A few days ago, Tiny Speck announced that they will be closing Glitch.
I am rather saddened by the news but also extremely unsurprised.
When I started to play the game last year, it amused and charmed me. It also had a rather grim, creepy, horror tale vibe that appealed to me. Despite its cartoony graphics, the game reminded me of the more involved gameplay in such games as Second Life and Eve Online. Strange as it may seem, Second Life and Eve Online share quite a number of gamers between them. Glitch entered this strange relationship and became a third in a gaming triangle of weird, wacky, dangerous and thought provoking games.
Tiny Speck's announcement that its closure was partly due to being unable to find a large audience, unspoken was that the audience it did have didn't pay it enough.
Well I don't think the game's audience should be blamed for outright mismanagement on Tiny Speck's part.
They didn't promote their game enough. They heavily relied on the word of mouth viral idea. Which isn't a bad thing but it should be done ALONG with regular marketing. The viral needs to get started than as people become more curious more professional marketing should take up the slack. Tiny Speck just did the viral and never backed it up with concrete advertising. The actual marketing they did do was in the form of one release trailer two years ago, that baffled prospective fans and gave them no idea what was actually IN the game.
I mean really, even myself (a fan of the game), said WTF WAS THAT?
Consider that the trailer was released two years ago and it stated that release was Spring 2011. By the time I joined, Fall 2011, the game was barely out of beta. It wasn't even accepting open sign ups. I believe I just sent in an email to Tiny Speck and a few weeks later, I received an invite. Truthfully I don't even know how I won this invite because I heard that a lot of people never received one. Was it a lottery system?
Why did a newly released game need a lottery system? Why did it need to throttle and bottleneck its audience? Again, it could be my previously stated thought that the game wanted to be a viral success. But we also need to get a more reality based reason, this game could not properly scale with its potential audience. Prokofy Neva, in regard to Second Life, has often thought that Linden Lab purposefully throttled its audience due to scaling issues. I think Tiny Speck did the same with Glitch.
In fact they slowly allowed more and more people into the game Fall 2011 into Winter 2012. And most of these new people were due to established players sending out personal invites. Mind you, there were still potential fans waiting for invites from their emails to Tiny Speck. Apparently most of these people were ignored. And that had to create a kind of blacklash to the Viral goodness that Tiny Speck was trying to establish.
One of the major signs that the game was not scaling properly was centered in the issue of housing. The housing in Glitch of Fall 2011 consisted of the player becoming authorized with a game permit. This required the player to apply and wait in a crazy office staffed by lazy NPC monsters asking inane questions. It was a hilarious send up of any professional bureaucracy. After receiving a permit, the player had to gather up game money then buy a house in a desired district. Each district had its own style of houses and different sizes from hovel to mansion. However within each district was a number of "streets" shared between a few players. Once these streets were full, the housing was sold-out. It turned out to be an incredibly popular gameplay option with the game's fans, it forced Tiny Speck to constantly be spewing out new districts along with their streets.
As I said, the game was failing in the scaling area.
Instead of working with the issue, Tiny Speck did the worst possible thing to do, they pulled their game out of release state and sent it straight back to Beta. Yes. Crazy wasn't it? Whatever marketing they had planned (and it had to have been more than just that one awful trailer) was nixed and signups were closed. Even personal invites were no longer an option.
What did this mean for the game? Their audience was kept small ON PURPOSE! It was not allowed to grow. They never left BETA. They used the illusion of all those potential fans, languishing on a wait list, as a reason to throw more money away on the game. They counted the proverbial birds in the bush rather than the one in their hands. So folks, they ballooned their costs in man hours, game assets and other development on an illusion of more fans. Meanwhile back in reality, those potential fans chalked off their unreceived invites and rightly deduced that the company was mismanaging its game, then moved on.
I even saw this problem and left the game because of it. The ill conceived beta was mainly to deal with the housing issue. In place of what the game had, the houses were now all free, turning a previous achievement and valuable commodity into something worthless. The new houses were ugly as sin. The ways to "expand" these new houses were slipshod and unappealing. Of course, the small fan base was ecstatic over these changes.
However the game never opened up its signup page again. It didn't even allow players to send personal invites until just before the closure announcement.
And their announcement had the gall to state that the game never received the audience they thought it would attract.
Well its hard to get an audience if you don't allow them into the front door.
Of course, there was also a problem of the game being built on Flash. Which is dying and being superseded by HTML 5. Obviously Tiny Speck wasted all of its money on the jackass BETA ONCE AGAIN plan instead of getting a start on reconfiguring its code into the new standard.
Well no use crying over the mistakes.
It is a shame. The game had potential, it had a potential audience. Which the company allowed to slip away. A cautionary tale.
