The true feelings of the Glitch team aren't being hidden here, and although it's sad, I think folks appreciate it a great deal.
such an unusual and oddly endearing gesture. i am sure there is some kind of story behind it, but it's kind of beautiful in this industry full of people who first decide they want to make money and then decide what to build.
kidding. they are right around the alley from us and i liked the game art. i wish they'd had had better success...
I've seen so many startups that took customer money even when they knew they probably wouldn't deliver the anticipated value. It's wonderful to see somebody who winds down a business with such concern for every stakeholder.
Good fortunes to the Tiny Speck team. I hope our paths cross someday.
1. As a fellow game developer that published a game (and didn’t hit the jackpot). (We’re a small startup at the time launching our little game and it didn’t go well at all after a 2 hard-working year, about the same time when Glitch launched).
2. It’s the Flickr’s founding dream to create this, and if you read the backstory of Flickr, you’ll notice that the founder initially wanted to create this startup before Flickr, but found out it is not feasbible, and took out a main component from the game (sharing photo) and built Flickr. And so now, the founder has sold her company to Yahoo!, and decided to use every penny to make her dream come true, and it appears reality hits where it hurts the most, and the game didn’t fly. I tried the game, it’s really polished, but it just didn’t have the target market pool as big as Zynga in Facebook. Really sad its under-appreciated.
3. There is an unseen s*load amount of hard work placed in Glitch, but it just all went boom to their face.
What is the problem? Does this mean hard work != successful? Or did they not have enough marketing budget to make Glitch fly?
Work-for-pay is only as valuable as someone else willing to pay for it. No one cares how hard you worked, they care about how much value you delivered to them.
Thankfully it is a real MMO, and there are some redeeming social aspects to it, but it has very little to recommend it over, say, World of Warcraft. It's a browser game, so it's more accessible, but it doesn't actually play nicely with mobile since it runs in flash, and you might as well go big or go home.
Because Glitch is a thinking-person's social game, Tiny Speck is not aimed at the entire world, at least not at first, especially not teens eager for the next World of Warcraft. Instead, Butterfield admitted, "There's not a better way to say [who we're targeting] than people with above average intelligence and sophisticated tastes, in their 20s or early 30s...The intersection of NPR listeners and game players."
Literally was just wander about clicking and waiting for progress bars.
Maybe someone could buy the IP cheap, add in some Zynga-style dark gamification and massive marketing and have themselves the next Farmville. Wait, forget I said that. Giants forbid.
Does this mean hard work != successful?
On the Web, hard work never guaranteed success.
While I had not heard of Glitch until this, I can appreciate the wrenchingly painful admission that this venture has reached its end; and must be wound down.
I tell myself that I am allowed to fail as many times as is needed to succeed. But it hurts every time.
After all the pre-launch hype about changing the face of gaming forever, the game was dreadfully boring -- you basically walk around and click on things. I described it to a friend as "FarmVille where you don't get your own farm." Sure, there was a lot of art; I think I had my pick of several dozen hairstyles and encountered hundreds of types of objects. They must have drawn thousands of art assets.
There is no lesson to take away here except that games live or die on their mechanics and depth. Zynga has shown us exactly how far you can go with pretty, social games that give you just enough little dopamine kicks to keep the window open.
(edit) I also got a strong impression it was a single guy's visionary pet (for the lack of better word) project, and he had some spare money from a previous exit to throw at it. So he kept pulling it in his own direction. I might be and probably am off here, but that's the impression I formed by hanging around the project for a bit.
Remember the power of the usability study people!
Glitch was not the case, and even if it were I doubt flash performances may be an issue for why users didn't get in the game. The game was just terribly boring.
Of course, there are plenty more sensible reasons for giving up flash, but "the continued decline of the Flash platform" seems more like "game does not run on iPad".
Sounds a lot like Diablo III / Torchlight II, which supposedly aren't all that boring...
In hindsight it reminds me of my experience with Second Life: once you've got the basic ideas, and toured some of the more creative or amusing islands, what is there to do? At least in 2L you could build something that would remain in the world. In Glitch there were endless skill-building exercises that had meaning only in the game world. The only payoff for building a skill was to be able to learn some more skills.
Meanwhile millions are obsessively playing Minecraft, whose design could not be farther from Glitch in every way.
I didn't play (much) because I liked grinding and quests, but for a different challenge. I really appreciate that they set up the JSON auction house feed.
It was missing purpose, I think. I could grind out levels, but I didn't have any reason to. There wasn't any compelling reason to actually play the game beyond just scoping out the art (which only lasts so long).
Why don't you give the game away or make it open source or let player volunteers run it?
Glitch looks simple, but it is not. [...] It takes a full-time team of competent engineers & technical operations personnel just to keep the game open. Even if there was a competent team that was willing to work on it full time for free, it would take months to train them. Even then, the cost of hosting the servers would be prohibitively expensive.
That explains why making it free or open-sourcing wouldn't save the current game world, but why not open-source it anyway? Then somebody can give it another shot, with a smaller, limited world, and see if it gains any traction the second time around.
