PlayerScale

Last updated
PlayerScale
Company type Subsidiary
Industry e-commerce, internet advertising, social gaming
Founded2009 [1] [2]
FounderChris Benjaminsen  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Headquarters,
Key people
Jesper Jensen (CEO) [1]
John Vifian (COO) [2]
Chris Benjaminsen (CPO) [2]
Oliver Pedersen (CTO) [2]
ProductsPlayer.IO
Number of employees
14 (January 2013) [3]
Parent Yahoo!
Website gamesnet.yahoo.com

PlayerScale, Inc. is a Belmont-based [3] [4] gaming infrastructure provider. [4] [5] As of 23 May 2013 it operates as a subsidiary of Yahoo!, [2] [4] but it is still functioning as a stand-alone business unit. [6]

Contents

Player.IO

PlayerScale's Player.IO is a platform for online games. [4] It works across consoles, the web, PCs, Macs, and on mobile phones. [3] Player.IO is used on a daily basis by an estimated 150 million people worldwide. [1] [4] It works with various programming languages, including C++, Java, .NET, Objective-C, HTML5, Unity, Flash, iOS and Android. [3] The platform includes payment processing, online chat, analytics, virtual currencies, distributed caching, authentication, social login, leaderboards, localization, among other things. [7]

Everybody Edits

One of the Player.IO showcase projects was the maze-based platform game Everybody Edits. [8] During his lecture at the 2011 Flash Gaming Summit, PlayerScale chief product officer and Player.IO co-founder Benjaminsen revealed that the game, initially published on Flash game portal Newgrounds, had accumulated around 250 thousand registered users in seven months and was making $10,000 monthly. [9]

In a 2011 review for Jay Is Games, John Bardinelli writes: "Experiments in user-created content can go wildly wrong. With Everybody Edits, it happened to go wildly right. [...] The game as a whole doesn't project an air of refined polish, but the core underneath exhibits a lot of creativity and allows players to unleash their imaginations wild on the world in a simple, entertaining sort of way." [10] Phill Cameron of Rock Paper Shotgun : "I keep coming back to Everybody Edits. I think it's because I'm never alone. Just having other people share in your victories, and more importantly, to lessen your defeats, makes for a compelling experience. You're in this together, for better or for worse, and that forces a level of camaraderie. [...] Regardless, you've got one thing in common; you hate whoever created this meticulously designed Rage Machine." [11]

In March 2019, the game suffered a data breach, exposing 871 thousand unique email addresses, alongside usernames and IP addresses. [12] [13] In July 2019, another data breach occurred, leaking 882 unique email addresses, usernames and passwords in plaintext, along with in-game report files. [14] Everybody Edits was eventually shut down on 31 December 2020, [15] the last day Adobe supported its Flash Player. [16]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adobe Inc.</span> American multinational software company

Adobe Inc., formerly Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American computer software company based in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the creation and publication of a wide range of content, including graphics, photography, illustration, animation, multimedia/video, motion pictures, and print. Its flagship products include Adobe Photoshop image editing software; Adobe Illustrator vector-based illustration software; Adobe Acrobat Reader and the Portable Document Format (PDF); and a host of tools primarily for audio-visual content creation, editing and publishing. Adobe offered a bundled solution of its products named Adobe Creative Suite, which evolved into a subscription software as a service (SaaS) offering named Adobe Creative Cloud. The company also expanded into digital marketing software and in 2021 was considered one of the top global leaders in Customer Experience Management (CXM).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adobe Flash</span> Discontinued multimedia platform used to add animation and interactivity to websites

Adobe Flash is a discontinued multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich internet applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players.

<i>Neopets</i> Virtual pet site

Neopets is a free-to-play virtual pet website. First launched in 1999, the website allows users to own virtual pets ("Neopets") and explore a virtual world called "Neopia." Players can earn one of two virtual currencies. One currency, called Neopoints, can be obtained for free through on-site features like games, events, and contests. The other, Neocash (NC), is purchased with real-world money and can be exchanged for wearable items for pets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Browser game</span> Video game played in a web browser

A browser game is a video game that is played via the internet using a web browser. They are mostly free-to-play and can be single-player or multiplayer. Alternative names for the browser game genre reference their software platform used, with common examples being Flash games, and HTML5 games.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yahoo! Mail</span> American email service

Yahoo! Mail is an email service offered by the American company Yahoo, Inc. The service is free for personal use, with an optional monthly fee for additional features. Business email was previously available with the Yahoo! Small Business brand, before it transitioned to Verizon Small Business Essentials in early 2022. Launched on October 8, 1997, as of January 2020, Yahoo! Mail has 225 million users.

Adobe Flash Player is discontinued computer software for viewing multimedia content, executing rich Internet applications, and streaming audio and video content created on the Adobe Flash platform. It can run from a web browser as a browser plug-in or independently on supported devices. Originally created by FutureWave under the name FutureSplash Player, it was renamed to Macromedia Flash Player after Macromedia acquired FutureWave in 1996. It was then developed and distributed by Adobe as Flash Player after Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. It is currently developed and distributed by Zhongcheng for users in China, and by Harman International for enterprise users outside of China, in collaboration with Adobe.

Abandonia is an abandonware website, focusing mainly on showcasing video games and distributing games made for the MS-DOS system.

Kongregate is an American web gaming portal and video game publisher. Its website features over 124,000 online games and 30+ mobile games available to the public. The company also publishes games for PC, mobile, and home consoles. It was purchased by GameStop Corporation in 2010 before being acquired by Modern Times Group MT AB in 2017.

