Topic
IYO, why didn't it work?
I enjoyed Glitch a lot. I reached level 52 without "trying" to. I wandered around, a lot. I built a full tower without using housing routes. I loved the art, the vistas, the spaces, beyond telling.
I don't want to jump straight away into the deep end of the pool here, but here goes: the game wasn't making money, the creators deemed it never would. WHAT WOULD HAVE MADE IT WORK?
Yeah, allcaps, tacky. But srsly. Glitch was amazing, unique. Games of this caliber aren't imagined, created or maintained for free. If we want more of them in our lives, then let's talk about how that can happen.
Here, I'll go first: it never occurred to me Glitch would disappear. Had I known it was in such serious peril, I would have paid/donated/purchased something much, much earlier.
Replies
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I kept thinking that there wasn't anything addictive after I leveled up high. But that was before they introduced all they had worked on as the game closed. The social aspect was a huge part. And no destruction. Those two things make it less desirable to guys in general, who are big gamers. HECK I don't know. F***.
I wanna know why too! -
If there was a Like button for your response I totally would have hit it.
I enjoy a good FPS game as much as the next gamer, but I *refuse* to believe that's the only way to be profitable. Maybe the lack of killing and battle hurt Glitch, but that's an easy out. Minecraft seems to have surmounted that.
In any case, thanks for the reply and I look forward to hearing others! -
I'd like to know the answer to this.
I've left very many of the "popular" MMOs because of the grinding and killing and lack of community. Some were free and some were ptp. In those games, for me, chat was more of an annoyance because all it was was people spamming goods for sale or griefers belittling others. It took me a long time to talk with people in game here for fear that it would be just like the other MMOs. But it definitely wasn't the same. Not only was Glitch beautiful and the community wonderful but gameplay was ... comforting and made me feel good, on many levels.
So, if anyone with the "know" can explain what it was that led to Glitch's "failure" (in the monetary sense as it never failed me as a game) I would be very interested the learn the answer(s), too. -
@Kridla We needed more players. Simple as that. I believe our average revenue per player was good. We just did not have close to enough players. So in that sense, it makes one wonder what we needed to do to bring in and keep the players we were losing rather than figure out how to make more money per player since the numbers were pretty good there.
Although its encouraged to not dwell on the things that went wrong, most of us probably can't help but think about it. I'm not sure if any of these things would've made a difference in the end, but these are a few things I've been thinking of the last couple weeks. (Note: I'm speaking only for myself and not for Tiny Speck)
Smaller team, more player-created content. I think we desperately needed player created content, quests, jobs, items, streets, etc. We never figured out the way to do it or if we did, we didn't implement them. If we had a smaller team that focused on creating methods for players to create content rather than the large team we had creating linear content, we would not only have a smaller payroll but also give higher level players more things to do.
Tutorial-ish tutorial, cloudy goals. Glitch had very poor retention for new players. We could've taken a lesson from Skyrim or Animal Crossing, two games I feel do the tutorial properly in different ways. Skyrim throws you right in the middle of the story. You're engrossed right away and can't quit from the first minute. Animal Crossing immediately puts you in debt to pay off your house. You have something to do right away. Our tutorial was very long and felt very tutorial-ish. And when you come out of it, you didn't know what to do next. I think we should've made you build your house off the bat. Once you explored the world collecting materials to build your first house, meeting foxes and sloths, gathering wood from enchanted trees, you would've invested time into the game and your character and seen the world without knowing you were in a tutorial. We were making progress towards a new tutorial but time got us.
Virality. A very high percentage of our players are very anti-social media. Sure we could've appealed to you guys to invite more players, spread the word, but I think we would've eventually fallen back into the same hole after it wore off. The fact that Glitch didn't have any natural virality did not help us reach the numbers we needed to succeed.
In the end, all this may not even have made a difference. So who knows! Maybe it just wasn't the right time for a game like Glitch. I feel like the future of social games is heading towards the Glitch-y mentality. Social games actually becoming social, more real-time collab. I just think Glitch was a game of tomorrow on yesterday's technology. We should try again in 2017. :) -
I thought there wasn't any marketing or promotion of the game made so far. So maybe that is the reason why there was a lack of players.
Also I do not understand why it is impossible to switch the game to other technology, for example unity or html5. There are a lot of different solutions these days, I beleive.
Of course I do not know the whole situation from inside, but just when a lot of new content and imporvements were launched the developers made a decision to shut everything down, very strange indeed. Maybe they could give Glitch another chance in the end... Taking into account a very loyal community. -
That's interesting, Kukubee - I had been thinking that part of the problem was the lack of incentive to subscribe, but it sounds like that wasn't the issue, Although, I don't think a better subscriber conversion rate would have hurt, and I suppose if you've subscribed to a game you're more likely to stay. but that only applies if you're losing seasoned players, not those in the first hours of play.
From what I've read, it does sound like it was getting people in through the door that was the problem. On other forums I've seen people saying they were waiting for invites that never came, and were still waiting when they heard the game was closing, so maybe things were a bit disjointed there? But enough to make a difference? Who knows..
