It's a bit beside the point, but I'd like to note how refreshing it is to read an honest shutting-down-and-wrapping-up post from a startup that had big dreams. It's all too easy to mistake bluster for confidence, and end up writing a shutdown note that claims some kind of hollow victory.
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.
We are offering refunds for all purchases made since November 1st, 2011 (a little over a year ago) and will immediately begin refunding all payments which can be refunded automatically through our payments processors (which will be nearly all of those made in the last 50 or so days). We will then move on to manual refunds for older payments. This will take some time to wrap up since there is not always a simple way to process the payments — credit cards expire or are cancelled, PayPal accounts are closed, etc. — and we may need to collect additional information from you in order to process your refund.
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.
I wish they had people opt-in to refunds. It seems that they received a lot of VC funding so they can handle it, but it sets a precedent that an ailing bootstrapped game company, or one that blew through all their funding, would have a hard time following. I think automated refunds for the last 90 days, and giving refunds to the people who asked before that, would be a nice sustainable way to handle it.
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?
"Hard work" is worth exactly nothing if it doesn't provide value to someone else. I can assure you that walking out into my side yard and digging holes all day in the summer is much harder work than sitting in my air-conditioned home office writing code for the company I work for, but they receive no value for all that "hard work" and do value the time I spent in-chair in my office.
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.
Seems like they weren't adequate at marketing.. The concept of the game is appealing but I have never heard about it until today, the people who have played it have nothing but praise haven't seen a negative comment yet.
Here's one. Even though it is more varied and complex than your average Zynga pump-and-dump, at a fundamental level it is still the same kind of get-on-a-treadmill-and-keep-walking sort of game, where the primary form of achievement is watching numbers increase linearly as rewards start getting exponentially farther away. You feel almost as used while playing it as playing farmville, which kills enjoyment. That is, you are acutely aware at all times that the game mechanics are subtly or not-so-subtly designed to keep you recurrently tied to the game. To profit you need to spend a certain amount of time per day doing menial tasks.
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.
"In a bleak,automated future Britain Bing is one of millions who pedal exercise bikes to create energy as a living. Their currency is merits,tokens with which to buy food from vending machines and which can be increased or decreased according to which shows one watches on giant television screens. A popular choice is 'Botherguts',which humiliates over-weight citizens. But Bing uses his merits as entrance money to get sweet-voiced fellow worker Abi onto the TV talent contest 'Hot Shot'. Unfortunately,despite her talent,she is but one of a glut of singers and ends up on the porn channel 'Wraith Babes'.An enraged Bing saves up another lot of merits and gets onto 'Hot Shot' to denounce its falseness. But will he be seen as a new Messiah or a voice crying in the wind and forced to sell out?"
Perhaps this paragraph from a 2010 CNET article says something:
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."
You're right that one of the founders of Flickr was behind Glitch, but there were two Flickr founders: Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. Butterfield was the one behind Glitch. Fake went on to Hunch and then Pinwheel/Findery.
There is an unseen sload amount of hard work placed in Glitch
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.
More likely that in the world of game development, hard work is a necessary but not sufficient condition for 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.
I played Glitch for a couple hours once and it's pretty obvious to me why it didn't work.
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.
Two hours? You got some real patience. I was in the early pre-beta and they lost me few minutes in, right after I was given a "pet rock" that I was expected to talk to.
(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.
I suppose my experience was similar, but what really lost me was that this "revolutionary" game that was supposed to be so different from the standard fare was running on Flash taking up all my CPU cycles. Even back in 09, I was sick of it (but I was sick of all Flash in general). And of course, that's one reason they cited for their closing, and possibly a large reason.
I play flash games all the time on Kongregate, and 9 out of 10 make my laptop sound like an helicopter, but I keep going back, and so do a bunch of people, from what I can see.
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".
Replying to myself... but on that same note, we can look to Jagex and note their sustained success with Runescape, perhaps the "original" in-browser MMO. More impressive is that it's Java-based and has been since 2001, yet they've continually updated it to run on more powerful hardware.
I tried this game out when it was in pre-beta too. I found it novel and refreshing that there was an MMO aspect to a flash-based game, but I didn't find myself going back to the game. I have no recollection of what the aspiration was supposed to be, and like you, all I remember about the core mechanic of the game is clicking on things I see and performing various actions on them.
About a year ago I somehow got an invite to the beta and played maybe 20 or 30 hours, on and off, over several weeks. The whimsy and quirkiness of the design elements were always impressive. And it was commendable that they were building a family-friendly, kid-safe game that could still be appreciated by adults. But somehow it just didn't hook me and I stopped going back.
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.
It's almost like Glitch was more fun for the game designers than for the players. It was full of gorgeous art and silly jokes. But, for the player, there wasn't much to do, except collect N of these so you can get another X.
This may be true. I took a break for a while, but have been back at it with the primary motivation to... cheat and scheme. To start with, I've been scraping the auction house data, hoping to analyze the best pricing strategies and/or quick-pounce on cheap items. I used this to learn Python, SQL, and basic EC2. I scraped their encyclopedia, dumped the Wiki, and was matching up ingredient lists for crafts. Then I was also going to use screenscraping and image recognition to bot my herb farming... Guess I will have to find another flash game for that.
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.
That was my experience as well. Although exploring the world was initially interesting -- and I enjoyed outfitting my character with a fez -- after a while wandering around squeezing chickens got a little dreary. And when you leveled up and learned new skills, most of the time they weren't all that interesting. Becoming 10% more efficient at gardening or whatnot.... It definitely seemed to be lacking a hook of some sort. I bet there are some interesting lessons for game designers there.
