Topic
Gamasutra article with Stoot interview
I wanted to share this interview with Stoot on Gamasutra. It made me feel better about the how/why of the shutdown.
www.gamasutra.com/view/news...
Stoot says at the end he might try a game again in the distant future. I had tons of fun with Glitch and if there ever is another game, I sure hope I get to play it.
Replies
- I am sure that if any of us had a huge amount of excess cash we would be giving it to stoot to start the game over in a different platform, but I don't think any of us are multi-millionaires.
-
Janitch: As much as you may not believe it, we're not actually stupid and have hopefully spent a lot more time thinking about it than you have :)
The issue was not with getting people to click on ads and try the game - it was getting players who tried the tutorial to keep playing. - Gamer retention. Trends in gaming says that 9 out of 10 people who try out a game don't come back a second time, those who do tend to stick around. I think I shared something like that on my G+ a while back.
- Sorry Bees, I didn't mean to suggest you are stupid, but I'm in the SEM business and I've seen far too many campaigns waste money because of misunderstanding the audience or how to appeal to them. (We make bid optimization software, but as they say: GIGO.)
-
Before Glitch, the only PC game I liked was Sims.
Our home acquired XBox 360, and games with violence, cruelty, murder, sex, non-stop action, etc. were played ad nauseum by my DH and son. They loved them; I hated them.
Every few months, I would search for nonviolent PC games. There are many, and they're great ... if you're a child.
I stumbled upon Glitch during one of these searches. It was discussed in a forum. I begged for an invite and was very lucky to be sent one.
I was dismayed to find it was a side-loading platform which required your character to jump and collide with things or negotiate terrain. I immediately thought, "OMG ... this works just like Super Mario Brothers ... a game Kevin [my adult son] played as a child!"
Dreary, dreary, dreary was my game play experience in Ur until a Glitchen - out of the blue - dropped by to say hello. We conversed a bit (very exciting to me!), then he took me to many fun, amazing places. "Wow!" I thought. "I've got to find a way to get to these places by myself!"
Soon, I made many more friends and conversed with them, too. This aspect of the game came just in time, as I was so frustrated with trying to get direct answers from Live Chat that I came very close to just walking away.
I will remember my time here with fondness, and will continue to search for a game that suits me well .. but I know it will be a long time before anything better than Glitch comes along. -
I have no idea why anyone would confuse one person's informal polling in global with many people's thousands of forum posts, or why anyone would spend three weeks watching me (how creepy!), but yes, I did ask for other people's opinions about the mini-map, for a number of reasons (though I wasn't asked why), yes, it did directly impact me (it badly broke my chat interface), and yes, I did express my own opinion when asking others for theirs, because I learned long ago that if no one's brave enough to utter a negative opinion first, some others who hold them are likely to keep mum. It did take three or four weeks for the map/tp/chat mess to be fixed. It only took a minute to find this mild example of someone expressing a frustration with the game and being met with hostility from someone who doesn't even understand the problem. "How in hell do they get in your way?" You can "headdesk" and "facepalm" all you want, but yes, it has always been true that all sorts of things can interfere with greeting, including feats and quests, and the lovely, friendly person who was expressing her frustration would surely have explained further if she'd been asked nicely. My comments were repetitive, as were other people's, new and old players alike, because many aspects of the game never improved. My criticisms were never knee-jerk, though some may have found them unreasonable; however, in that article, stoot says a lot of what I've been saying, and what others have been saying, for years. I guess that makes us all unreasonable people.
Here's a whole thread from nearly two years ago in which more than twenty testers discussed and debated various aspects of the game without ever being rude or dismissive of each other's opinions. It IS possible to disagree politely. There IS always room for another person's opinion, even if it's based on feelings which you personally do not have. I'm not saying that no one was rude early on, but the now-constant theme of "don't criticize TS" didn't appear for a long time, and when it did, it took strong hold, partially because a lot of thoughtful testers were not interested in getting into shouting matches. "Apologist" isn't necessarily the right term, but it's close. The main attitude was, "I'm afraid that if we're honest about the game's faults, it will seem as if we don't love Glitch, and it will disappear," and the secondary one, which is what I was reacting to in what I saw repeatedly from Saucelah/Red Sauce, went something like, "You are only criticizing certain aspects of the game because you are too stupid to understand TS' Big Plan; I understand it and/or have enough blind faith to know that it'll all work out in the end, but you Just Don't Get It, so you should shut up and stop annoying the important people." Of course, I never said or meant to imply that any one person had never criticized the game. Even the most inappropriately optimistic staff member could occasionally be caught admitting that something was wrong.
That old thread also happens to discuss the game's lack of storyline and long-term goals. Unfortunately, most of the thread still applies, and some of the sentiments expressed there are similar to those expressed in the Gamasutra article's comments section. They're the sentiments I've continued to express, and others have continued to express, because they were never addressed. It really is too bad that it didn't all work out in the end.
As for advertising, as soon as I heard that there were ads for the game, I went looking for them. It turned out that my normal browser blocked them quite effectively, and I have still never seen one (I tried another browser, without ad-blocking scripts installed, but the ads may have been pulled by that point). Many adults block ads; children are perhaps not as likely to, which might be part of why there was a sudden, visible influx of very young players in the last couple of months. There was no TV, radio, or print advertising. My "grieving" began and ended around un-launching time, last year; however, the closing notice did bring me a moment of surprise, because there was never any big "We're open!" announcement, no press release, and no media coverage of the relaunch, if there was one. That, coupled with the fact that the game was closed to the public much more than it was open, leaves many players feeling as if Glitch never had a chance to find a wider audience. The marketing efforts are being questioned not because anyone's stupid, but rather because the campaign was largely invisible to the players... and if the players aren't the target audience, then who is?