I think the virality is an issue, but I'm not sure it's a case of Glitch not having virality, just that the usual channels didn't work as well as you'd expect.. I've noticed some folk on game sites say that Glitch was rubbish because you couldn't kill things (I'm paraphrasing) and more saying, 'This game sounds great! Why hadn't I heard of it before?' so maybe more could have been done through the usual gaming channels, but whether that would have been enough on its own, I don't know.
I've seen lots of folk here say that Glitch was their first MMO, that they wouldn't play another, that they weren't 'gamers'. I'm in that position - I'm not a 'gamer' but I loved Glitch passionately from the start (I think I was L5 or 6 when I logged off from my first session *blush*). I don't think the friend who invited me is a gamer, and I'm pretty sure the six or seven mates of hers that joined at the same time as me (3 weeks before the closure announcement) weren't gamers either. The people I was showing the game to weren't gamers. I think making a game for non-gamers is a marvellous and wonderful thing, but it's a bugger to market it, because the people who you're after don't think they need your product.
FWIW, I think there's a difference between dwelling on the things that went wrong and trying to learn from the past. In my incarnation as a project manager my mantra would be 'Your project's not completed until you've done your 'Lessons Learned'.
While it's all really raw is the wrong time for introspection, and you can't be dispassionate in those circumstances. Some of the discussions on here have been horse-floggy and speculative with a heavy side serving of recrimination, and none of the staff need that right now. But I would really encourage those behind the game to save these discussions and come back to them in a year or 18 months, when the dust has settled and the wounds are less raw and pick them over and see how much truth there is in them. Because if Glitch really was 'tomorrow on yesterday's technology' (and for the little it's worth, I think you're right) then yes, you should absolutely have another go. And at that point, you'll be really glad of your Lessons Learned file from 2013. ;) -
Kukubee, you had natural virility though!
DONG! - I tried inviting my friends. Only one hung around past the tutorial and she went back to Minecraft pretty quickly. My other friends who play games were looking for a challenge of some sort, and Glitch really didn't offer a challenge at all so they didn't make it past the tutorial. To be honest, I wouldn't have stuck around Glitch very long myself except that I joined last October when the old street projects were still going. The street projects were great fun and I got caught up in the challenge of trying to leaderboard.
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I think this a really key point -- having something to do is vital. Challenge and accomplishment are vital. They certainly existed in Glitch, but you had to find them for yourself and obviously most people don't stick around that long. I don't think I would have stuck around long term if a friend hadn't introduced me to the Rook attacks within my first few days. Those caught my attention long enough for the rest of the game to suck me in, but even the Rook got old after a while.
I always wanted to see the Rook attacks have more of a consequence, and would have loved to see the attacks tied to the street projects. Make the Rook attacks considerably more difficult to defeat, and if you don't defeat him in time, he breaks the street, and then players have to rebuild it through a street project.
And I never did understand why all those regions started being introduced with no street projects. I'm sure there were reasons, but it seemed like a big waste. So yes, more things to do that have significant effects on 1) Ur itself and 2) the player's individual game. Even silly things like having a lot more ongoing leaderboards for random actions (most deaths, most time on no-no, most stuff fed to pigs, Rook attacks, etc.)
I hand-guided a couple of my close RL friends through the tutorial towards the end -- one took to it immediately, but eventually drifted away because she ran out of obvious things to do. The other got through the tutorial, but then had no idea what to do next. I tried to encourage her to explore (didn't help that she got dumped in Kajuu, like I was as a newbie), but she never came back. I did the tutorial as an alt myself after that, and I have to agree that it was too long and should have taken place more in the real Ur so that the new player is already moving around and exploring instead of interrupting that momentum. Also, send a Greeter to them automatically. I don't think either of my friends took much notice of the stick in their inventory, but they both could have used the guidance after they got dumped out of the tutorial (I mean, they had me sitting over their shoulders in RL, but there was a lot I couldn't show them properly without being in-game).
Glitch didn't have any natural virality
Gotta disagree on this at least partially. I think Glitch did have a great deal of viral potential, but it was arrested by various factors. Word about it spread through my little corner of the internet quite quickly, but invitations were hard to come by at the time, and for long stretches of time while I was playing, new players couldn't join at all. So I would tell people, yeah, this is the greatest game ever... but you can't join yet, sorry. And by the time they could, they'd long forgotten about it.
Also, just because existing players tended to be anti-social media doesn't mean that there aren't loads of people on social media who would love Glitch. Millions of people are off playing Zynga games on Facebook, and many of them would love an alternative to Zynga's annoyances. Those are the people Glitch needed to reach, not WoW gamers. I had just quit Farmville and Mafia Wars out of exasperation when a friend mentioned Glitch. I went to the Glitch website and instantly knew I was going to love it, and luckily, my friend still had invitations.
The promo videos, however, sucked. I didn't watch them (actually, was there ever even more than one?) until I'd been in Glitch a very long time, but I thought they were boring and didn't promote any of the really cool things about Glitch. I barely recognized it as the same game. So there wasn't really a product that could go viral -- but there could have been, if something clever had been designed for it.
