
Glitch Is Closing - pretz
http://www.glitch.com/closing/
======
jashkenas
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
Well put. First time I see a candid shutdown notice with emotion and humility
to this degree.

------
trotsky
_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
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.

------
siaukia
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?

~~~
wmf
_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.

~~~
bonaldi
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)

------
dgreensp
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.

~~~
vostrocity
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.

~~~
riffraff
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".

------
fernly
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
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
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.

------
jpatokal
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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
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.

------
ericz
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
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
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
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
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
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.

~~~
AJ007
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.

~~~
guiambros
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.

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

------
Pkeod
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
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
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>

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

------
pdknsk
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&...](http://www.famitsu.com/cominy/?m=pc&a=page_fh_diary&target_c_diary_id=36043)

They should put this on their resume. Picture taken, and drawn, by Keita
Takahashi.

~~~
89a
I was disappointed to hear when he joined there, knew it would end like this
and would rather he build his own things.

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

~~~
elisee
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
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?

------
marknutter
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
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
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...](http://www.frontend2010.com/video/rob-goodlatte-and-daniel-burka)

Best of luck to the TinySpeck team. Brilliant stuff.

------
erikpukinskis
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.

~~~
peteforde
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?

~~~
trotsky
I doubt there are too many, but from memory these guys pretty much did exactly
that:

<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.

------
engrocer
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...](http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/12/online-game-startup-tiny-speck-
raises-10-7m-from-andreessen-horowitz-and-accel/)

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

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

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

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

~~~
aquarion
Something like <http://www.glitch.com/hire-a-genius/> ?

~~~
rdl
Exactly like that! Thanks.

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

[http://playnice.ly/blog/2012/11/14/playnice-ly-closing-
down-...](http://playnice.ly/blog/2012/11/14/playnice-ly-closing-down-in-the-
new-year/)

------
Monotoko
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
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.

------
peterhajas
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
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
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
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
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
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
Release the source and let the community continue?

~~~
jeremyarussell
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
What is going to happen to all the IP?

------
replayzero
This game was beautiful!

------
89a
Nice art direction… but the gameplay was even more mindless than Farmville,
few steps above CowClicker

