Hello everyone,
We share unfortunate news with you all today, amidst these already troubling times: we are officially disbanding & dismantling Walrus LLC. Although we came to this conclusion only very recently, the reasons behind such an act had been slowly building up on us over the past months, and so we've decided that winding down Walrus was the only viable path going ahead. This is a conclusion we came to unanimously, despite efforts to revive the project. You can read on about the motivations behind this decision and get a glimpse of our journey through these last 8 months, or scroll down to read our next steps and browse the many materials that we've consequently decided to open-source.
Walrus was a Minecraft server created in September 2019 by Austin (AustinLMayes) and Rafi (Cobol72)), with the intent of providing a Minecraft eSports platform. The server began by catering in particular to the widely-known PGM/Ares gamemodes. The project unfortunately did not lead to fruition as outlined below. The announcement you're currently reading was written and published on April 21st, 2020.
Speaking on behalf of the team, it's been a wonderful ride. While the outcome is unsuccessful, we've all gained from this opportunity and learned much about what it takes to build a start-up venture, from the various logistics and a successful business model, to assembling the core team-members who will accomplish and embellish your idea in ways you had never considered to begin with. On this note, as a leadership, we are immensely grateful for the considerable work that our staff have dedicated to Walrus, whether that's maps & gameplay, graphic design & market research, plugin development & sysadmin work, finances & business plans, and beyond. As Anthony put it the other night, we had a rockstar team and couldn't be thankful enough for the many times spent staying up at all hours of the night, brainstorming and working on the project.
It's safe to say that we were hit hard by the tough realities that enterprising businesses face: lack of sufficient time and energy for the college students we are, and a loss of technical insight and resources to get the job done. During our planning phase of September through November, we saw great things for Walrus -- a professional working environment looking to do the Ares gamemodes the way we envisioned them, a completely automated Ranked system tailored to our competitive community, plans to expand to UHC & Arena, machine learning & data analysis to perfect our products, honest collaboration with the community... Momentum and morale were high as ever.
Come December, we set ourselves with the ambitious "12 Days of Walrus" launch into our open beta phase -- we realized immediately that this was too ambitious and sought to correct the course. Much backend work had to be done to help get our infrastructure along to where it is today. We set ourselves on focusing on the Ranked product described above, but school's spring term picked up again and we lost some technical muscle as some were forced to prioritize their time away from the project. The loss of our core developers hit us harder come February.
Roughly a week after we launched private servers, we came up with the novel idea of pivoting our focus towards bedwars -- we saw great potential in the popular gamemode and felt there was room to provide a stable, competitive alternative to Hypixel, folding it into our automated Ranked product. However, we again butted up against our technical limitations, and finally grasped the complexity and formidable learning curve associated to the infrastructure; we tried lately yet failed to replace the incredible technical insight that we began with back in September. The Covid-19 episode added uncertainty to the mess of things, as more of our core members found themselves with less time and fewer resources to devote to the company. These happenings are nobody's fault in particular, and we deeply respect and value commitment to life's more pressing priorities. It was simply unfortunate that these worked against us.
We are grateful for the many individuals who worked at Walrus past and present, if only for a little bit -- every person brought on helped advance the state of the project in some shape or form. Life hits, and while we are at fault for having lacked the foresight to gauge how heavy of a commitment an endeavour like this is, we gained much and do not for one bit regret Walrus. We recognize that failure is almost just as, if not more important than success in shaping careers, and we're certain that the wonderful folks who helped feed the Walrus will go on to achieve great work.
We also have you, our attentive and ever supportive community, to thank for your attention to our work. We had the opportunity to work with multiple members of the community and the feedback you provided us with along the way was immensely helpful. We're sorry we couldn't make it all the way as you might have wanted.
As a result of our disbanding, we are adopting the following measures:
- Private servers will stay up until Sunday evening (April 26th), at which point we will take down the infrastructure.
- Sponsors will see themselves given a full refund. Please remain in the Walrus Discord for now and pay attention to our notices in the #vip channel as we provide you with further details over these coming days. Sponsors can also elect not to refund, as they wish. All in all, we can't thank you enough for your early support and confidence in Walrus!
- We're open-sourcing the entirety of our codebase! Thank you to our past and present developers for agreeing to this. You'll find all of these repositories on our GitHub Organization page. Code is either open-sourced under the Apache-2.0 or AGPL-3.0 license -- the license used is specified within the repository.
- We're also open-sourcing the vast majority of our Google Drive documents. These include all kinds of interesting materials, such as plans that were in the works, art graphics of all sorts, training documents, our Staff CoC, all our meeting notes, an unfinished article commemorating the incredible history of the PGM/Ares gamemodes, a snazzy Walrus lobby map, and so much more. We thought it would be interesting for others to gain insight into our business strategy, tactics and history, and the various stages of reflections that we went through in these past 8 months of our existence. Multiple documents are left in a WIP state. We hope you're able to make good use of the documents and that you can find something of special worth by digging around in there.
- We'll be closing down the Walrus Discord at some point within the next couple of weeks, once all else has been properly sorted out, as well as dissolving the registered company.
- We're offering our support to our various staff as they go on their own path, whether seeking new positions at peer organisations or moving on from the game entirely. We can certainly vouch for the formidable members of this team.
As usual, feel free to forward us your questions in the Discord's #q-and-a channel and we'll do our best to answer them.
Thank you again to our staff and community, we couldn't have asked for greater believers in Walrus. Those of us who see the word "walrus" in their lives twenty plus years from now will surely have good memories rushing back of long hours, tireless discussions and work, and genuine excitement to see Walrus LLC come to life.
Do keep in touch! Many of us are members of multiple Ares communities (Stratus Network, OCC, CompMC, Avicus even...), play bedwars & UHC servers, or frequent places like Hypixel or Lunar and other Minecraft servers. This is a pretty cool game and we hope to see you around.
We're sorry that the project had to go this way, although Walrus will quite certainly live on in our hearts and memories!
Walrus
Walrus logo excellently crafted by Elusiveblank.