In short: Tiny Speck needed a marketing professional on staff. Or at least a consultant. Desperately.
And I would also recommend a formal mechanism to get ongoing feedback from the users. There were long-time players out there on the forums and in global who had some really spot-on critique, and if their feedback could have gotten to TS early on, maybe it would have helped.
I just think Glitch was a game of tomorrow on yesterday's technology. We should try again in 2017.
You are right, but oh, please don't wait that long! :-) -
"In short: Tiny Speck needed a marketing professional on staff. Or at least a consultant. Desperately."
that wasn't a real issue.
the issue was that there was nothing to do inside the game that was worth sharing, or was even comprehensible, outside the game.
thus, there was no incentive to really share.
the game was also designed around solo quests, solo achievements and solo grinding in such a way that there was really no incentive to invite anyone to play.
i was *embarrassed* to invite anybody i know to play glitch. that was a HUGE problem. the barrier to entry was way too high.
also, the tutorial only fucking sucked because it highlighted aspects of the game that fucking sucked and sent the message, minute zero, that the game was a grind-fest. this wasn't so much a fault of the tutorial as a fault of the game. if the game wasn't such a grind-fest, the tutorial would have [for the most part] sorted itself out and served to encourage play rather than scare so many people away.
other than the clothes, the primary creative outlet for most players was house decoration. i LOVED decorating my house when that system was being tested. i spent hours and hours decorating and nudging furniture to get it set just right. THAT was a "grind" i could enjoy because my mind was constantly active during it.
after the house decorating came out of testing, i never decorated my house once. this wasn't because i'm too cheap to subscribe, but because it wasn't worth the grind to build wall segments.
i could see myself inviting friends to a game were they can decorate and share and invite and do communal play, but not one where i know they are going to have to waste four hours button mashing their laptop to make a fucking "lamp".
everything got hooked into the grind-fest and it is embarrassing to invite anyone to a grind-fest.
"There were long-time players out there on the forums and in global who had some really spot-on critique, and if their feedback could have gotten to TS early on, maybe it would have helped."
they heard everything. it is just that executing on feedback is really, really difficult. -
probably the most cutting and true criticism of glitch was on metafilter after the shutdown was announced:
www.metafilter.com/121858/G...
"I'm going to just say this: This game was an awful trap and waste of time for smart people. It was literally sweatshop online except that it didn't contribute to keeping your family alive. I am sad for those who worked on it, but happy to see it go. To all those who loved it: I cannot fault you, nor argue that my pursuits are more valuable. I am speaking from my own experience, and yours may have been very different."
i have to agree with that quite a bit. especially about feeling sorry for those who worked on it. so much talent devoted to propping up such generic, flawed game design. -
The trailers could have been better, yeah. I know when I first heard about Glitch a few months ago, I watched the main trailer and it was a bit off-putting. The voice was annoying and the giants were a bit confusing, creepy. Of course I eventually played the game, loved it, and now the song is catchy. :)
So the song seems to appeal to existing players, but not new ones. I ended up loving Glitch because of how weird it was, but I guess the trailer didn't showcase the, uh, right kind of weirdness. What hooked me once I played was the whimsy of the tutorial. Walking on the clouds, then down into the black void to meet a 2-headed flamingo and an egg-munching dustbunny, all while that quirky tune was playing. Like Alice in Wonderland Online or something!
But I know that wasn't enough for everybody, so it's a shame the tutorial revamp Kukubee mentioned never happened. -
I don't think the player base is adverse to social media. I know many people on here who are well hooked into social media. I think the problem was/is that a marketing scheme built on users spamming their social media isn't workable especially with the type of person found on glitch. Some of this may be embarrassment - how much do i want to let my friends know I sit around patting trees and nibbling pigs in my spare time? Some of it may be because so much of glitch is an in-joke - it wouldn't be relevant to my off glitch friends. Some of it may also be that there is an increasing feeling among the web savvy, and i would count many people i know on here among that class, that social media posts designed as advertising, and with no other redeeming value, are socially unacceptable especially when it comes with a benefit to the person posting it such as with the "invite your friends" feat.
Another major problems in my eyes is that the game wasn't open to new players for long periods of time and when it finally opened up again there was no big announcement and even very active players sometimes didn't know it was open to the public. I heard for several people after it ended that they had wanted to try it and hadn't because it was close or invite only. I personally was also reluctant to post about glitch on my social media when people would not be able to join or would need an invite. It seems to me that you have a certain window to catch the public imagination and the going back to invite only beta for such a long time was a serious setback.
As to the gameplay aspects I really disagree with what has been said above. There was a lot of great aspects of the game besides the grind fest but they were some of the hardest for newer players to find and become involved with. I think as the game progressed it got harder to get into while at the same time losing its challenge. I joined over a year ago and buying bags and a house were both challenges. At that time even finding a house available was difficult because they were bought so fast. But buying my first house in glitch is one of my favorite memories and let me become invested in the game in a meaningful way that i think was lacking for newer characters.
