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<p><b>June 16, 2025</b></p>
<p>Dear SIMMER.io community,</p>
<p>I'm heads down focused now on getting SIMMER.io back up and running on a new hosting platform. There's a ton of migration work to do, and new hosting costs associated with the work.</p>
<p>Currently, I *think* I'll be able to restore all old games and accounts.</p>
<p>If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out! Our <a href="https://discord.gg/SRNTJsMdgd">discord channel</a> is still alive too.</p>
<p>Rocco at SIMMER dot io</p>
<p>PS. You can support the revival of SIMMER.io financially at <a href="https://buymeacoffee.com/simmerio">https://buymeacoffee.com/simmerio</a> </p>
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<p><b>April 19, 2025</b></p>
<p>Dear SIMMER and ShareMyGame users,</p>
<p>This is Rocco from <strong>SIMMER.io</strong> — the WebGL game sharing site you signed up for.</p>
<p><strong>I have some very unfortunate news:</strong><br>
SIMMER.io and ShareMyGame.com are now discontinued.<br>
At this time, there’s a strong likelihood they will not return.</p>
<div class="section-emoji">💥 What Happened</div>
<p>Despite having billing alerts in place, I was hit with astronomical cloud bills while the site was under attack from bad actor(s). I’m currently working with the cloud providers to negotiate forgiveness for those charges.</p>
<p>The events unfolded like this:</p>
<ul>
<li>Two upload attacks (which I mitigated)</li>
<li>Followed by seven DDoS attacks across multiple cloud providers and storage buckets</li>
<li>All happening in a matter of days</li>
</ul>
<p>There’s a <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/1jzoi8v/ddos_attack_facing_100000_bill/">Reddit post</a> about my worst cloud bill that you can help upvote.</p>
<div class="section-emoji">🔐 Security + Privacy</div>
<ul>
<li>✅ No evidence that payment info was compromised (SIMMERconnect used a separate billing provider)</li>
<li>✅ No evidence of leaked email addresses or password hashes</li>
<li>✅ Sensitive login info was stored via Google Authentication, not SIMMER servers</li>
<li>✅ There’s no sign of mass scraping of games</li>
<li>🔁 The attacker repeatedly requested a small, nonsensical subset of files — not full games</li>
<li>🌐 Some public data (like game names, descriptions, profiles) could have been scraped, as is the nature of open web content</li>
</ul>
<div class="section-emoji">💳 Billing (SIMMERconnect users)</div>
<ul>
<li>You’ll get a full refund on your final bill by Wednesday, April 23</li>
<li>If a payment occurred after April 11, I’ll refund your last two payments</li>
<li>I may set up an optional form where you can choose not to receive your refund to support me and the project</li>
<li>Expect an email from me later today</li>
</ul>
<div class="section-emoji">💾 Game Data</div>
<p>I had to delete the main storage buckets during the attack to stop the financial bleed. However, I backed up game data to another cloud provider:</p>
<ul>
<li>✅ Most games were preserved</li>
<li>⚠️ A small number (<0.1%) may have failed to copy during the backup process</li>
<li>⏳ I’m working on building a secure recovery tool for you to access your games</li>
</ul>
<p>Note: I'm also working to reconstruct missing <code>index.html</code> files, which weren’t collected during upload.</p>
<div class="section-emoji">⏱ Why This Took So Long</div>
<ul>
<li>Suspend services across half a dozen cloud providers</li>
<li>File and escalate tickets across three cloud platforms</li>
<li>Lock everything down to stop further damage</li>
</ul>
<p>I had a small team of curators and one support person, but otherwise, I ran SIMMER as a solo indie dev — technical, devops, security, everything.</p>
<div class="section-emoji">👤 From Me to You</div>
<p>This has been a devastating blow. I’ve spent nearly 8 years building SIMMER — with 2 years of full-time focus. I quit my job last year to go all-in, hoping to grow this into a sustainable platform for indie developers.</p>
<p>I did what I could to keep it secure — like using Cloudflare CDN — but my resources were limited. I'm relieved there’s no evidence of private data being compromised.</p>
<p>I’m incredibly sorry for the loss of service, especially to those who supported SIMMER creatively or financially.</p>
<div class="section-emoji">🛠️ What’s Next</div>
<ul>
<li>I’ll follow up soon with options to recover your uploaded games</li>
<li>Refund options will be sent to all SIMMERconnect subscribers</li>
<li>I may offer a way to donate if you’d like to support me personally</li>
<li>This page is live at https://simmer.io (still under attack)</li>
<li>Backup updates will be posted at <a href="https://github.com/TheRoccoB/simmer-status">GitHub status page</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Thank you for being part of this community — and for giving this project a chance.</p>
<p>—Rocco<br>Founder, SIMMER.io</p>
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