(And yes, stoot may have made the final decision to close, but many players have tended to pin EVERYTHING on him and on him alone, which is just silly!) -
I posted the Gamasutra link to Reddit, and I got responses from gamers who were confused by the content of the game and what they were supposed to do. They also felt annoyed at the comparison of this game to Diablo and Civilization, and said that considering them "just clicking" really missed the points behind those games. I suppose the new tutorial was supposed to be an effort to remedy this, but it was too little too late.
I don´t run adblockers on my laptop, and I never saw a single Glitch ad. I haven´t seen anyone here comment that they came to Glitch for reasons other than word of mouth.
And I'm still baffled by the decision to close less than two months (!) into open beta without any concerted effort to try and fix the problems encountered or seeking more player input. Without reading the forums, I probably wouldn't have even noticed that Glitch left closed beta at all. -
I did not come through word of mouth. I follow Kotaku, RPS, Joystiq, and some blogs of individual critics like Tobold in order to find new games. There was a lot of buzz about Glitch last October when the game originally released. The reviews weren't that good but the YouTube trailer intrigued me, particularly the giants. I never saw any mention of open beta or re-release on any of the blogs I follow. I have been confused since the closing announcement as to why there was never a re-launch press release to generate buzz on the gaming sites again.
I also run ad blockers, though it seems like I saw an ad on Facebook once. It might have been on my iPod. -
Maybe I misspoke there. I followed from Joystiq, which is mainly targeted at mainstream gamers, at the tip of a blogger so it wasn't really word of mouth. (But people take Kotaku seriously????) I meant that there was no formal advertising for the game.
But let's take a look at the numbers. According to Glitchium, only about 70k players visited more players. I'm not even going to guess how many players it would take to make this game sustainable, but I know that's not it. This game barely scraped the surface in terms of potential players. Forget about long-term player retention, this game never got the players to retain in the first place. -
What saddens me most about this discussion is the nagging feeling that everybody is right to a certain extent.
1) Did Tiny Speck attempt to solve their problems as if their very jobs depended upon it? Of course they did. However, it's possible that they fell victim to what I call the "Jurassic Park effect". They considered every conceivable thing, but ipso facto, there was no way they could consider things they couldn't conceive.
2) Would asking the player base for help have made a difference? There is a possibility that it might have. One thing abundantly apparent is the players who are most dedicated to Glitch generally tend to have giant brains. Heck, the nature of the game itself is designed to appeal to really intelligent people.
Of course, option 2 would place TS squarely on the horns of a major dilemma. We players don't have all the information that TS has, but that information is their own private company property. It would be disastrous for them to make it public. Possibly some people could have seen something outside of the Jurassic Park effect that could have helped. Maybe, but we'll never know.
So, we're all caught between a rock and a hard place and it's lose-lose for everybody. It's just extremely sad. -
"They also felt annoyed at the comparison of this game to Diablo and Civilization, and said that considering them "just clicking" really missed the points behind those games."
I thought the same when I read that. Especially in Civ games, each suboptimal click can have huge consequences on the outcome. You have to think and use strategies. Diablo plays heavily with the reward center of your brain and you have to optimize your character to play the endgame properly
In Glitch you cannot do anything wrong. The only thing you can optimize is the time you need to reach your goals. Bad clicks don't get punished.
Imagine Glitch without the lovely art, devs and with a "normal" community. Not many people would play it for it's gameplay alone. A lot of my friends stopped playing after months or did nothing else than chatting anymore because the gameplay felt boring to them once they got to see most of the stuff.
Many of you might disagree on the Glitch-gameplay part ,which is fine, opinions differ. But for me (esp. after the introduction of homestreets) the core gameplay felt more like a boring single player game. -
I played Glitch for a about three months back in 2011, got bored, and then returned around the start of July. Incidentally, that's when stoot said the gameplay was consistently fun. But like I said, I think it was too little, too late.
I want people to keep in mind that even though my comments are very critical, I'm not blaming anyone in particular for the game's closing. Even if TS had done everything right, I still think there would be a big chance that this game would've still failed. However, I still think it's worth looking into why this is the case and what we can do to ensure there is more diversity in the MMO genre in the future - I dont think the game was given a fair chance, as it was shut down barely out of Open Beta. Im not blaming anyone either....it was a myriad of miscellaneous circumstances that led to its demise. In the end i hope Glitch influences ppl making new games, both in what worked and what didnt...and why. Theres ideas and ideals that worked here,which would be a nice addition to MMO's. As for the mistakes, those can be learned from as well.
-
Good post Flowerry Pott. Well stated and yes it's extremely sad.
Also, if getting players to love the game after the tutorial was the goal we may not even have been the right people to ask for ideas. Forum members are the super-dedicated players, not the people who tried the tutorial and moved on.
I don't take Kotaku seriously but I do sometimes find it amusing. :-) -
1) I apologize for not sharing this article with you any sooner.
2) Tiny Speck, the core company, is not shutting down.
I didn't read the whole thread to see if the second part was stated somewhere.