Not that any of this should be seen as detracting from how wonderful glitch was. The game did so many things right especially in so many small ways. It was a true join and a privilege to be a part of it. -
a little thing that maybe only pertains to me..
while i loved making and sharing glitch snaps within glitch, sharing them outside of glitch felt weird because the snaps had all these weird random quoin things caught in odd animation frames marring otherwise interesting, quirky landscapes. -
while i loved making and sharing glitch snaps within glitch, sharing them outside of glitch felt weird because the snaps had all these weird random quoin things caught in odd animation frames marring otherwise interesting, quirky landscapes.
Clear the quoins first, noob. -
"Clear the quoins first, noob."
whenever i did, they'd come back by the time i had framed the shot i wanted. -
These are really interesting perspectives. I teach a class on social media, so I do a lot of thinking about virality. I agree both with the people who say "I was embarrassed" and those who say there was more native virality than Kuk suggests.
I play games a fair amount, but I don't let them post to my social media stream, because I don't want my friends to know I spend enough time playing bejeweled or whatever to get that score. So in that sense, I didn't want people to know I made it to level whatever on glitch.
On the other hand, I think the return to beta, while wise because of the tutorial problem, meant the game's inherent virality never got a fair shot. And people like me might have been able to push past our squeamishness and share something if a straightforward appeal was presented. I like many balked at the "invite your friends" feat, but a gentle suggestion that we should invite some friends, detached from in-game rewards might have gone over better than you think. -
I gotta agree about the housing issue. I think I mentioned in another thread that one of my proudest Glitch accomplishments was buying my little 4000c treehouse. It was difficult, and it wasn't much compared to what we have now, but it gave me something significant to strive for. As much as I like the flexibility of the new houses/home streets, I think having a house and furniture handed to you as a newbie might not have been the best way to go. No immediate goals to work for, and the skills/resources for additional upgrading, building, and decorating are too far off at that point.
That metafilter post was really interesting. I don't agree that that particular quote was the best summation by a long shot, but definitely many other posters there touched on many of the same issues we've been mentioning here, along with other interesting points. But I see that one of the devs was posting in that thread, so hopefully TS has read the whole thing and already taken on any of the points they find valuable.
And I want to say again to any staff still reading here that any critique on my part comes from a place of love for this game and all the amazing work you've done, and a desire to see you succeed if you try again someday. Obviously we all love Glitch a lot, since we're still skulking around a dying website four days after the game closed. :-D -
Funny, the main trailer is why I tried the game. The reviews weren't very good but I loved the artwork on the giants and wanted to see what they were.
Striatic, I'm confused as to how you think Glitch was any more or less grindy and time wasting than other MMOs, or even other computer games. -
To my pleasant surprise there's been some good discussion in here. (I say surprise because there've been a lot of inane WHY DON'T YOU JUST... comments posted since the shutdown announcement which were a) idiotic, b) comically unaware of what it takes to run a real business, and/or c) already answered in the FAQ.) I'm especially grateful to Kukubee who took the time to tell us his thoughts.
Kukubee says: If we had a smaller team that focused on creating methods for players to create content rather than the large team we had creating linear content, we would not only have a smaller payroll but also give higher level players more things to do.
I'm going to betray my Oldness here, but I think democratizing game content is overrated. I'm thinking of all those hundreds of hours I spent trawling through shitty Neverwinter Nights levels trying to find one that wasn't stupid / unplayable / filled with typos / appallingly sexist and juvenile / jarringly anachronistic / all of the above. To use K's own examples, how much of Skyrim and Animal Crossing were player-created? Skyrim was moddable but the art, plot, and characters, for all their flaws, were Bethesda's. I'm a firm believer in letting professionals create the content I pay for; I didn't spend $60 on a subscription just to read a story written by some eleven-year-old ;) with a login. I realize that's unfashionable (and yes, expensive) but I will stand by my opinion that, all else being equal, I'd much rather read writing by annapeee than writing by random players on the street. Expert artists and writers have something to contribute and I don't like the thought of living in a world where they don't have respect (or paycheques).
Now I'm not dissing the emergent gameplay, puzzle towers, Toxic Moon dongs, or hidden notes and gifts that players contributed to Glitch. I liked a lot of that stuff (and loved some of it), and I'm glad we had a forum for it. And no doubt there were better ways to encourage players to make their own fun and maybe streamline the top-down content creation. That's all rear-view mirror stuff and I don't think speculating on it is too productive. Nevertheless, I think it's overstating the case to say that the game needed to be put into our hands. I paid for this game because I admire the team that designed it, loved their vision, and trusted them to give me a good time. If there were more of a free-for-all with respect to player-run content, I have a feeling that the signal-noise ratio would have plummetted and I would have lost interest. Glitch is not Wikipedia and thank Alph for that. - I have to confess- I played the tutorial and was left completely unattached and neutral about the game. I didn't log on again for weeks, it was only after I saw my son playing the real main game that I thought it look really interesting. Interesting enough for me to give it a second chance and from that moment on I was hooked. So I think the tutorial needed major work, or possibly scraped completely which would allow the new player to be thrown straight into the game. Playing the game I knew that if I needed help with how to play i had been given a greeter stick to summon a guide or there was a chat area dedicated solely to help. In the end I never used the stick and I think I went to live help once during the first ten levels. I just went with the flow and it is the sort of game that allowed you to do that. I think the tutorial did more damage than good in bringing in more players. But that's only from my own experience.
