Glitch Is Closing

242 points by pretz 13 years ago | 104 comments

jashkenas 13 years ago |

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.

jonathanjaeger 13 years ago | |

Well put. First time I see a candid shutdown notice with emotion and humility to this degree.

trotsky 13 years ago |

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.

benatkin 13 years ago | |

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.

tommypjr 13 years ago | |

refunds to the 10 paying users shouldn't break the bank.

kidding. they are right around the alley from us and i liked the game art. i wish they'd had had better success...

rscale 13 years ago | |

That gave me such huge respect for the team.

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.

siaukia 13 years ago |

This saddens me on some aspects:

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?

fallous 13 years ago | |

"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.

hahla 13 years ago | |

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.

sirclueless 13 years ago | | |

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.

vostrocity 13 years ago | |

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."

89a 13 years ago | | |

Said he was targeting that, but anyone who played it would tell you how utterly mindless the game was.

Literally was just wander about clicking and waiting for progress bars.

troymc 13 years ago | |

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.

wmf 13 years ago | |

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.

Does this mean hard work != successful?

On the Web, hard work never guaranteed success.

marbletiles 13 years ago | | |

hard work anywhere has never guaranteed success. I'm amazed people still fall for this (and it's consequence, that failure is caused by laziness)

enqk 13 years ago | | |

And contrary to physical media, on the web, hard-work does not leave traces, and no recognition in the distant future.

olefoo 13 years ago | |

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.

dgreensp 13 years ago |

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.

fernly 13 years ago |

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.

jes5199 13 years ago | |

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.

greenmountin 13 years ago | | |

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.

msluyter 13 years ago | |

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.

wmf 13 years ago | |

Don't forget achievement and rare item grinding. There's always more grinding to do (which is why I left).

jpatokal 13 years ago |

This bit I don't quite get:

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.

ericz 13 years ago |

A startup with a webpage offering employees for hire as opposed to hiring employees? http://www.glitch.com/hire-a-genius/ What a strange sight.

saumil07 13 years ago | |

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?

mikeleeorg 13 years ago |

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?

wmf 13 years ago | |

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.

peteforde 13 years ago |

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.

guiambros 13 years ago |

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.

ghshephard 13 years ago |

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.

rrbrambley 13 years ago |

Bummer. For anyone with a hiring budget, hire these people: http://www.glitch.com/hire-a-genius/

Pkeod 13 years ago |

I really like the concept and I also liked the changes and direction it was going. Sad to see it go. :(

>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.

jbrowning 13 years ago |

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.

[1] http://rubygems.org/gems/snafu [2] http://www.glitch.com/blog/2011/11/30/the-big-unlaunching/

minikomi 13 years ago |

If my memory serves correctly, that's where Keita Takahashi[1] was currently stationed. Wonder what he'll do next?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keita_Takahashi

pdknsk 13 years ago | |

He doesn't seems to have been very involved with Glitch lately.

You can read up on it on his blog. It's dual language. Click on the pictures.

http://www.famitsu.com/cominy/?m=pc&a=page_fh_diary_list...

danso 13 years ago | |

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

Nursie 13 years ago | | |

They were AWESOME.

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.

abhiv 13 years ago |

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.

Of course, hindsight being 20/20 and all that.

wmf 13 years ago | |

Good MMOs are supposed to last for years. Perhaps they pitched it as a "casual WOW".

pdknsk 13 years ago |

I'm not familiar with Glitch, other than knowing that the creator of Katamari Damacy worked there.

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.

89a 13 years ago | |

I was disappointed to hear when he joined there, knew it would end like this and would rather he build his own things.

georgespencer 13 years ago |

We hired Anna Pickard on a freelance basis to do some copywriting for us a few months ago. She's a joy to work with. Go and hire her.

icefox 13 years ago |

Now that the main page is just a gravestone, what is glitch?

elisee 13 years ago | |

Found this About page via the "Log in" link at the top: http://www.glitch.com/about/

"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."

Groxx 13 years ago | | |

I always got Maple Story vibes when I tried it.

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?

wmf 13 years ago | |

This is the best recent video I can find: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHX9PZpKjgI

scottyallen 13 years ago | | |

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.

marknutter 13 years ago |

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.

desireco42 13 years ago |

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.

rglover 13 years ago |

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:

http://www.frontend2010.com/video/rob-goodlatte-and-daniel-b...

Best of luck to the TinySpeck team. Brilliant stuff.

erikpukinskis 13 years ago |

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.

engrocer 13 years ago |

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.

http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/12/online-game-startup-tiny-s...

wmf 13 years ago | |

I would guess they're not completely out of money. Probably just out of ideas for how to turn the metrics around.

bazookaBen 13 years ago |

MMOs are difficult. It's a pretty daring endeavor, considering that Tiny Speck raised $5m in 2009 for just this one game.

loceng 13 years ago |

Do a Kickstarter to get funds to turn it into HTML5/CSS, etc..! I'd fund it. I'm sure many other people would, too.

richo 13 years ago |

Terrfyingly, nearly all of their engineers list a LinkedIn profile, but none link a github/bitbucket etc profile :/

indiecore 13 years ago | |

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)

Khurrum 13 years ago |

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.

rdl 13 years ago |

I wish they'd make it clear who from the team is now available/looking for work, too.

aquarion 13 years ago | |

Something like http://www.glitch.com/hire-a-genius/ ?

rdl 13 years ago | | |

Exactly like that! Thanks.

ximeng 13 years ago |

I got this today from playnice.ly, another startup that's going away:

http://playnice.ly/blog/2012/11/14/playnice-ly-closing-down-...

Monotoko 13 years ago |

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 :)

greenmountin 13 years ago | |

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.

mjsergey 13 years ago | |

booom http://www.glitch.com/start/xYi02NjEyMC1lNGZmZg/

peterhajas 13 years ago |

I remember signing up for this service years ago. They emailed me years later, saying it was ready.

They took forever to launch, but the idea seemed novel. Sad to hear that its shutting down.

jumpbug 13 years ago |

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.

stevewillows 13 years ago |

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!) :)

Khurrum 13 years ago |

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.

janulrich 13 years ago |

I'm sad to see this game go. It was really fun to play. The beautiful art and non-violent gameplay made it really a really unique whimsical game.

krakensden 13 years ago |

I'm sad to hear it- it reminded me positively of Castle Infinity, and was the most deeply humane facebook game I ever came in contact with.

klrr 13 years ago |

Release the source and let the community continue?

jeremyarussell 13 years ago | |

They list the reasons why they won't do that in the FAQ at the bottom. That said I think they are greatly underestimating their fans.

malandrew 13 years ago |

What is going to happen to all the IP?

replayzero 13 years ago |

This game was beautiful!

89a 13 years ago |

Nice art direction… but the gameplay was even more mindless than Farmville, few steps above CowClicker