Founder revives $15,000 browser arcade four years after shutting it
One game, no cofounders, and an EC2 bill that outlived the AWS credits. The arcade is back as a weekend project under a new name.
In 2021 a solo founder put around $15,000 into a project called Anbu. He says the original plan was a decentralised cloud gaming platform.
He scaled it down to what one person could pay for.
What he could afford was a browser arcade: a place to play games with friends in a tab.
The money went on specific things. He designed the platform himself in Figma and hand-drew the original art and logos.
He commissioned the rest: development, pixel art, music, sound effects and some 3D models, on his own account of the spending.
That budget bought one game, "Egg on the Run", plus game lobbies, friend invitations, chat and a publishing platform for other developers.
The growth plan had three steps. The first game would pull players in, those players would bring friends, and outside developers would eventually publish their own games on the platform.
It stopped at step one. The founder says the first game was not compelling enough to attract much interest.
Hosting finished it off. He says EC2 costs were heavy, and AWS credits covered them until the credits ran out.
With no players arriving and the bill now his, he could not justify the expense and shut the platform down. He says he did not expect to see it again.
Four years later he still had the original assets. While working on another startup, Sky, he picked the arcade back up as a weekend side project to see how far he could get rebuilding it with Astra.
It is now live as EggVerse.
The useful part for anyone reading is the ledger, not the comeback. A five-figure spend produced one game and a working social layer, and the thing that killed it was a recurring cost that only became visible when someone else stopped paying it.
Free infrastructure credits are a loan against a future that has to arrive on schedule. Anbu's players did not.
The assets, by contrast, kept their value. Art, music and design survived the shutdown intact and were still usable four years later, which is why the second attempt starts from something rather than nothing.
What the revival costs him this time has not been disclosed.
More: EggVerse