- Yeah, being thrown straight into the game would've been interesting, considering that there were many people who were willing to help. Also, I assume that since the first tutorial was much shorter, it was easier to deal with.
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I'm a non-gamer and this was my first MMO.
I got hooked for two reasons: one, my bf (the cat face) played and was my in-house guide. He helped me when I couldn't figure things out in the beginning. two, WARDROBE and VANITY. I could spend a lot of time dressing my damn glitch (and I spent a lot of money).
I also loved decorating my house and 100% agree with Stri about the grind of wall segments. BLEURGH. Also loved my botler, naming my animals, decorating my street, etc. I could come to this game just to "decorate" and then to take in the beauty and clever in the artwork and music.
I'm also a solo player. While I lucked into being a greeter (and enjoyed it in the beginning) and once in a while attended party or group quests, I was way more about exploring UR solo and being amused by others as they did their group things (tho -- I really would have/should have joined the way of the battras).
TL;DR: market the dress up/decorate part of the game to the appropriate market segments. -
I definitely think that one problem was team size. Even one less salary is a lot of savings, on such a small scale. Though, firing people sucks so it would have probably been better to just not have hired as many people in the first place (which clearly, one cannot do).
I think in the end, the dreams were bigger than could be achieved in such a short time, and a slower progress due to less workers would not have been terrible (and might have cut costs enough that we could have held on long enough to be worthwhile). Maybe more should have been done before Glitch's playerbase became as big as it did? Maybe Alpha should have lasted until more was done? Definitely we shouldn't have launched and unlaunched.
Maybe whoever said "charge players $1 a month to play" had a point (lots of people can't afford a sub and don't want credits, anyone with internet can probably afford $1 per month though). Didn't I just see the player tally at 191,000? I know many are inactive, but....
Maybe earlier Merch availability (Giants know we asked often enough!) would have led to a new stream of revenue. Maybe they could have found volunteers to moderate the forums, saving that precious staff cost for game stuff (though, it would have been hard to do initially and would have to be semi-supervised, still, less staff hours would be used).
Maybe key staff members could have all married billionaires and performed "favors" for their spouses in exchange for continued financial support of the game. -
maybe, oh, how i hate the word maybe.....its as bad as "if only" lol...
But saying that.......just maybe.......... -
Great discussion here.
I was a first beta-player, I totally get "Glitch." However, after the Unlaunch, I'm still waiting for "Glitch." Global chat and groups are pretty good for social level but most of goals or quests are for solo.
So, what am I talk about "Glitch?" For example, Spice Wars. See, we can kill trees and plant new trees. So, we can mess it up or clean it up together. I like the old Rook, when animals and trees are rook'ed, we save them much as we can as spread across several streets to discover which we didn't rescue. The current Rook was just simple on one street.
For tutorial-wise, I like old tutorial. It was pretty simple to start with and often meet a greeter upon first impression than the twig. Plus, doesn't explain enough about "Glitch" concept.
I remember stoot mention that he doesn't care about the money for Glitch. I knew players contribute a lot of money to Tiny Speck. And yet, they need more players? That was great puzzle for me.
What we discussed in here won't bring Glitch back, that's for sure. However, this is great for future developers to look at our perspectives.
EDIT: Oh! I forgot one more thing... despise the lagfest, Project Street was one of most awesome activities in Glitch. -
I think that MMO's, even the ones that successfully balance challenge elements that hook players, also promise a forever combination of play, community and story that they can't really deliver, because really the idea of a story, game, or relationship that never ever ever ever ever ends is a bad thing, a monkey's paw everyone involved. It's just bad for humanity in general.
Of course, I would have happily taken a nice, say, ten year run for Glitch.
I think. -
Simple:
We can't have nice things. -
Glitch was my first mmo so I came in without any expectations or preconceptions. I found Glitch by Googling "non-violent mmo." I was looking for a cheerful sandbox game that I could play with my 24 year old daughter who lives hundreds of miles away. I wanted something simple to play during breaks and soothing to play late at night. Glitch seemed perfect. I had a lot of fun playing with my daughter. I especially enjoyed cooking meals for her that she would take with her when she went into the mines.
Our very favorite activities were dressing up and decorating our houses. But my daughter and I were both very disappointed in the vanity, wardrobe and furniture selection. Basically, almost all the styles looked like they came out of a Tim Burton movie. There were some brightly colored things like from a Pee Wee Herman movie and there was a ton of dark, muddy, dreary, ironic hipster stuff like from Burton's later movies. I did not appreciate having that style forced on me. I wanted Glitch to give me real choices and I would have been happy to pay to get them. I was upgraded all the way, I bought additional credits on top of that and I would have bought more if there was anything pretty to spend them on. So the part of the game that interested me the most became frustrating rather than fun.
