to the shutdown via in-app notifications ahead of its final closure in October. At that point, Fortnite Mode will also no longer be available.
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Fortnite users can now livestream gameplay to Houseparty’s social video app
Houseparty, the social video app acquired by Fortnite maker Epic Games in 2019, has just announced a major new step in terms of integrating these two properties: the company says it will now allow gamers to livestream their Fortnite gameplay directly into Houseparty. The feature works to allow users to share their gameplay with up to nine other friends in a Houseparty room.
The addition follows Houseparty’s launch of a “Fortnite Mode” last November, which added a video chat feature to Fortnite where players could see live feeds from their friends while gaming, powered by Houseparty. Today’s launch is something of a reverse of that, as it lets players stream the game to friends, which is viewable inside Houseparty itself. This allows the users’ friends — including those who may not be Fortnite gamers themselves — to watch and and interact with the player.
To use the new feature, the Fortnite player will need to have enabled Fortnite Mode Streaming and be connected to Houseparty. When they begin to stream their gameplay, their friends on Houseparty will be notified that their game feeds are now available to watch.
The Fortnite player can then see who is watching their stream via a graphic overlaid on their screen which shows their “watcher count.” This is represented by a little eye icon in the middle-left of the screen for the gamer, while Houseparty users will see the eye icon in the top-left of their video screen.
During the livestream, the player and their friends can watch and chat, as usual.
If the Fortnite player doesn’t want to livestream their gameplay, they can change this at any time from a setting inside Fortnite without losing their ability to use the video chat feature. Parents and guardians can also turn on and off Fortnite Mode and other privacy features inside Fortnite’s settings. The company notes that personal info will be blocked from streams, including payments information. However, The Lobby, your menus and your gameplay can all be streamed when Fortnite Mode is enabled.
Houseparty first gained traction as a way for friends to virtually “hang out” online through video chat, but ultimately sold to Epic Games shortly after the gaming giant raised a massive $1.25 billion round. So far, Houseparty hasn’t given up on its other social features, even as it has become more closely integrated with Fortnite. The launch of the new feature creates potential for Houseparty to capture some of the more casual livestreaming that today takes place on other platforms, like Twitch, Facebook or YouTube, where users aren’t necessarily streaming for fans, but rather for friends.
The company says the new feature won’t offer a record function for later exporting these livestreams for publishing elsewhere, but notes that Fortnite already allows the ability to save replays.
At launch, Fortnite gameplay integration with Houseparty is available across PC and PlayStation only (PS4 and PS5). Epic Games didn’t say if or when other platforms would be supported. Houseparty users on iOS, Android and Chrome will be able to watch the livestreams.
The previously launched video chat feature in Fortnite was also supported on PCs and PlayStations.
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Houseparty adds ‘Fortnite Mode,’ bringing video chat to the popular game
Epic acquired Houseparty way back in June of last year, following an absolutely massive $1.25 billion raise. It was clear why the Fortnite publisher would be interested in the social video app. After all, Fortnite is one of the most social games around.
Now, after several months of global quarantining, the deal is finally bearing some fruit. Today Epic announced that the title is getting video chat via Houseparty integration. Starting today, the feature is available on a handful of platforms: PC and PlayStation 4 and 5.
Image Credits: Epic
Users will need to install Houseparty on an Android or iOS device and connect the app with their Epic Games account. From there, the video chat will be integrated into the game. Images are cropped tight on the player’s face and a virtual background is added, à la Zoom. Given the all-ages nature of the game, there are some additional safety features on board, including the ability for parents to toggle off the feature in Fortnite’s settings.
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Under quarantine, media is actually social
The flood of status symbol content into Instagram Stories has run dry. No one is going out and doing anything cool right now, and if they are, they should be shamed for it. Beyond sharing video chat happy hour screenshots and quarantine dinner concoctions, our piece-by-piece biographies have ground to a halt. Oddly, what remains feels more social than social networks have in a long time.
