Glitch, the experimental MMO from Flickr developer Stewart Butterfield and his team Tiny Speck, is closing. Butterfield had been able to attract Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi and Journey producer Robin Hunicke, but what he couldn’t attract was players -- at least, he couldn’t attract enough players to keep the game viable from a business perspective, he tells Gamasutra.
Just over two weeks ago, Tiny Speck revealed that the game will soon close. Gamasutra spoke to Butterfield to find out more about why his attempt to create, as he put it in 2010, "something that I feel like has been the right balance of social hang out, social experience, and enough of a game context" couldn't find the players it needed.
It Just Wasn’t Fun Enough, Fast Enough
One major, obvious problem with Glitch is that it wasn't fun until very late in its development -- and not until after its launch, says Butterfield. "There's no objective answer to what went wrong," he says, but "on top of everything else, it took us until the final four months for the game to actually become really fun from a moment-to-moment gameplay point of view." "Sometimes we were in such a rush to complete a feature that the purpose of the feature wasn't realized," Butterfield admits. "There's dozens of examples." By and large, people who tried the game often complained it wasn't fun, and trying to pin down the fun was a challenge for the team. "When you see people complain a game is boring because it's 'just clicking', there's usually something else the matter, because Civilization is just clicking, and Diablo is just clicking," he says. Player housing never reached a point where there was a point to building or customizing it, he says; on the other hand, collecting coins Mario-style was iterated until it had a unique social element that made it a favorite activity of players. When a coin was collected, any player who was close enough "would get some benefit", he said, so people started playing together naturally. "There was this flocking behavior," he says. "That was super fun collaborative play, because you're jumping through the treetops." There just wasn’t enough of that “super fun” gameplay to sustain a growing audience.Where’s the Audience?
The game did grow a small, dedicated audience who loved it -- check out the outpouring on the game's official forums, where one player's reaction to the shutdown announcement was simply, "Stunned. And crying" -- but turning that into a larger audience remained out of reach for Tiny Speck. "The people who loved the game really, really loved it. If we had figured out an easier way to get more people to that state it would have been a success," Butterfield says. "Ultimately if I have to identify one thing as the problem -- I don't think there is just one -- but if I had to choose just one, I think the game was too foreign of a concept for most people," says Butterfield. "Most games slot pretty easily into a pre-existing category," he says, but with its varied activities and lack of combat, Glitch didn't. This nebulous appeal was what killed it. "The promise of the game was always just, 'Here's a bunch of mostly beautiful looking scenes and vignettes,' and you can see it and be attracted to it, and start playing, and not know how to get there,” says Butterfield. The result of this vague promise? "A lot of people were just like 'I don't know what the fuck I'm supposed to do.' Some people took 'I don't know what I'm supposed to do' as an invitation to explore and ended up loving it. Other people closed the browser. That's it." He admits that the developers need to take the blame for this. "We didn't do a good job of explaining what it was or why they'd be interesting. So a lot of people who would have loved the game didn't get past the trailer, or the first part of the tutorial, or really had no idea." The changes the team made to the tutorial in its twilight days would have "had to happen years before -- at least a year before" to have made a difference in the game's fate, says Butterfield. "Whether you wanted that more frenetic second-by-second instant reflex kind of gameplay, or whether you wanted to play the auction house and the market, or whatever, there was something for you. But very few people could see that up front, and we could never figure out a way to show that that was in there." This trailer, released late in its lifespan, was an attempt to try and articulate just what made Glitch fun -- but it was too little, too late."There wasn't much that you could just step into and immediately see that it was fun and how it was fun, until the end," admits Butterfield. For most of its life, Glitch was "a pretty hard row to hoe to get to the point where you loved it," he says, and the team couldn't figure out how to get players to that point.