I was wondering how much capital it would take to build that replacement infrastructure. If you went through game engine, databases , everything, and said "Hmmm, ok how can we make this thing basically run itself, or at a minimum with a staff of 3 or 4." Then you'd need a game population that supported that, and I don't know what it cost to play. But I'd love to do a deep dive into the business and technology and figure out if there was a way to make it work. I would expect to be disappointed because it looks like they had a great team and I'm sure they did all of this too.
What will happen to Tiny Speck?
Tiny Speck, the company behind Glitch, will continue. We have developed some unique messaging technology with applications outside of the gaming world and a smaller core team will be working to develop new products. But now is not the time to talk about that. Right now our concern is with the players and our comrades who are suddenly looking for new work.
It's complicated, but it comes down to this: if that were a transaction that made sense to the purchaser, we wouldn't be shutting the game down.
Obviously that's pretty opaque, but i think this suggests that they've cut a deal to sell the assets. I dont't know a lot about that market but it seems to happen pretty commonly when 3d online games flop. Somebody in a market that never was exposed to the game buys them and repurposes them or uses them as a jump start in some tier 2 freemium project.
building and developing, learning new skills, collaborating or competing with everyone else in one enormous, ever-changing, persistent world.
But I'd love to hear how they had planned on actually doing that. Was there going to be Minecraft/Second Life-style building of structures and worlds? Was there going to be contests and competitions? Was the core of the gaming experience going to be mainly on learning new skills?
And if all technical and financial roadblocks were removed, would their vision have made for a truly compelling game? Or was their vision doomed from the start?
It's beautiful in the way few things imagine that they could be.
But, aside from the intrinsic beauty, the truth is that there was no reason for you to keep coming back. It didn't have the same evil addictive psychology of Zynga's games ("Your crops are dying! Your friend Samantha just moved to a farm next door. Spam your friends - or buy some credits - so you can level up faster."). No intricate action + social interactivity like WoW. No puzzle challenges like Limbo, or adventure-style like Monkey Island (true, neither was multiplayer). No fast paced action like War of Tanks/War of Warplanes..
In the end it was just a cute massive multiplayer social game. Maybe the cutest ever. But this doesn't seem enough to attract a loyal audience - other than maybe a few other game geeks, artists and designers.
This reminds me of the Steve Blank's (the original author behind the lean startup movement) stories. Do you really need to implement a full game, with that many details, with that many layers, with so many features, just to realize that your users aren't coming back in the first place? Can't you put your mom/sister/son to play for a few months, and just see how many times they keep coming back (when you're not looking)? Can't you probably get to the same conclusions with, say, 10% of the effort? If you do this early enough, you'll still have the other 90% of runway to make corrections and explore different options (or, hell, pivot to totally different business model if you discovered your boat isn't going anywhere).
Of course hindsight is a bitch. It's always so much easier to explain what happened, that to forecast the future...
But Glitch repeated some of the same mistakes that others have done in the past. Case in point: the excellent paper "Lessons from Habitat" (http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html), about the experimental project created by Lucasfilm in the late 80's. The entire paper is a great read, but one part that strikes me as relevant to this discussion is:
While we find much of the work presently being done on elaborate interface technologies -- DataGloves, head-mounted displays, special-purpose rendering engines, and so on -- both exciting and promising, the almost mystical euphoria that currently seems to surround all this hardware is, in our opinion, both excessive and somewhat misplaced. We can't help having a nagging sense that it's all a bit of a distraction from the really pressing issues. At the core of our vision is the idea that cyberspace is necessarily a multiple-participant environment. It seems to us that the things that are important to the inhabitants of such an environment are the capabilities available to them, the characteristics of the other people they encounter there, and the ways these various participants can affect one another. Beyond a foundation set of communications capabilities, the details of the technology used to present this environment to its participants, while sexy and interesting, are of relatively peripheral concern.
Keep in mind the entire project ran on Commodore64, and two decades ago a 1200bps connection was leading edge. But even though gamers today have much higher expectations in terms of quality than ever before, the core principle is still the same: success of a massive multiplayer game is defined not by its level of peripheral sophistication (be it design, cuteness, or head mounted displays), but by the social experience and characteristics of how people can interact with each other.
(btw, 20+ years and we still don't have head-mounted displays. No, Google Glass doesn't count)
Another issue was channel distribution. It's really challenging to succeed with a web-only game, especially when you're not anchored Facebook. And if on top of that you're using Flash, you'll be missing out all those of 2-3 minutes mini-slots of "free time" that people have every day on their mobile devices (waiting for the train, the bus, bathroom, elevator, etc). And Glitch almost never sent emails. So they were expecting people to bookmark the site and keep coming back. Yeah, right...
Anyway, in the end of the day the Glitch team deserves a lot of praise for accomplishing what they did. It's a gorgeous project, and I can just hope that their work will inspire future designers and game developers, and hopefully parts of the code gets open sourced.
