Freeriderhd Buyout

As we all know, Kano games sucks, a lot. And they have a dying, nearly dead, game on their hands that im sure they would be able to part with for less than 100,000 USD. I'm just looking to get a feel for how much funding we could communally contribute to buy the game. all funds would be stakeholder value, and we could work out details from there. even if your not interested, please answer this poll.

 

If I had money, I would donate to support this effort.

 

brokie, also nobody would be donating, and we'd probably have to set up a middleman or someone to handle it all legally and on kanos end cuz none of us are really experienced in aquiring a game.

 

If it did come down to anyone acquiring the game, I think it should lead towards Calculus or any of the community devs.

 

yeah exactly, but we would still probably need a good bit of funding

 

reminds me of ness' rant, i'd like to have ness' opinion one day on this xd

also i found this account, very likely Char's alt. randomly logged on 4 months ago
http://frhd.co/u/Charlie

it has Eric (the one and only), Ira (free rider hd staff), Ash (forums admin), some random called FreeRider (rare username) and timteh (first non-mod to join forums)


weirdly enough, multiple accounts were purged/deleted off the database and replaced with a bunch of numbers recently (check out Charlie's friendlist)

leading me to think Kano is doing smth to free up space in their servers and they're financially struggling

most of the Charlie friend list is similar to Eric's friendlist

TL;DR: i think char is back omg :holding_back_tears:

 

interesting, it would be good to have mods back lol. although i disagree with ur financially struggling kano thing cuz storing all the data is actually a really small part of the budget for running a game. freerider its probably like less than 150 per month

 

If the game could get bought out from Kano and then hosted on a site like crazygames.com (aka the company Kano dreams they could be) that may be the best way to preserve the long-term longevity of the game. Crazygames' entire business model is to take kid's games, pump them with ads and in-app purchases, then engage in guerrilla warfare with the school district IT departments who try to IP ban them. And although FRHD isn't exactly the most monetizable game by any means, I can definitely see it having some sort of life on the site - there already is a precedent for multiplayer, build-your-own-level-and-share-it types of games on there. Bonus points for Crazygames being based in Belgium - European gaming companies are usually pretty chill - and not in North America (*cough* Canada), East Asia, or the Middle East where gaming companies are infamous for predatory monetization practices. But I'm just being dreamy here, when we haven't even solved how to extricate FRHD from Kano's taloned clutches

 

Don't think it's would want to let go due to residule money earnt but if we had a seriously achievable price I'd chip in.

 

yeah im not sure if the ad profits even outweigh the monthly server costs tbh. We wouldn't have residual money for a long time either. Spend it all on more advertising and community competitions

 

I believe FRHD will last around 1-2 years before shutting down or being sold, it's been like this since 2024.

It's definitely dead (way deader cuz summer break), but not to the point where Kano sells it.

i still see newgens making new tracks (one track every 5 hours)

But wait.

From 1-2 tracks a minute back in 2021

To one track every 10-20 mins in 2023

To having entire hours with no tracks.

But the suspicious part is a lot of these accounts have like 2-3 tracks completed

Spoiler: Yapping. How did FRHD get here?

Anyways, FRHD was created at 2013. It was doing well, until peaking in popularity in 2015-2016!
Anyways, it would slowly decline from 2017 to 2019, covid would revive it again, but not for long. It would start declining again from 2022 to 2024, before stagnating. I'd say 2023 was the last year where FRHD was still alive

(ngl i don't think kano is selling it anytime soon xd)

Covid made frhd last longer, but more and more ppl quit.

the thing is, for a long while, new players would appear and "replace" the people who quit.

But there aren't enough dedicated newgens to replace the community's aging players. A lot of them get demotivated or just find it boring/dead and quit


FRHD was still doing fine back in 2022-2023, but its prime was 2015-2016. Which guess what? Was back when Kano updated the game

But another thing: Kano stopped caring about its game. Geometry Dash survived 7 years without updates, but it needed updates to become big enough to not need them.

