Topic
This has happened before.
Uru Live
There.com
Ryzom
Three MMO games that were closed. All unique in their own ways and much-loved by their developers and communities.
Uru died twice.
There almost died once, then died properly.
Ryzom died twice.
They're still alive.
Have a look at their histories:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uru_Live
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_(virtual_world)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzom#History
This post is not an advertisement. It's a pointing-out of precedents, and it's my way of begging Tiny Speck to have faith in the kind of community that their bold, creative, passionate preposterousness has created.
Replies
- I hate it that Glitch is closing. And I agree with you. Tiny Speck HAVE FAITH! I truly and absolutely hope that you will come back. Perhaps if you had come back into beta sooner, I don't know. This is breaking my heart.
- It angers me that crap like Farmvile can generate revenue and that Glitch can't.
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I think that the lesson of Myst Online/Uru Live is the most telling. There, the game existed in the form of player-hosted shards from the beginning; the central server came later. When the developers announced that the game has been cancelled, they donated the game to the community under an open source license, allowing them to develop the contents on their own.
You say that it would not have been feasible for the community to run the game on their own. Well, granted - as long as we are talking about the game server as it currently exists with many thousands of players. But how about a shard with several dozen or hundred players? [And in any case: even if you don't believe that the fans could run the game, why not release it anyway in case they can?]
(By the way: how many players have been registered, and how many are online at any given time?) - These are exactly the things I thought of.
- I'd like to add the Virtual Magic Kingdom to this. I lived in Glitch because that game, which I played for years, died. Glitch was a very similar game, and I truly did fall in love. I am so sad to see Glitch go, but I do think that it will be for good.
- If they do re-open the doors, I wonder if they'll do a rollback?
- If they do bring back the game, I would like to see is reset (or at least taken back a few in game years). What initially lured me in was the street projects, but by the time I got in the game, they were done. It would be awesome if could happen again.
- quinn, this was about dead games that came back, not dead games that the community still mourns but will never come back. :/ i kinda miss vmk, tho i know im looking at it through nostalga goggles.
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Excuse me, but There.com is back up and running. Not only that, its doing great! They are begging greeters to come back because there are too many signing up and not enough people to show them the ropes. So instead of going to wikipedia for their (there) info, try just going to There.com website.
(eta: Michael Wilson (ceo and owner of There.com) runs a blog, too. This is where he will post all the financials for There.com so that the users will always know if its in the black, if it is running into the red, we know and can help get it back in the black. Its no longer a money sink because its also run in the cloud... ) -
Hi Innie. :)
I did include a link to There's website, albeit sort of non-obvious: it's on the word "still" in the sentence "They're still alive."
Michael Wilson is one of my heroes. - I didnt notice that! ;)
- And you may add Vside to the list (no idea if my old character still works in the reborn version)
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I was under the impression that Glitch was based on GNE (Game Neverending), but with more improved graphics. It could be said that Glitch was GNE version 2.0. So I'm still hoping that someday in the future, TS will still re-open Glitch, maybe it won't be called be Glitch anymore, but the core gameplay will stay the same, with a lot of new improvements. Why stop when they were just about to win the game?
Hopefully. Probably. Someday. Still hoping. - Bump.
- Another bump. I am sad that Tiny Speck completely ignored this.
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People. It has already been said. First of all, 45K would pay maybe one staffer for a year. There are over 30 staff at TS. And if there was an Indiegogo every single day it wouldn't earn 45K. And that's just staff. There's server space to buy or rent. Bandwidth. Backups.
They can't afford to run the game. You need to accept this.
I'm sure they are in pain over this project shutting down as well, and all this "please keep it going" and "we can raise enough money" is not helping. Let it go. It's too much money to run. Faith can't feed their families. -
I think the argument is more at this point that even though they're sure no one could run the game, why aren't they releasing it anyway and letting people attempt--even if they fail--to get it going on small, private servers? Is it the website vs. flash integration? I don't know. And maybe there's some legal/copyright issue at work here, but I wish they'd just donate the assets/code to the community and let someone TRY to get a small private server up and going. I tell myself they have their reasons, and likely they do, but it's frustrating not to hear what those are.
I'm not asking for Glitch to keep going--I've accepted that isn't happening despite twice now having had dreams where it was and waking up in great joy, then disappointment--I'm just asking for them to give the community the opportunity to set up private servers, if that can be done and it's legally feasible. But maybe it's not legally feasible :P -
@Thaumatrope: It's more than just "some legal/copyright issue". It's the basis for Tiny Speck's future. Glitch includes messaging technologies that TS has developed as part of the game, and, much like the Neverending Game's sharing and photo technologies turned into flickr.com, TS will be financially capitalizing on those things. It's not about to release them into the wild for free. And it's either this or TS pretty much ceases to exist entirely, so there's not much of a choice. As it is, they're just laying off the Glitch staff.
And, as others have said, Glitch is insanely complicated. That's part of why it's shutting down: TS wasn't able to figure out how to run it cheap enough fast enough. It's a resource hog of a game that requires a massive back-end to track literally everything everyone does — every single petting, every single herb harvesting, every single quest completed, every single shrine donation. Maybe someday this kind of infrastructure will be cheap, and it can just be stuck on some AWS servers to live in the cloud...but it's going to be a long time from now. - bump. (and I hope someone has cross-posted these games in to the master game list -thingy - I havent checked too busy trying to enjoy glitch to the end ) .
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"And, as others have said, Glitch is insanely complicated. That's part of why it's shutting down: TS wasn't able to figure out how to run it cheap enough fast enough. It's a resource hog of a game that requires a massive back-end to track literally everything everyone does — every single petting, every single herb harvesting, every single quest completed, every single shrine donation."
- Jannisary
Congratulations, you described an MMO. An MMO like any of the three I mentioned at the top of the thread.
It is indeed most likely that the real reason TS hasn't seriously considered alternatives to completely removing Glitch from existence is that there are components in it that they can use later to recoup their losses. That's perfectly fine. They deserve profit. What's disappointing is that they have made bullshit excuses* instead of coming out and telling us that. - @Jann: see, I didn't realize that they were planning on capitalizing on aspects of the game. That explains a lot.
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* An example of a compound bullshit excuse:
"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. Any massively multiplayer game is several orders of magnitude more complex than a multiplayer game (and those are usually an order of magnitude more complex than a single player game). The state of the world changes hundreds of thousands of times a second, and each of those changes has to be immediately saved in a way that is safe and redundant. Most of those changes — decrease in a chicken's lifespan, the regeneration of a rock, the health of a tree, the movement of every player — have to be sent from server to server and from server to player's local computers. If you're in a busy place in Glitch, your computer might be receiving hundreds or even thousands of messages about stuff that's happening around you every second."
And? That hasn't stopped other MMO games from surviving in a community-run form (Uru, SWGEmu, Earth & Beyond) or being maintained by a skeleton crew (There, Istaria, Ryzom).
The more popular illegal World of Warcraft servers constitute a relevant example as well.
"It takes a full-time team of competent engineers & technical operations personnel just to keep the game open."
See above.
"Even if there was a competent team that was willing to work on it full time for free,"
You severely underestimate the Glitch community and the general willingness of people to work full-time on something they care about for free. Clearly you have no familiarity with open source projects.
"it would take months to train them."
You wouldn't have to train anyone. People would figure things out eventually on their own.
"Even then, the cost of hosting the servers would be prohibitively expensive."
You don't have to worry about that.