Topic
Donating to save glitch
When I look at the $111,425 raised to save Glitch's art and music, I can't help but say to myself "What if that money would've went to saving Glitch itself, rather than just it's content?" I mean, it can't possibly cost that much money to keep the game going, could it?
So I ask, why couldn't we donate to keep the game going? I for one would be more than willing to try to donate money to such a cause. What do you guys think?
EDIT: I stand corrected, it costs a lot of more money than I thought. But hey, it was only an idea.
Replies
- It does cost way more than $111,425 to keep the game running.
- 500K a month was the number thrown around recently.
- $111,000 is about a month to a month and a half of staffing costs (111,000/30=3,700, and HQs are in two of the most expensive cities in N.A., $3700 a month is middle class in Vancouver, probably lower in S.F., there were more than 30 staff I think, but maybe up to 2 months because there are also lower-level jobs at TS like customer support which probably doesn't fetch quite as much as developers or artists)
- Biohazard - and if those numbers are right, that still doesn't account for servers & other materials. either way, and I don't think you were disagreeing but correct me if i am wrong, it just wasn't feasible.
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It wasn't just a matter of not enough money. It would be nice if that was so, because that would be a fairly trivial thing to fix.
The biggest problems, if I understand it correctly, were twofold. First, Glitch needed more players, but fewer and fewer people are looking to play online games through a browser. They want their games on mobile, which Glitch is not equipped to do.
Second, the infrastructure of the game, along with being unsuitable for mobile, would not have been able to handle a larger number of players. Heck, the system was only barely accommodating the player base that existed already. Remember when we started getting those red-flag warnings to re-start the game/browser after playing for as little as an hour? Those were a sign that something was going very wrong.
It was a vicious circle: it needed more players, but getting more players would have broken the game enough that people would have left in droves, leaving it in need of more players. - ...I don't understand how on earth they could spend 500K a month. I mean, I could see 50K maybe but...I don't know what they'd spend all of that money on. ._.
- 50k wouldn't pay 35 highly qualified staff in two high-cost-of-living cities - not even close, especially when you need staff cover 24/7/365. Even double that probably wouldn't cover it. And usually, there are costs to employing people over and above their salaries. Plus the costs of office space (again, in cities where office space isn't cheap), communications, utilities, equipment, servers, marketing. I think that 500k would disappear quite fast.
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Flyne, if 500k is a close-ish estimate of their costs, then as I just showed you above, about 100k of that goes directly to the salary of staff. That's 1/5 or 20%. And that's a vague estimate, because I don't know how much talented computer workers make.
In fact, that's a low guesstimate, I'm almost sure. Paying 35 people with 100k in a month brings their annual salaries to an average of 34,200 a year. That's below the national average salary of *everyone* (which is 46k as of earlier this year), and one would hope that people with such talent could expect to at least be paid a tiny bit more than an average pencil pusher!
Then there are "associated costs". Many companies provide additional health/etc benefits, which they pay either all or half of. Canadian companies are obligated by law to match employee contributions the the Canadian Pension Plan (which employEEs themselves are obligated to pay and which comes off their pay every week, it's completely automated unless you are a contractor)
The basic costs of just having the employees that they have, not counting putting them at a desk, could go up to 200k a month. It's not terribly hard, once you see that, to believe that their costs are that high. - I understand now.
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A survival strategy that worked for some MMO games:
- Inform the playerbase that the standards of development and support they're used to are unsustainable and that there is now a choice between closing the game or drastically changing the infrastructure around it.
- Downsize staff. A lot. Pad the remaining skeleton crew with volunteers and interns.
- Get rid of offices. Paid staff, interns, and volunteers all work from their homes.
- Stop or greatly reduce development. No more updates except for critical bug fixes. (If the financial situation improves later on, development can be slowly resumed.)
- Optional: If F2P, switch to a monthly subscription payment model. If subscription-based, switch to F2P.
- Optional: Open-source everything that can be open-sourced (example of an exception: components and/or assets that the game company does not have the rights to redistribute). This allows passionate players with relevant skills to contribute to development and even potentially to improve aspects of the game's efficiency.
- Optional: Incentivize player recruitment and word-of-mouth advertising.
- Optional: Accept donations. - It would be lovely to see an end to the second guessing.
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Agreed. I come here to remember what I loved about the game, but at some point you have to stop being in denial. There have been several posts and several interviews with Stoot explaining in detail why the decision was made and why they felt it was impossible to continue. It's very sad, but it's much easier to deal with once you get to the acceptance stage. Then you can live happily in your memories instead of trying so hard to bring back something that's gone.
It's OK to just remember and let go.