Comment by siaukia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by siaukia | Hacker News Reader

This saddens me on some aspects:

1. As a fellow game developer that published a game (and didn’t hit the jackpot). (We’re a small startup at the time launching our little game and it didn’t go well at all after a 2 hard-working year, about the same time when Glitch launched).

2. It’s the Flickr’s founding dream to create this, and if you read the backstory of Flickr, you’ll notice that the founder initially wanted to create this startup before Flickr, but found out it is not feasbible, and took out a main component from the game (sharing photo) and built Flickr. And so now, the founder has sold her company to Yahoo!, and decided to use every penny to make her dream come true, and it appears reality hits where it hurts the most, and the game didn’t fly. I tried the game, it’s really polished, but it just didn’t have the target market pool as big as Zynga in Facebook. Really sad its under-appreciated.

3. There is an unseen s*load amount of hard work placed in Glitch, but it just all went boom to their face.

What is the problem? Does this mean hard work != successful? Or did they not have enough marketing budget to make Glitch fly?

"Hard work" is worth exactly nothing if it doesn't provide value to someone else. I can assure you that walking out into my side yard and digging holes all day in the summer is much harder work than sitting in my air-conditioned home office writing code for the company I work for, but they receive no value for all that "hard work" and do value the time I spent in-chair in my office.

Work-for-pay is only as valuable as someone else willing to pay for it. No one cares how hard you worked, they care about how much value you delivered to them.

Seems like they weren't adequate at marketing.. The concept of the game is appealing but I have never heard about it until today, the people who have played it have nothing but praise haven't seen a negative comment yet.

Here's one. Even though it is more varied and complex than your average Zynga pump-and-dump, at a fundamental level it is still the same kind of get-on-a-treadmill-and-keep-walking sort of game, where the primary form of achievement is watching numbers increase linearly as rewards start getting exponentially farther away. You feel almost as used while playing it as playing farmville, which kills enjoyment. That is, you are acutely aware at all times that the game mechanics are subtly or not-so-subtly designed to keep you recurrently tied to the game. To profit you need to spend a certain amount of time per day doing menial tasks.

Thankfully it is a real MMO, and there are some redeeming social aspects to it, but it has very little to recommend it over, say, World of Warcraft. It's a browser game, so it's more accessible, but it doesn't actually play nicely with mobile since it runs in flash, and you might as well go big or go home.

Your comment reminds me of this:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089049/

"In a bleak,automated future Britain Bing is one of millions who pedal exercise bikes to create energy as a living. Their currency is merits,tokens with which to buy food from vending machines and which can be increased or decreased according to which shows one watches on giant television screens. A popular choice is 'Botherguts',which humiliates over-weight citizens. But Bing uses his merits as entrance money to get sweet-voiced fellow worker Abi onto the TV talent contest 'Hot Shot'. Unfortunately,despite her talent,she is but one of a glut of singers and ends up on the porn channel 'Wraith Babes'.An enraged Bing saves up another lot of merits and gets onto 'Hot Shot' to denounce its falseness. But will he be seen as a new Messiah or a voice crying in the wind and forced to sell out?"

thanks, I never heard of this movie but it sounds interesting.

Perhaps this paragraph from a 2010 CNET article says something:

Because Glitch is a thinking-person's social game, Tiny Speck is not aimed at the entire world, at least not at first, especially not teens eager for the next World of Warcraft. Instead, Butterfield admitted, "There's not a better way to say [who we're targeting] than people with above average intelligence and sophisticated tastes, in their 20s or early 30s...The intersection of NPR listeners and game players."

Said he was targeting that, but anyone who played it would tell you how utterly mindless the game was.

Literally was just wander about clicking and waiting for progress bars.

You're right that one of the founders of Flickr was behind Glitch, but there were two Flickr founders: Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. Butterfield was the one behind Glitch. Fake went on to Hunch and then Pinwheel/Findery.

There is an unseen sload amount of hard work placed in Glitch

Maybe someone could buy the IP cheap, add in some Zynga-style dark gamification and massive marketing and have themselves the next Farmville. Wait, forget I said that. Giants forbid.

Does this mean hard work != successful?

On the Web, hard work never guaranteed success.

And contrary to physical media, on the web, hard-work does not leave traces, and no recognition in the distant future.

hard work anywhere has never guaranteed success. I'm amazed people still fall for this (and it's consequence, that failure is caused by laziness)

More likely that in the world of game development, hard work is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success.

While I had not heard of Glitch until this, I can appreciate the wrenchingly painful admission that this venture has reached its end; and must be wound down.

I tell myself that I am allowed to fail as many times as is needed to succeed. But it hurts every time.

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