With no source material, we’re doing it live. Coronavirus has absolved our desire to share the recent past. The drab days stuck inside blur into each other. The near future is so uncertain that there’s little impetus to make plans. Why schedule an event or get excited for a trip just to get your heartbroken if shelter-in-place orders are extended? We’re left firmly fixed in the present.
A house-arrest Houseparty, via StoicLeys
What is social media when there’s nothing to brag about? Many of us are discovering it’s a lot more fun. We had turned social media into a sport but spent the whole time staring at the scoreboard rather than embracing the joy of play.
But thankfully, there are no Like counts on Zoom .
Nothing permanent remains. That’s freed us from the external validation that too often rules our decision making. It’s stopped being about how this looks and started being about how this feels. Does it put me at peace, make me laugh, or abate the loneliness? Then do it. There’s no more FOMO because there’s nothing to miss by staying home to read, take a bath, or play board games. You do you.
Being social animals, what feels most natural is to connect. Not asynchronously through feeds of what we just did. But by coexisting concurrently. Professional enterprise technology for agenda-driven video calls has been subverted for meandering, motive-less togetherness. We’re doing what many of us spent our childhoods doing in basements and parking lots: just hanging out.
It’s time to Houseparty
For evidence, just look at group video chat app Houseparty, where teens aimlessly chill with everyone’s face on screen at once. In Italy, which has tragically been on lock down since COVID-19’s rapid spread in the country, Houseparty wasn’t even in the top 1500 apps a month ago. Today it’s the #1 social app, and the #2 app overall second only to Zoom which is topping the charts in tons of countries.
Houseparty topped all the charts on Monday, when Sensor Tower tells TechCrunch the app’s download rate was 323X higher than its average in February. As of yesterday it was #1 in Portugal (up 371X) and Spain (up 592X), as well as Peru, Argentina, Chile, Austria, Belgium, and the U.K. I despite being absent from the chart a week earlier. Apptopia tells me Houseparty saw 25 downloads in Spain on March 1st and 40,000 yesterday.
Houseparty rockets to #1 in many countries
A year ago Houseparty was nearly dead, languishing at #245 on the US charts before being acquired by Fortnite-maker Epic in June. Our sudden need for unmediated connection has brought Houseparty roaring back to life, even if Epic has neglected to update it since July.
“Houseparty was designed to connect people in the most human way possible when they are physically apart” the startup’s co-founder Ben Rubin tells me. “This is a time of isolation and uncertainty for us all. I’m grateful that we created a product that gives a sense of human connection to millions people during this critical moment.”
Around the world, apps for direct connection are spiking. Google Hangouts rules in Sweden. Discord for chat while gaming is #1 in France. Slack clone Microsoft Teams is king in the Netherlands. After binging through Netflix, all that’s left to entertain us is each other.
Undivided By Geography
If we’re all stuck at home, it doesn’t matter where that home is. We’ve been released from the confines of which friends are within a 20 minute drive or hour-long train. Just like students are saying they all go to Zoom University since every school’s classes moved online, we all now live in Zoom Town. All commutes have been reduced to how long it takes to generate an invite URL.
Nestled in San Francisco, even pals across the Bay in Berkeley felt far away before. But this week I had hour-long video calls with my favorite people who typically feel out of reach in Chicago and New York. I spent time with babies I hadn’t met in person. And I kept in closer touch with my parents on the other coast, which is more vital and urgent than ever before.
Playing board game Codenames over Zoom with friends in New York and North Carolina
Typically, our time is occupied by acquaintances of circumstance. The co-workers who share our office. The friends who happen to live in the neighborhood. But now we’re each building a virtual family completely of our choosing. The calculus has shifted from who is convenient or who invites us to the most exciting place, to who makes us feel most human.
Even celebrities are getting into it. Rather than pristine portraits and flashy music videos, they’re appearing raw, with crappy lighting, on Facebook and Instagram Live. John Legend played piano for 100,000 people while his wife Chrissy Teigen sat on screen in a towel looking salty like she’s heard “All Of Me” far too many times. That’s more authentic than anything you’ll get on TV.
