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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@Kukubee: Thanks for your honest take on the whole thing, and for all your efforts to preserve Glitch in one way or another - I am looking very forward to the Glitch Art book igg.me/p/289274/x/2172289 and am sad to have missed the plush cubimals that you made - how awesome you are! I am also looking forward to the Music of Glitch project that Danny has going with your help igg.me/p/286468/x/2172289 - there were so very many things that made Glitch special and unique, and the art and music are certainly a big part of that. So, again - thanks! And I hope that as technology improves, we will see a reincarnation in some way of our beloved Ur! With lots of love and good thoughts your way, Hab xoxoxo
p.s. DONG -
Miss Bobbit --
What you say is true if they would have been predicating their business model on changing the ratio of subscribers to non-subscribers. However, I think that they looked at what a reasonable push was in that direction, saw how much revenue it would bring in, and it didn't even come close to what they needed. Look at the amount of funding that was burned through (if the public sources are accurate), push that into a monthly payment, then do the math on how many subscribers it would take.
Even if you could have waved a magic wand and made TWICE that number of subscribers appear, you would have to keep the non-subscribers out, because if the ratios remained the same the tech simply would not have scaled to keep up. You wouldn't just need 2x the money to make it work, but 20x (or whatever) the money. In other words, the cost of increasing the playable capability of the game rose more quickly than the revenue you could generate by those additional players.
We'll be in a different situation vis a vis technology, etc. several years from now, as Kukube implies. - Clearly, a world that possesses jelly but not peanut butter cannot continue to exist. That is the definitive answer here.
- I think it was the lack of onion rings. Elf will back me up!
- From what i could tell from my last day on ur, the problem was flash. flash could NOT handle that much sobbing, weeping, and note writing.
- If you needed more players, why didn't you take it out of beta, and do the rest of the tests with more people comeing in so you could get more players? Just wondering, as this has been in my head for a long time
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That's because the problems were two-fold and interrelated. In very basic terms Flash and the servers could not be made to handle enough players to maintain the game while not taxing the servers to the point of breaking meant that there was simply not enough revenue.
$500k/m is a daunting figure when your game is marketed towards a niche group in the first place and as much as players were willing to subscribe the actual perks were fairly limited.