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.
This was something I was curious about as well. It is a skill to make systems that can be managed by only a small number of engineers/operations types, but it is no more difficult than building a game world like this, just different.
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.
Presumably, there's some novel IP that is keeping some of the company alive. From the website:
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.
Why can't you sell the game so someone else can take it over?
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.
proprietary solutions and licensing issues are the first things that come to mind, followed by being haunted by the existence of the project in the wild (unwanted questions, judgment, publicity). I guess they decided it's just best to rip off the band-aid and move on.
I'd say that's a nice gesture, really. The company's founders have excellent street cred. The game had a lot of hype/visibility. It did not fail for lack of technical prowess. People will (and, I bet, are already trying very hard) want to hire the people that worked on the game. The management team is simply facilitating this behavior. What' wrong w/ that?
I would love to know what was on their product roadmap. I can't imagine what I've seen in their game was all they aspired to be. I know the high-level aspirations included:
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?
They did add some building/decorating with new housing and towers and I guess group halls were on the roadmap. There are also a few small competitive aspects. But it seems like either they didn't know what the core "endgame" mechanics were going to be or they put off implementing them too long.
I am really sad to read this. I have been an occasional Glitch player since early betas and I've always been impressed at the civility of the players and the seemingly endless creativity of the game itself.
It's beautiful in the way few things imagine that they could be.
It's a gorgeous game, and I'm heartbroken that they're shutting down. I was part of the very first wave of beta testers when they first launched. Even though I didn't spend much time, I remember being shocked by their attention to details. Every little thing was nicely planned, designed and implemented.
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.
I think its pertinent to note that the American successor to Habitat still exists and is live, some 17 years later. (vzones.com) They spun off from compuserve, went public as Avaterra, got delisted, and now are owned by some other company.
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.
Agree. To me the problem with most/all online worlds is exactly that they are all passive: Worlds Chat, The Palace, Second Life, now Glitch. They all stayed in their weird limbo between MMORPG and objective-less platform game. Some better than others, but all share the same (lack of) purpose.
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.
That's really sad. I have a friend who plays it every day - and found it adorable. I spend about 40-50 hours in it, and was really impressed with the characterization, polish, and originality.
Truly a sad end to a great game. The Glitch player community had some of the most friendly people that I've ever met and I had a great time both playing the game and developing against their API[1]. I think what really killed their momentum was pulling the game back into private beta[2]. Quite a few players left after that and the game obviously never recovered.
I read the OP thinking, this game seems as crazy as Katamari...and then came across your comment. The original Katamari games were so mindblowingly great that I'd buy anything Keita designed
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 idea of a game company that's venture-backed before shipping anything seems odd to me.
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.
"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?
Here's their original trailer, which made me fall in love with the idea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6O5QXj6n18 Alas, it turns out falling in love with the idea of the game wasn't the same as falling in love with actually playing the game. It still makes me sad to hear they didn't figure out what was missing from making the game really engaging.
I played the beta. My impression was that it was beautiful, but painfully boring. I gave it roughly 15 minutes before leaving and never coming back. I really think they could have found out it wasn't actually fun to play before investing so much time and money into it.
I think talents of the team that build Glitch will be released to build something better. Now they have more experience and better feel for what people are looking for.
Bummer. I was always impressed with both the UI of Glitch as well as the game art. For those that don't know, their original designer was Daniel Burka (ex Digg and later Milk and Google). Here's a great talk that references Glitch and building the experience for an app:
Bummer for Stewart Butterfield. But maybe third time's the charm!
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.
I spent 3 years as a CTO and Executive Producer in social and children's games.
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.
There are always exceptions of course - I believe both The Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) and Love (www.quelsolaar.com/love) are products of individuals. Neither are typical MMOs, and both embrace different sorts of simplicity. KoL uses rudimentary (yet charming!) graphics and a rather clunky web interface, and Love's world is generated procedurally.
I think it is possible to bootstrap _certain_ types of "massively multiplayer" games, but with the necessity of making significant compromises in design.
My initial reaction to your comment was to snort and roll my eyes, but I am sincerely curious: can you name any similar games that found success by building an MVP and evolving into a sophisticated MMPORG?
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.
So they burnt through $10.7M within 1.5 years? $600k/month? I wonder what they have left. I'm curious about the ramifications after this sort of thing transpires.
The github as a resume thing is still fairly new and mostly implemented by people who have been out of work or working for themselves (since a lot of employment contracts stipulate that the company has dibs on anything you write)
Looks cute - like something that deserves to stick around. Although the game didn't seem all that interesting.
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.
I would really like to see the game... as I've never heard of it which is a shame, can any existing player send me an invite? Add me on Steam under the same name as here if you're willing :)
Recently, they were seem to have been floundering about with some last-ditch engagement attempts -- game-wide "feats". One of them was to invite as many people as possible to the game, and there was widespread backlash, very depressing now that I think about it.
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.
I'm surprised. Maybe marketing to the wrong audience? I told 2 people, my wife, and her sister, and they both became hopelessly addicted. Neither are techie people at all.
Brent, one of the illustrators, has a nice handcraft line in Vancouver called Kukubee. If I ever need an illustrator, he's who I'll go to (if he'll take the work!) :)
What these people need is the kind of person who specializes in disaster management. It really doesn't feel like what they have there should be unrecoverable.
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.