And without the traditional norms of who we are and aren’t supposed to call, there’s an opportunity to contact those we cared about in a different moment of our lives. The old college roommate, the high school buddy, the mentor who gave you you’re shot. If we have the emotional capacity in these trying times, there’s good to be done. Who do you know who’s single, lives alone, or resides in a city without a dense support network?
Reforging those connections not only surfaces prized memories we may have forgotten, but could help keep someone sane. For those who relied on work and play for social interaction, shelter-in-place is essentially solitary confinement. There’s a looming mental health crisis if we don’t check in on the isolated.
The crisis language of memes
It can be hard to muster the energy to seize these connections, though. We’re all drenched in angst about the health impacts of the virus and financial impacts of the response. I certainly spent a few mornings sleeping in just to make the days feel shorter. When all small talk leads to rehashing our fears, sometimes you don’t have anything to say.
Luckily we don’t have to say anything to communicate. We can share memes instead.
My father-in-law sent me this. That’s when you know memes have become the universal language
The internet’s response to COVID-19 has been an international outpour of gallow’s humor. From group chats to Instagram joke accounts to Reddit threads to Facebook groups like quarter-million member “Zoom Memes For Quaranteens”, we’re joining up to weather the crisis.
A nervous laugh is better than no laugh at all. Memes allow us to convert our creeping dread and stir craziness into something borderline productive. We can assume an anonymous voice, resharing what some unspecified other made without the vulnerability of self-attribution. We can dive into the creation of memes ourselves, killing time under house arrest in hopes of generating smiles for our generation. And with the feeds and Stories emptied, consuming memes offers a new medium of solidarity. We’re all in this hellscape together so we may as well make fun of it.
The web’s mental immune system has kicked into gear amidst the outbreak. Rather than wallowing in captivity, we’ve developed digital antibodies that are evolving to fight the solitude. We’re spicing up video chats with board games like Codenames. One-off livestreams have turned into wholly online music festivals to bring the sounds of New Orleans or Berlin to the world. Trolls and pranksters are finding ways to get their lulz too, Zoombombing webinars. And after a half-decade of techlash, our industry’s leaders are launching peer-to-peer social safety nets and ways to help small businesses survive until we can be patrons in person again.
Rather than scrounging for experiences to share, we’re inventing them from scratch with the only thing we’re left with us in quarantine: ourselves. When the infection waves pass, I hope this swell of creativity and in-the-moment togetherness stays strong. The best part of the internet isn’t showing off, it’s showing up.
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Fortnite maker Epic acquires social video app Houseparty
What does a gaming company do after raising $1.25 billion? Acquisitions seem like a pretty good place to start. Epic Games — of Unreal Engine and the ridiculously successful Fortnite phenomenon — has just picked up Houseparty.
The social video app announced the news via blog post this morning. The deal seems like a natural fit for Epic. Social has been an integral piece of Fortnite’s success as a multiplayer battle royale title.
Founded in 2015, Houseparty is a social network that delivers video chat across a number of different platforms, including iOS, Android and macOS. Like Fortnite, the offering tends to skew younger. Specifically, the app caters toward teen users, providing a more private and safer space than other, broader platforms.
“Houseparty brings people together, creating positive social interactions in real time,” Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said in a post announcing the news. “By teaming up, we can build even more fun, shared experiences than what could be achieved alone.”
For Houseparty, the acquisition appears to mean the app will continue to operate relatively unchanged for the time being. In an FAQ, the company noted that the app is largely staying the same as of today. Things like friendships and streaks will remain untouched by the company, and Epic and Houseparty accounts will stay separate. How such integration looks going forward remains to be seen, of course.
“Joining Epic is a great step forward in achieving our mission of bringing empathy to online communication,” Houseparty co-founder and CEO Sima Sistani said of the news. “We have a common vision to make human interaction easier and more enjoyable, and always with respect for user privacy.”