(Any mention on the forum of dissatisfaction with this situation, or any other situation for that matter, was immediately shut down by groupthink. It was not healthy for Glitch that the forum turned into a total echo chamber.)
And even if you decorated your house to your liking, there was no easy way to show it to the public. Snaps were very limited. Letting people in was risky. The towers came too late and also had security issues. It was super frustrating to put so much effort into something that almost no one else could see. The houses should have been open for everyone to see into. That would have made it feel a lot less like a solo experience.
I also found it very discouraging that global chat was so rude and lewd. IMHO global chat should have been PG and the nasty stuff should have been confined to a separate X rated channel. Avoiding global chat isolated me from the other players and that was frustrating too.
Another thing that was driving me crazy was the way TS always seemed to be tweaking the details and ignoring the major issues. Also, TS was so quick to nerf anything that was really cool. Would it have been so terrible to let us enjoy some juicy exploits?
Of course there were not enough players. There was zero marketing from TS. There was no swag. Many of us are into social media but there were no tools for us to promote the game. I had a snap as my Facebook cover for a long time but I made it myself. TS should have given us a tool for that. Where were the widgets to put on our blogs? I bet many of us would have promoted Glitch on Pinterest etc.
Anyway, it is a real shame. Everyone knows how talented Stoot is. I am afraid the consensus will be that if he couldn't get a quirky social game to work then no one can. - Miss Bobbit, agree with every word! Especially for juicy expolits and decorations :)
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I always wondered about the marketing. I only ever heard anything about through BoingBoing (which I don't really read everyday anyway), signed up for an invite, and promptly forgot I had done so. I'm not a gamer, so my channels of info don't often sync up with game sites and blogs, so had I not happened to see the article, I never would've even heard about it; and I don't even remember seeing the trailer til I'd already signed up.
There were admittedly times when I got bored with grinding. I hated cooking. I didn't see the need to do it, and didn't mind spending a little bit of money to avoid having to perform 18 actions for a single bowl of whatever. I didn't mind grinding in the mines, either solo or collaboratively, but mainly because I could make money doing it in a short period. There was some imbalance there- I could spend a Saturday mining over and over, and end up making 300K without ever having to hit the AH, while cooking didn't really seem to net much in comparison.
Mainly what I enjoyed was the artwork and the exploration. I don't recall having massive problems starting the game, because I was mostly interested in seeing what that business on the map over there was, and how to get there. Because I'm not a regular MMO player, I didn't have any trouble making up my own things for awhile, and I never felt embarrassed about telling people to check out the game I was having so much fun playing. I don't even know what that means, to be honest- I wasn't playing for them, I was playing because I enjoyed it myself (and screw what other people think anyway). What I did end up having difficulty with after awhile was simply that I was doing the same things over and over. I was losing interest with only the same things to do and same places to go for so long, and played very little for quite awhile until new things did arrive. For awhile, that was my option- small tweaks were happening, but large new things didn't materialize for a long time, and some of the things that had been dangled out there (I'm especially thinking of group halls) never fully materialized.
I loved all the art. Full stop. I loved the wardrobe options (my look right now, while it's changed a few times just for fun, is back to the same as it was when I started). The music I also loved, though I usually muted it if I was mining or staying in one region for a long time.
But lag. Holy balls, such lag. If I used Chrome, Flash crashed all the time. If I used Firefox, my character would go wherever it wanted to go. And if I went onto a street with more than five people on it in either browser, everything slowed to a crawl (the main reason I didn't play Game of Crowns again after first beta- the lag only got worse for me with time). It also made me play less. There were weeks when I checked into the game once a week just to collect mail and get the iMG from the rock. - Too many piggies. Everywhere you looked: piggies piggies piggies
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@Kukubee: Thank you for your reply. And, thank you to everyone else who posted, too. Very interesting to read everyone's insights and opinions.
Kukubee says: I just think Glitch was a game of tomorrow on yesterday's technology. We should try again in 2017. :)
I'm not sure I entirely agree with this. As far as the technology goes, perhaps this is true. I'm not one to say either way.
However, I think it was very much a game of today. A game that today needs. Tomorrow might need it, too. And if there is another Glitch incarnation (those Giants have done this before, right??) I'll be there waiting to sign up.
TS, created something awesome that many, many people will be talking about for a long time. In the mean time, I hope other developers out there learn from Glitch too. The gaming world needs more games like Glitch. With any luck, there will be. -
I love the piggies. I thought the piggies were one of the high points of the game. The roly poly pink eager cheerful generous piggies really sold me on the game. When I joined there were no greeters and I was utterly lost but the piggies were there for me and sustained me until I figured it out. The fact that they are piggies, rather than broccoli or fish, made me feel that I was welcome and that my heritage was respected... ( I come from people referred to as "pigs in the parlor" Irish as opposed to "lace curtain" Irish! ) Thank you so much for the lovely piggies!