Kaneva, LLC is a privately owned American video game company based in Atlanta, Georgia and founded in 2004 by Christopher Klaus and Greg Frame. Kaneva was a 3D virtual world that supported 2D web browsing, social networking and shared media.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OMGPop</span> Game studio acquired by Zynga Inc. in 2013

OMGPop, stylized as OMGPOP and formerly known as i'minlikewithyou or iilwy, was an independent flash game studio. In 2013, it was purchased by Zynga Inc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adobe Animate</span> Animation software made by Adobe

Adobe Animate is a multimedia authoring and computer animation program developed by Adobe.

Modern HTML5 has feature-parity with the now-obsolete Adobe Flash. Both include features for playing audio and video within web pages. Flash was specifically built to integrate vector graphics and light games in a web page, features that HTML5 also supports.

gPotato Video game website

gPotato is a free multiplayer game portal website operated in Japan and South Korea by Gala Inc. and its subsidiaries, and formerly in North America and Europe by subsidiaries of South Korean-based Webzen. gPotato game portals are in South Korea and Japan. Games hosted at gPotato range from traditional MMORPGs to more accessible casual flash games/browser-based games, all of which are free-to-play so no annual/monthly payment is required; revenue is generated from a micropayment system. Games and their premium item shops can be accessed by the Group's regional gPotato portal sites.

Trello is a web-based, kanban-style, list-making application developed by Atlassian. Created in 2011 by Fog Creek Software, it was spun out to form the basis of a separate company in New York City in 2014 and sold to Atlassian in January 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Have I Been Pwned?</span> Consumer security website and email alert system

Have I Been Pwned? is a website that allows Internet users to check whether their personal data has been compromised by data breaches. The service collects and analyzes hundreds of database dumps and pastes containing information about billions of leaked accounts, and allows users to search for their own information by entering their username or email address. Users can also sign up to be notified if their email address appears in future dumps. The site has been widely touted as a valuable resource for Internet users wishing to protect their own security and privacy. Have I Been Pwned? was created by security expert Troy Hunt on 4 December 2013.

Credential stuffing is a type of cyberattack in which the attacker collects stolen account credentials, typically consisting of lists of usernames or email addresses and the corresponding passwords, and then uses the credentials to gain unauthorized access to user accounts on other systems through large-scale automated login requests directed against a web application. Unlike credential cracking, credential stuffing attacks do not attempt to use brute force or guess any passwords – the attacker simply automates the logins for a large number of previously discovered credential pairs using standard web automation tools such as Selenium, cURL, PhantomJS or tools designed specifically for these types of attacks, such as Sentry MBA, SNIPR, STORM, Blackbullet and Openbullet.

Collection #1 is the name of a set of email addresses and passwords that appeared on the dark web around January 2019. The database contains over 773 million unique email addresses and 21 million unique passwords, resulting in more than 2.7 billion email/password pairs. The list, reviewed by computer security experts, contains exposed addresses and passwords from over 2000 previous data breaches as well as an estimated 140 million new email addresses and 10 million new passwords from previously unknown sources, and collectively makes it the largest data breach on the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Junade Ali</span> British computer scientist and cybersecurity researcher (born 1996)

Junade Ali is a British computer scientist known for research in cybersecurity.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Taylor, Colleen (23 May 2013). "Yahoo Acquires Gaming Infrastructure Startup PlayerScale". TechCrunch . Retrieved 20 July 2014.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "PlayerScale, Inc.: Private Company Information - Businessweek". Bloomberg Businessweek. Archived from the original on September 12, 2014. Retrieved 20 July 2014.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Takahashi, Dean (28 January 2013). "PlayerScale handles behind-the-scenes infrastructure for games — and 100 million players". VentureBeat . Retrieved 20 July 2014.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Preimesberger, Chris (23 May 2013). "Yahoo Buys Another Startup in Online Gamer PlayerScale". eWeek . Retrieved 20 July 2014.
  5. "How Yahoo's acquisitions fit into Mayer's master plan". CNN . Retrieved 20 July 2014.
  6. Williams, Steven; Perez, Madeline (6 July 2014). "Yahoo's acquisition strategy is actually a talent strategy". The Washington Post . Retrieved 20 July 2014.
  7. Koetsier, John (23 May 2013). "Marissa Mayer and Yahoo are on fire, acquiring gaming company PlayerScale". VentureBeat . Retrieved 20 July 2014.
  8. "Player.IO Showcase: Games, Projects and more built with Player.IO - Player.IO". PlayerScale. Archived from the original on 20 May 2013. Retrieved 20 July 2014.
  9. Crossley, Rob (28 February 2011). "How I made a $10k-per-month Flash game in my spare time". MCV. Develop . Retrieved 20 July 2014.
  10. Bardinelli, John (8 March 2011). "Everybody Edits - Walkthrough, Tips, Review". Jay Is Games . Retrieved 27 March 2024.
  11. Cameron, Phill (5 July 2010). "User Degenerated: Everybody Edits". Rock Paper Shotgun . Retrieved 14 April 2024.
  12. "Have I Been Pwned: Pwned websites". Have I Been Pwned? . 3 April 2019. Retrieved 7 April 2019.
  13. "Everybody Edits lekt gegevens 871.000 spelers" [Everybody Edits leaks data 871,000 players]. Security.nl (in Dutch). 3 April 2019. Retrieved 7 April 2019.
  14. "Data Security Breach 2 - Please Update Your Passwords". 22 July 2019.
  15. "EE Offline, EEU Opt-In, & Big Changes!". Everybodyedits.com. 26 December 2020. Retrieved 27 March 2024.
  16. "Adobe Flash Player End of Life". Adobe Inc. Retrieved 27 March 2024.