With some massive investments on its side, it seems more acquisitions are likely in the cards for the gaming company. In January it purchased Serbia-based computer design startup 3Lateral.
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Bunch scores $3.8M to turn mobile games into video chat LAN parties
The best parts of gaming are the jokes and trash talk with friends. Whether it was four-player Goldeneye or linking up PCs for Quake battles in the basement, the social element keeps video games exciting. Yet on mobile we’ve lost a lot of that, playing silently by ourselves even if we’re in a squad with friends somewhere else. Bunch wants to bring the laughter back to mobile gaming by letting you sync up with friends and video chat while you play. It already works with hits like Fortnite and Roblox, and developers of titles like Spaceteam are integrating Bunch’s SDK to inspire longer game sessions.
Bunch is like Discord for mobile, and the chance to challenge that gaming social network unicorn has attracted a $3.8 million seed round led by London Venture Partners and joined by Founders Fund, Betaworks, Shrug Capital, North Zone, Streamlined Ventures, 500 Startups and more. With Bunch already cracking the top 100 social iOS app chart, it’s planning a launch on Android. The cash will go to adding features like meeting new people to game with or sharing replays, plus ramping up user acquisition and developer partnerships.
“I and my co-founders grew up with LAN parties, playing games like Starcraft and Counter Strike — where a lot of the fun is the live banter you have with friends,” Bunch co-founder and CEO Selcuk Atli tells me. “We wanted to bring this kind of experience to mobile; where players could play with friends anytime, anywhere.”
Bunch team
Atli was a venture partner at 500 Startups after co-founding and selling two adtech companies: Manifest Commerce to Rakuten, and Boostable to Metric Collective. But before he got into startups, he co-founded a gaming magazine called Aftercala in Turkey at age 12, editing writers twice his age because “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” he tells me. Atli teamed up with Google senior mobile developer Jason Liang and a senior developer from startups like MUSE and Mox named Jordan Howlett to create Bunch.
“Over a year ago, we built our first prototype. The moment we tried it ourselves, we saw it was nothing like what we’ve experienced on our phones before,” Atli tells me. The team raised a $500,000 pre-seed round and launched its app in March. “Popular mobile games are becoming live, and live games are coming to mobile devices,” says David Lau-Kee, general partner at London Venture Partners. “With this massive shift happening, players need better experiences to connect with friends and play together.”
When you log on to Bunch’s iOS app you’ll see which friends are online and what they’re playing, plus a selection of games you can fire up. Bunch overlays group voice or video chat on the screen so you can strategize or satirize with up to eight pals. And if developers build in Bunch’s SDK, they can do more advanced things with video chat, like pinning friends’ faces to their in-game characters. It’s a bit like OpenFeint or iOS Game Center mixed with Houseparty.
For now, Bunch isn’t monetizing, as it hopes to reach massive scale first, but Atli thinks they could sell expression tools like emotes, voice and video filters, and more. Growing large will require beating Discord at its own game. The social giant now has over 130 million users across PCs, consoles and mobile. But it’s also a bit too hardcore for some of today’s casual mobile gamers, requiring you to configure your own servers. “I find that execution speed will be most critical for our success or failure,” Atli says. Bunch’s sole focus on making mobile game chat as easy as possible could win it a mainstream audience seduced by Fortnite, HQ Trivia and other phenomena.
Research increasingly shows that online experiences can be isolating, and gaming is a big culprit. Hours spent playing alone can leave you feeling more exhausted than fulfilled. But through video chat, gaming can transcend the digital and become a new way to make memories with friends — no matter where they are.
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Instagram now lets you 4-way group video chat as you browse
Instagram’s latest assault on Snapchat, FaceTime and Houseparty launches today. TechCrunch scooped back in March that Instagram would launch video calling, and the feature was officially announced at F8 in May. Now it’s actually rolling out to everyone on iOS and Android, allowing up to four friends to group video call together through Instagram Direct.