If you design your business right, the online life cycle can be very long. Unfortunately the current nature of startups, venture capital, and exits encourage go big or go broke instead of longevity.
From what I've seen, most avatar based passive online worlds have not done very well. Indeed, I think the MMORPG has effectively filled the slots where we imagined a Snow Crash-esque virtual world.
Sadly, we still far from a true Snow Crash experience. A decade ago Second Life was our best bet, but they simply ignored all the Lessons from Habitat. Not dead, but not much different than vzones.
I guess it'll take a several more years for someone to put money and years of hard work to try their chances on something like this again.
>Why don't you give the game away or make it open source or let player volunteers run it?
So will it be lost forever in the ether? Please, Glitch owners, preserve it in some meaningful way.
[1] http://rubygems.org/gems/snafu [2] http://www.glitch.com/blog/2011/11/30/the-big-unlaunching/
You can read up on it on his blog. It's dual language. Click on the pictures.
However his next big thing 'Noby Noby Boy' was just too weird and kinda pointless for me. He's certainly one to watch, and I'd probably shell out for his games regardless, but he's not 100% guaranteed to make something great each time.
The startup world in general is moving toward a hits-driven model, but a game company whose product is only used for entertainment takes this to an extreme. A game like Glitch doesn't solve any problem, and it's not even a generalized tool like Twitter where the problems it enables solving become apparent later. It's simply a game, that will live or die based on how well it entertains people. It's very hard for me to understand how investors evaluate an idea like this before anything has shipped. (Of course, Stuart Butterfield probably raised money based on past success alone.)
It doesn't even seem like the company had plans to build a portfolio of games like a Zynga or EA. So they raised a bunch of money before they had even a glimmer of product-market fit, hired a bunch of people, and then figured out that their game wasn't good enough.
The only strategy that seems to work in the game business is to be a low-budget, low-profile indie developer for a few years till you have a portfolio of titles that you've developed yourself or for a publisher, then raise financing (debt or equity) to develop a larger project on your own steam. Raising money from the start for a single high-profile, whimsical product seems destined to fail.
Of course, hindsight being 20/20 and all that.
He made a post introducing the Vancouver staff on his blog.
http://www.famitsu.com/cominy/?m=pc&a=page_fh_diary&...
They should put this on their resume. Picture taken, and drawn, by Keita Takahashi.
"Glitch is a web-based massively-multiplayer game which takes place inside the minds of eleven peculiarly imaginative Giants. You choose how to grow and shape the world: building and developing, learning new skills, collaborating or competing with everyone else in one enormous, ever-changing, persistent world."
edit: that said, I haven't for quite a while, and it was only briefly. But I was mostly lost and wandering, where Maple Story had quests up the wazoo to keep me focused. Was that part of the appeal, or a transient attribute?
http://www.frontend2010.com/video/rob-goodlatte-and-daniel-b...
Best of luck to the TinySpeck team. Brilliant stuff.
This does seem to count as a vote against Big Production Up Front. I have to wonder if they had started smaller, used a more "Lean" strategy, got a product to market quicker, and started working on revenue, if they would've A) discovered the "insurmountable" problems sooner, B) had some revenue to play with, and C) been in a position to pivot when the shit hit the fan.
The world of gaming is surprisingly unreceptive to the premise of a "minimum viable product". It is EXTREMELY difficult to "pivot" a game. The level of polish and extent of gameplay required to meet consumer expectations for a game requires a commitment well beyond the bounds of any typical B2B or B2C product.
From my experience, the best approach to a gaming company is to build many, small games, taking on client projects to fund the company while building company projects with bench time. It's sustainable, but painful, and is an inferior path to success relative to most other startups.
The bar of quality in gaming has been set too high by companies willing to lose money on failures to make the occasional hit. You might as well start a movie production startup.
I think it is possible to bootstrap _certain_ types of "massively multiplayer" games, but with the necessity of making significant compromises in design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_in_the_Desert
I am just talking out of my ass here, but I could see an argument for the "build big and go live" strategy being more an affectation of the single player focused studio system than a mmo best practice. at least for the traditional pc/3d style mmos it is much easier to find gross examples of pre-launch implosion, launching years late, launching alpha quality etc. than it is to find the opposite. Yet almost all of those games seem to enjoy a core fanbase often for years before they launch that would be all over an mvp. i can certainly see how launching with a small amount of content could be a big risk, but there are clearly a lot of problems with aaa title dev that a launch and iterate approach might be helpful for.
http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/12/online-game-startup-tiny-s...
What they probably need is better feedback on how to make it more engaging, and some way to port their work out of Flash... which could be doable with some ingenuity.
http://playnice.ly/blog/2012/11/14/playnice-ly-closing-down-...
They were fairly open, with an API that enabled several third-party iPhone / iPad apps -- but that were mostly passive inventory viewers, etc. I wonder how things would have gone with Facebook integration instead, with noble attempts at social networking and feed publishing. May have given them the edge they needed.
They took forever to launch, but the idea seemed novel. Sad to hear that its shutting down.
