- Status update
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Little Poundcake
To follow up on this, since I'm a numbers person and I know that some of you are, too: Think about how often you or anyone you know will click on an ad because it looks interesting. Not very often, right? We spent *well* over $10K (I don't remember how much) to get about 1,000 clicks on our ads. Those are expensive clicks. Okay, so we have 1,000 people who did not know about Glitch and then clicked the ad. They ended up on a version of the home page with a big shiny "Play Now!" button. Now what? Only 100 of those people decided to click the "Play Now" button, which took them into the brand new cloud and flamingoes tutorial. Boo: we just lost 90% of those expensive clicks. :( Anyway, bright side! 100 new players! They're playing! Except... oh, shit, we lost all but about 30 of them before they even registered for a real account. Fuuuuuck. When we stretched that trend out over more ad dollars and a longer period of time, it turned out that we would hang on to maaaaaybe 5 of those people for longer than a week. The rest just vanished, usually somewhere around level 3-5, never to return. Glitch was a wonderful, magical thing for those of us who loved it, but it was simply not loved by most people who encountered it in the wild. It sucks, but it's the truth. Tens of thousands of people saw Glitch and did not instantly love it! We don't know what's wrong with them, either. :( Ad conversion was a total shit sandwich. We tried! We put lots and lots of dollars into the ad machine after spending lots and lots of time making a new tutorial for all of those new people. We had smart people helping us target ads towards our most likely players. A few of them came, fewer of them saw, almost none of them stayed. As Kuke mentioned, we needed significantly more players. There was no indication in any of our data that we could get there — or even remotely close — with more advertising. In short, math: sometimes it's a bummer.
- 13 replies
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Little Poundcake
Shit, if only we'd preserved line breaks in status updates. That must be what did the game in.
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Dewa
Hi Little Poundcake, finally coming out of lurking mode, wow do I miss the entirety of Glitch......anyway, the numbers didn't work for me either when I tried to recruit friends to join and play. Did try though. And thank you for staying with us through the end times. It is comforting.
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Ayasta
For what it's worth, I was one of the ones who got invited from a friend when the game was out of beta. My friend says "Hey, you should play this, I think you'll like it!" Shortcut to a week later, I'm hooked and he's off playing a MUD. I got to level 60 twice and he never made it past level 11. Kinda sad, but that's how it goes. I figured there was more behind the scenes than most of us knew, but I'm glad you posted this to let everyone know! Thanks for trying, at any rate. You and the other staffers have all of my thanks for making something so wonderful!
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Miss Coco
Thanks for the numbers, you guys. It's easy to get lost in the shoulda-coulda-woulda without some hard data. While I would happily have given up my refund for one more day of Glitch (hell, five more minutes!), I totally respect that TS pulled the plug while they still had the resources to take care of their employees and give us players as gentle an exit as we could have hoped for (i.e, the fact that we can still be here on this website arguing about all of this two months after the game closed). I'm somewhat comforted, though also kind of depressed that I have to live on a planet with so many people who didn't instantly love Glitch. :-(
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Marla
I think another problem was the "instant gratification", "almost zero attention span" of many people in this world. Glitch took a bit of time and effort. If you expended those, you "got" the game and fell in love with it. Unfortunately so few people are able to, or want to, put forth the effort.
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Mocha Maid
Thanks very much for this. I feel a bit better about the game closing... and even more unique than I thought I was! Hugs to all devs and pl\ayers!
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Wynella
Thank you for sharing that info LP. I hope it will finally put some issues to bed. I feel marginally more relieved that I didn't spam every single friend I ever knew, twice, for the feat. And I feel every more special for having been one of the few, the proud, the Glitchen. :) <3
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Lyrical DejaVu
Thank you as well, yes i was getting a bit spiteful, but mostly it was because of pondering. Mind you it still couldnt of helped that it never came up in search engines if you were trying to find it that was, it was buried under how to fix, or take advantage, of such and such a glitch. Mind you knowing this helps alot. As for the inst-gratification crowd this wasnt for them, unfortuanatly thats MOST of gamers, so sad more people didnt "get" the game.
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Lelu
Thanks for this LP. Math is a bummer sometimes. I wanted other people that I knew to like Glitch, but too many of them just didn't get it, as you say.
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flask
i do not know what's wrong with those people. glitch was only like the most awesome thing ever.
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Macs
I wonder how many of the 1000 visitors got a message telling them that they need to upgrade their their Flash plugin to play Glitch, which caused them to just leave. The interesting thing is that Glitch still runs fine in Flash 10, but Tiny Speck insists that everyone should use version 11 or above.
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