Topic
My 2 cents on the shutdown.....
Since the announcement of the shut down some things have bothered me. (I know there was more to the decision that what I am about to say but I just want to air this) The first is I feel the game was never given a chance to open back up again. Why didn't open the game up for everyone again? Invites are ok but it keeps it quite exclusive.
The second is about the "death" of flash. Just because Apple says flash is dying doesn't mean it's true. Look at all the sites that still use flash and are still extremely popular. Sure people would love to play glitch on tablets, but most of those have regular computers as well.
It reminds me of the Hot dog seller in a recession story:
The story was about a middle aged man who ran a hot-dog stand just off a big freeway. He had owned and run the stand for many years. The economy hit a recession. But he just kept selling his hot dogs. Then his son returned from college for summer vacations and started talking to his father about the recession. The father hadn’t really noticed it. The son was telling him all the things he should do to survive the recession. Well, the father thought I’d better listen to my boy he’s almost finished a degree and a very smart boy. The son said he should reduce his stock. The father did. He should cut his prices. The father did. He should buy cheaper buns and dogs. The father followed his son’s advice. And soon, sure enough the business started to slow. Then the son said he needed to diversify, cut down his hours of running the stand and look for some other ways of making income. The father did. And, funny thing, the hot dog stand business did fail, just like his son said it would.
I feel tiny speck threw in the towel too early. They should have at least released it again to see what would happen.
Just my two cents, I know it won't make a difference and there were probably a million other reasons to close.
Replies
- shouldn't that be "my 2 currants"? And now that you mention it, how come we never had hot dogs!
- I am also baffled by the decision to close two months into open beta, when TS made no announcement about the transition and even I had no idea it was open.
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To answer your questions:
1) Glitch did start advertising and was getting new people to the site. The problem is that they weren't staying past the tutorial. They got very, very few new players for the number of ads they ran. You might find this article helps you understand what they were facing.
www.gamasutra.com/view/news...
2) It's not as much that Flash is dying, as Glitch doesn't run very well in Flash. Flash limitations are why the game lags and gradually bogs down if you play for a while, especially in areas with a lot of players which are the most fun for some people. Plus Flash is dying and it's not Apple saying it, it's Adobe. Adobe has stopped support for Android Flash. Yeah it will be around for a while and if Glitch was retaining players (see #1) TS would probably have kept plugging away. Stoot also said Tiny Speck can't afford to shut down the game and spend 18-24 months to rewrite the whole thing in a different client like Unity.
If they released Glitch again, Tiny Speck probably would probably lose so much money they would go out of business entirely. That would be a bad thing because Stoot has ideas for other cool stuff. Maybe there will even be another game somewhere down the road and it will run better than Glitch. :-)