Minecraft hasn't had a "game-changing" update in 5 years, but it needed updates to grow and get to its prime

Unless if your game is an addictive RNG/luck-based game, it'll get boring eventually with no updates. FRHD's editor is a bit too limited to survive with no updates too (few actual options on the editor but eh, look at geometry dash 1.9).

Anyways, he community itself did more in 5 years than Kano did in 10 lol

Also, if 3 friends quit, another friend will quit too. That's why it looks like it died so fast

If a bigger company buys this, FRHD would have a lot of potential for revenue tho, if they fix it and bring in new players (most of the companies want money after all) and reviving the game (like post2henry said). There's a lot of examples on this, especially on browser community-based games

Also they could use "over 900,000 tracks created" and the featured tracks for marketing

Also re-do this UI and the game overall, the game itself is quite glitchy, easily hackable allegedly (beans2/Puravida claims we can hack with only one line of code, but idk if that's true) and the Browse Tracks button is off-centered

Make forums registering easier or just make an official discord server, it's kinda confusing for some ppl at first

Also, if we want this game to be alive again, we need more active staff, that could help too

But i believe that kinda requires reaching out to Kano, Totoca himself said they take forever to reply (if they even reply lol)

Also, me, shamato, piski, eli, zycerak and many others nolifed this game so much, it's also part of many people's childhoods

Cataclysm himself has a YT channel with over 1 million subs, after all, this game was big when slither.io was big. It's been a while...

Eventually, Kano won't make enough money, they would either sell it or just abandon it if no one's interested

But on the bright side, this game only needs fixing, marketing and a mobile editor (because ipad kids exist), it has everything to get over 100k monthly visitors like in 2016 (according to hypestat/similarweb it was niche but 100k is really solid)

 

TL;DR: omg kano just sell this so the ipad kids get addicted and you get free revenue

Unfortunately, kano is NOT selling this anytime soon, so we have to wait

 

I feel like FRHD as a game could have so much more added towards it as well with gameplay wise and track making but the impending doom is certain, the game is defs going to be shut down or sold off, there has to be a miracle if FRHD is going to continue but sadly not.

Maybe possibly everyone can go towards freerider.app, but sadly it doesn't have the near amount of popularity and is tricky to use at first. As you said, all we can do is wait, but sadly I feel like with that we all collectively as a community should do something, maybe make a new FreeRiderHD game, but knowing Kano they wouldn't like it if it took popularity they would shut it down by their demand. Its a tricky situation, atleast hopefully if the game shuts down, it'll be revived again.

 

If they sell it to the right company, i feel like it could be revived tbh. It's probably the right option, they could promote ness and calculus from senior admin to developer as well
Polygon could also become a dev

 

If we actually end up doing this and I have any money at the time I’ll definitely chip in, that’s gonna take a while tho because of everything yall have said but I do see a world where it works out for the better

 

Really curious to hear more of your thoughts on a Steam release, it would be huge paradigm shift for the game overall but atp I'd gladly welcome any way to extend the game's lifespan. My game dev friend has told me the biggest hurdle with Steam is marketing, but with our current player base I'd wonder if we can skirt around that

 

I've been thinking about an idea of a strike as well, and instead of a trackmaking strike, it could be a much more impactful strike if one were to make a bot that loads freerider tracks nonstop at a very high rate because sending data costs a lot more for Kano than saving data does. Not making tracks is just killing the game on purpose for no reason. It's a real shame that they don't communicate with us at all, it would be awesome if we could get the database on steam like post2henry suggests.

 

that'd make Kano shut down FRHD and all these years of tradition would be lost
unless if we all temporarily transfer the better tracks/data to a different game/DB

 

i lowkey feel like Steam has a different target audience, it's harder to find a Steam game than a game hosted in CrazyGames, Poki, etc
this game was more of a chromebook-reliant browser game that's quick to download and play. well, back in 2015-2023
i'd say this had a similar target audience to the io game audience at its prime

also, nobody would like ads in a steam game, but in-app purchases are pretty common there so we can earn some cash
also, unrelated, but add the mobile editor. that'll get more players than the glider, trust

but yea, steam is pretty good and we can earn a lot if we get enough players xd