I never experienced the lag (except for the final 2 hours) or the slow tutorial because I had already joined, but I understand that it was a problem for others. -
"Striatic, I'm confused as to how you think Glitch was any more or less grindy and time wasting than other MMOs, or even other computer games."
the computer games i play tend to involve puzzle and problem solving, creativity and very little grind.
my favourite game right now is the Angry Birds spin-off "Bad Piggies". damn is that game amazing. i've spent hours in the sandbox levels designing multi-stage rocket systems, rockoons [balloon launched rockets], planes with umbrella parachute based ejector seats - all kinds of stuff along with grabbing every star for every pre-set puzzle objective in the game.
this has NEVER felt like a grind. my mind is always occupied. i feel creative because i'm being creative.
it is also not particularly social.
MMOs like WoW often have a lot of grind, so i am discouraged from playing.
i have friends who play though, and sometimes they let me listen in on Ventrillo when they raid. and it is awesome even just to listen in on. they are coordinating, communicating, using strategy, joking around. it is great, engaging stuff.
there is no reason why glitch couldn't have had similar group dynamics that stimulate the mind in gameplay, but without violence. the early street projects felt that way but for various reasons stopped feeling that way.
"hey, join my guild" is a good incentive to invite a pal to play an MMO and glitch never ever had anything like that. you couldn't even properly share a house with a friend. sure you could allow access but you could never collaboratively build. - It was really only "sweatshop online" for the sort of people who didn't have the imagination to make up some fun of their own. I had one alt that leveled up to level 9 without ever leaving Gentle Island.
- I found it fun to make up new and pointless goals.
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"It was really only "sweatshop online" for the sort of people who didn't have the imagination to make up some fun of their own. I had one alt that leveled up to level 9 without ever leaving Gentle Island."
getting an alt to level 9 in the tutorial doesn't sound particularly imaginative to me, other than as a demonstration that the tutorial was sufficiently grindy to grind up to that level.
i can set new and pointless goals for myself in real life. glitch hobbled in game goals by occupying players doing grinds and fetch quests with enough frequency that it made it difficult to hatch unique plans with each other. there was some collaboration going on here and there but not enough and the game didn't support it nearly enough. -
Did we play completely different games, striatic? There were *tons* of collaborative things to do - and especially for achievements, many of which were 20x easier with a group. And it was pretty easy to get a group together, too. As for 'new and pointless goals' - all games are 'pointless' goals (with the rare exception of some charity-type games, like Free Rice). That doesn't stop them from being fun - for certain people.
I get that you didn't enjoy the game. That's fine, there's no game out there that's for everyone. But could you just try *not* to bring people down when we're already sad enough about the closing? -
WELCOME BACK, STRI. I see you left your punch-puller at home again. :D
striatic was actually one of the players that found some of the best collaborative things to do in early Glitch. I agree with his take on the grindiness, but not his overall take on the game. But you can't accuse stri of not trying. -
Lots of great feedback here...
I'll personally just link to my very first post here on the forums, which I've been refering to since the beginning.
Anyway, I think what kukubee said sums it up perfectly:
"a smaller team that focused on creating methods for players to create content rather than the large team" -
I put up my 2 cents worth here a while back, but to recap if you want:
The game needed more thing worth purchasing related to Utility, Vanity, and Gambling.
I note above that Kukubee said the income per player was good enough, they just needed more players. More UVG stuff would attract them also. - I'm sorry I called you a noob, that was rude. :( I'm just sad that Glitch is gone.
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People keep saying to me, "I'm sorry Glitch closed. I wish I had known about it, looks like it was a good game." This surprises me a bit because I have told everyone I know about it. I do agree about the Tutorial. There obviously was a lot of work and thought that went into it but it seemed lengthy and sometimes confusing. When I greeted new players who had been through the new Tutorial they had no idea what to do. I got that a lot so I created an Alt and went through the Tutorial. I thought it covered a lot of basics. I found the Home Street part of it confusing though. The need to return to the Tutorial after going to the Home street was confusing even to me. Some new players left the game at that point and never returned. If they wanted to stay, some did not understand that they needed to return to the Tutorial. Some bugs in first skills was also off putting for some players. I was called into EZ Cooking a couple of times when a player used all their resources before finishing the skill. I was also called into the AH tutorial once.
I always advised new players to explore and gather quoins, to find the Secrets. I felt Secrets were a good incentive to play because everyone loves that. There was a secret location in the Tutorial but some players never found it. Those that did find it enjoyed it very much and I was excited to discover it myself.
I don't know what it would have taken to keep Glitch alive. Perhaps there should have been only a short "Return To Beta", just long enough to revamp the housing (absolutely necessary!) and then a big relaunch with lots of publicity. I kept waiting for a loud relaunch with lots of bells and whistles. I expected it in July or August but it never happened and I began to worry. After that a quiet admittance of new players was scarcely noticed and then the thing I feared - Closure.
I love Glitch! It has been so much more to me than a game, it was Home. It was a virtual world that I lived in and met many Friends and had so much fun. Now I am a homeless wanderer moving from Glitch forums to Glitch chats to Glitch fan sites and back to Glitch Home, hoping that the Forums and wardrobe are still here. I have tried several games and none fill the hole in my heart.
