Facebook is shutting down Bonfire, its Houseparty clone for group video chat, which the company had been testing outside US since the fall of 2017
Casey Newton / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
Bonfire was Facebook's answer to Houseparty from the start: reporting in mid-2017 revealed the company was building a clone of the live group video chat app, and by that September it had surfaced on the Danish iOS App Store as a limited international test. Two years of testing outside the US never produced a US launch, and Facebook is now pulling the plug entirely.
The shutdown fits an established Facebook pattern — the company killed its Paper newsreading app the same way in 2016 — and it leaves Houseparty as the category's survivor, though not a permanent one: Epic would go on to acquire Houseparty in 2019 and later announce its own shutdown.
First-order effects
- Users in the non-US markets where Bonfire had been testing since fall 2017 lose the standalone group video chat app, with no path to a broader release.
- Facebook's clone strategy against Houseparty ends in failure: the original app outlasted the copy despite Facebook's distribution advantages.
Second-order effects
- Houseparty's team gains validation that its format could not be commoditized by a Facebook clone, strengthening its position ahead of Epic's 2019 acquisition of the app.
- Group video chat functionality gets folded back into Facebook's core properties rather than a standalone app, concentrating engagement inside Messenger and the main app.
Third-order effects
- The episode extends Facebook's kill list of cloned or experimental standalone apps — Paper, Bonfire, and later Neighborhoods — reinforcing that products outside the core feed rarely survive internal competition for resources.
- For startups, the outcome cuts both ways: clones can be outlasted, but category leadership offers no long-term shelter either, as Houseparty's own eventual shutdown shows.
The trend: Facebook's clone-and-kill cycle for standalone social apps keeps producing short-lived experiments while the company consolidates social features into its core properties.