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Glitch Is Closing

glitch.com

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Re: Glitch Is Closing

#21

Post by wmf »

fernly wrote: post #18

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 w…

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

Re: Glitch Is Closing

#22

Post by zalew »

jpatokal wrote: post #15

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 hostin…

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.

Re: Glitch Is Closing

#23

Post by wmf »

siaukia wrote: post #2

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…

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.

Re: Glitch Is Closing

#24

Post by scottyallen »

wmf wrote: post #19
icefox wrote: post #6

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

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

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.

Re: Glitch Is Closing

#25

Post by 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...

Best of luck to the TinySpeck team. Brilliant stuff.

Re: Glitch Is Closing

#26

Post by squidsoup »

clavalle wrote: post #9
erikpukinskis wrote: post #4

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…

Some problems, MMORPGs being one of them, are not very amenable to the lean approach.

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.

Re: Glitch Is Closing

#27

Post by [deleted] »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #4

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…

[deleted]

Re: Glitch Is Closing

#28

Post by trotsky »

peteforde wrote: post #13
erikpukinskis wrote: post #4

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…

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 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.

Re: Glitch Is Closing

#29

Post by 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.

Re: Glitch Is Closing

#30

Post by aj »

squidsoup wrote: post #26
clavalle wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some problems, MMORPGs being one of them, are not very amenable to the lean approach.

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_ type…

Also Battlemaster (http://battlemaster.org) (Text based MMORPG)
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