I like subscribing to a game and I don't mind paying extra for decorations from time to time. Facebook has some good games but although they claim to be FREE they are not. You can only progress so far before you must pay to advance or stagnate. FB games can dollar you to death if you aren't wary. It's very tempting to pay to level up, to go further. I have now quit 3 FB games because as a FREE player I reached a point where I could go no further without doing the two things I despise, paying to advance and recruiting new players. I suppose that those are the ways to have a long-lived game though. I am glad that Glitch did not work that way but also sad thinking that maybe that might have kept Glitch alive.
So now you may call me a Bag Lady I guess. I carry my bag of Glitch and Faunsphere memories and lists and wander the Web looking for a Home. I thank Tiny Speck for the Wonder and Fun that was Glitch and I thank the players for gaming with me and befriending me and making me feel like part of a large and fantastic Family! If you see me pass by say "Hi" and I will reach into my bag and pull out some RK! -
On the grind subject, you really did not have to grind much to get by in Glitch, in the 2 and a half months I managed to play it for, I made 100m+ currants and I spend a ton on emblems and icons, fully decorating my house and tower, a ton of machines and a load of other stuff too, that is with spending at quarter of my time shopping and a quarter of my time socializing.
The main thing for me is that it took over a year for me to actually get into the game, I waited a long time to get my closed beta email and a not long after they opened it. I almost gave up on the game completely, if I found something else to play I probably would have.
The only reason I even found the game in the first place was sheer luck too. - The main moneymaker in the game came from buying credits. They couldn't have made any money from this for two reasons: 1) You could buy furniture from other players, so there was no need to buy credits. 2) When you filled your house with all of that furniture, the house became unusable unless you had some serious CPU power. Which leads me to another main reason I believe the game failed: they put a huge load on the client side, and allowed us to put hundreds of thousands of items within a single location. What that meant was overwhelming lag, the inability to be on streets with other people or go into their house/tower, and overheating of user's systems.
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Too many maps were empty. The community disappeared into:
- teleports. You never walked anywhere once you got teleport up to snuff.
- The housing resource links. No need to go anywhere on the normal maps to get resources.
Later additions reinforced this. Maps that used to be super active became wastelands. Now, that could have also been number of users...
When I started, many maps were full, you could find people everwhere. Later, things got vacant.
Scalability was another issue never fully addressed. Too many resources worked well with a few players, but with many? omg. The mining hordes on weekends were amusing. A rock appears, swarmed, gone.
Characters were extremely limited in what they could do. Left, right, jump, fall. Expressions were minimal.
Flash. Omg, flash. Such a buggy piece of trash. But what other options they had, idk.
Taking it back into beta. That was a unique decision. Basically, it shouldn't have been released. But going back into beta, I've never heard of that before.
Personally, I think the designers were a bit unseasoned, and a lot of the mistakes were from that. I expect that we will see something in the future from them, although maybe not as a group. And there are a lot of software assets here. Who knows what the future holds. - I just blame Flash; it's easier and more satisfying that way :)
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To me the lag issues indicated what I think that the real problem was. When stoot gave his interviews, he mentioned that they had looked at some metrics and that things were not sustainable. Kukubee notes that they needed more subscribers. That's certainly true. What I think made things unsustainable was the fact that even if they actually got more subscribers, the technology stack simply would not have been able to keep up. My guess is that stoot and the business folks looked at how many people they really needed in order to stay afloat (let alone make fat stacks), looked at what that would mean for lag/gameplay/etc. and realized that the two were mutually incompatible.
My experience as a very business-integrated software dev has taught me that almost never does something die from purely business or purely technical concerns. It is usually a combination of both, locked in some kind of negative feedback loop.
I completely agree though that Glitch was tomorrow's game on yesterday's tech. My take (which I detailed in an article about Glitch on my company's blog) is that right now, there is no tech stack that would have allowed this to work in a fashion that was scalable and with a large enough potential market (i.e. mobile). It was truly ahead of its time.
FYI, I've executed basic Glitch-like functionality on my home network including multiple streets, multiplayer, local and global chat, etc. using game assets saved from the various APIs and nicely-provided archive tools, HTML5 and node.js services. While it's a cool experiment (and my daughters who both played enjoy walking around in a facsimile of the old world and chatting, etc.; btw, it works on tablets too), it's shown my original suspicions to be true: even using the latest and greatest tech, technical barriers would have linked up in an unholy alliance with business concerns to bring it down. -
Harkyman, I think you are confusing subscribers with players.
Lots of players overwhelms the technology.
Lots of subscribers enables you to buy the technology you need.
Kukubee, "good average revenue per player" is what it takes to keep the game in profit. If you weren't in profit then you didn't have it.
IMHO Tiny Speck gave too much away and didn't offer nearly NEARLY enough premium content. I was moly and I bought extra credits and I would have spent much much more on Glitch if they had more pretty/fun stuff to buy. I think if they had been more flexible about offering a variety of genuinely different styles and brighter palettes in vanity and wardrobe they would have sold enough subscriptions and credits to keep them afloat.
Also, I think they should have been more courageous about resetting the game. They should have done what needed to be done and anybody who whined in the forums should have been invited to play somewhere else. It would have been better to be harsh back then rather than be closed now.