The pandemic and its first major lockdown left us with great “winners” at the software level, such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Among the giants, a little later Meet joined them after succeeding Hangouts. However, coming even from below, he highlighted HouseParty, a group video calling application from Epic Games that hosted mini-games and made chatting more enjoyable.
HouseParty made it to the top of the charts on the Google Play Store and the iOS App Store, something totally unpredictable. The same will be its closure, which we know from Techcrunch and to which Epic Games has set a date: October. The developer of ‘Fortnite’, a game with which HouseParty came to integrate to continue growing, says that the application team is now working on “new ways to have meaningful and authentic social interactions on a meta-transversal scale throughout the Epic Games family.”
For all those users who have HouseParty installed, the end of the service will occur next month, without the closing day having been specified. Nevertheless, the app can no longer be downloaded from the iOS and Android stores, so it can only be used by those who have it until today.
A sudden closure that fits into the culture of the ephemeral
We live in a changing and liquid world, where ephemeral formats such as Stories and the short TikTok videos about more elaborate content and that leave more residue (Without detracting from the enormous creativity and work that comes to be in those formats). And it is short-lived even for success. What elevates you, a global confinement, also sinks you when time passes and you have not become essential.
It has been the case of HouseParty. In the first quarter of 2020 it exploded and in the second it reached a historic figure of almost 24 million downloadsHowever, from there the success of the application faded, currently returning to download values similar to those of the months before COVID-19 hit the world.
With the integration with Fortnite it grew again, as can be seen in the data for the fourth quarter of 2020, but the function only temporarily stalled, and the following quarter the trend was again a sharp fall. The success of Houseparty was that, in the first confinement, many groups of acquaintances got bored and wanted to play online while talking.
What’s more, the platform allowed 8 participants in video calls when giants like WhatsApp had not yet adapted to the new times. When everyone did and got better, and the COVID situation changed, Houseparty lost its rationale for more ubiquitous applications.
More information | Houseparty