With the feed, Stories, messaging, Live, IGTV and now video calling, Instagram is hoping to become a one-stop-shop for its 1 billion users’ social needs. This massive expansion in functionality over the past two years is paying off, SimilarWeb told TechCrunch in an email, which estimates that the average U.S. user has gone from spending 29 minutes per day on the app in September 2017 to 55 minutes today. More time spent means more potential ad views and revenue for the Facebook subsidiary that a Bloomberg analyst just valued at $100 billion after it was bought for less than $1 billion in 2012.
One cool feature of Instagram video calling is that you can minimize the window and bounce around the rest of Instagram without ending the call. That opens new opportunities for co-browsing with friends as if you were hanging out together. More friends can join an Instagram call in progress, though you can mute them if you don’t want to get more call invites. You’re allowed to call anyone you can direct message by hitting the video button in a chat, and blocked people can’t call you.
Here’s how Instagram’s group video calling stacks up to the alternatives:
- Instagram – 4-way plus simultaneous browsing
- Snapchat – 16-way
- FaceTime – 32-way (coming in iOS 12 this fall)
- Houseparty – 8-way per room with limitless parallel rooms
- Facebook Messenger – 6-way with up to 50 people listening via audio
Instagram is also rolling out two more features promised at F8. The Explore page will now be segmented to show a variety of topic channels that reveal associated content below. Previously, Explore’s 200 million daily users just saw a random mish-mash of popular content related to their interests, with just a single “Videos You Might Like” section separated.
Now users will see a horizontal tray of channels atop Explore, including an algorithmically personalized For You collection, plus ones like Art, Beauty, Sports and Fashion, depending on what content you regularly interact with. Users can swipe between the categories to browse, and then scroll up to view more posts from any they enjoy. A list of sub-hashtags appears when you open a category, like #MoGraph (motion graphics) or #Typeface when you open art. And if you’re sick of seeing a category, you can mute it. Strangely, Instagram has stripped Stories out of Explore entirely, but when asked, the team told us it plans to bring Stories back in the near future.
The enhanced Explore page could make it easier for people to discover new creators. Growing the audience of these content makers is critical to Instagram as it strives to be their favorite app amongst competition. Snapchat lacks a dedicated Explore section or other fan base-growing opportunities, which has alienated some creators, while the new Instagram topic channels is reminiscent of YouTube’s mobile Trending page.
Instagram’s new Explore Channels (left) versus YouTube’s Trending page (right)
Finally, Instagram is rolling out camera effects designed by partners, starting with Ariana Grande, BuzzFeed, Liz Koshy, Baby Ariel and the NBA. If you’re following these accounts, you’ll see their effect in the Stories camera, and you can hit Try It On if you spot a friend using one you like. This opens the door to accounts all offering their own augmented reality and 2D filters without the Stories camera becoming overstuffed with lenses you don’t care about.
Instagram’s new partner-made camera effects
What’s peculiar is that all of these features are designed to boost the amount of time you spend on Instagram just as it’s preparing to launch a Usage Insights dashboard for tracking if you’re becoming addicted to the app. At least the video calling and camera effects promote active usage, but Explore definitely encourages passive consumption that research shows can be unhealthy.
Therein lies the rub of Instagram’s mission and business model with its commitment to user well-being. Despite CEO Kevin Systrom’s stated intention that “any time [spent on his app] should be positive and intentional“ and that he wants Instagram to “be part of the solution,” the company earns more by keeping people glued to the screen rather than present in their lives.
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You rarely livestream, but 1M people livechill on Houseparty
Livestreaming doesn’t have to be a big performance or a one-on-one video call. Just ask the one million people who spend 20 million minutes hanging out each day on group video chat app Houseparty, the latest teen app phenomenon.
Built from the ashes of Meerkat, Houseparty is leading the charge for a new kind of synchronous social networking. It’s the closest thing to being with… Read More
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