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Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

This bit I don't quite get:

Why don't you give the game away or make it open source or let player volunteers run it?

Glitch looks simple, but it is not. [...] It takes a full-time team of competent engineers & technical operations personnel just to keep the game open. Even if there was a competent team that was willing to work on it full time for free, it would take months to train them. Even then, the cost of hosting the servers would be prohibitively expensive.

That explains why making it free or open-sourcing wouldn't save the current game world, but why not open-source it anyway? Then somebody can give it another shot, with a smaller, limited world, and see if it gains any traction the second time around.

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This was something I was curious about as well. It is a skill to make systems that can be managed by only a small number of engineers/operations types, but it is no more difficult than building a game world like this, just different.

I was wondering how much capital it would take to build that replacement infrastructure. If you went through game engine, databases , everything, and said "Hmmm, ok how can we make this thing basically run itself, or at a minimum with a staff of 3 or 4." Then you'd need a game population that supported that, and I don't know what it cost to play. But I'd love to do a deep dive into the business and technology and figure out if there was a way to make it work. I would expect to be disappointed because it looks like they had a great team and I'm sure they did all of this too.

Presumably, there's some novel IP that is keeping some of the company alive. From the website:

What will happen to Tiny Speck?

Tiny Speck, the company behind Glitch, will continue. We have developed some unique messaging technology with applications outside of the gaming world and a smaller core team will be working to develop new products. But now is not the time to talk about that. Right now our concern is with the players and our comrades who are suddenly looking for new work.

Why can't you sell the game so someone else can take it over?

It's complicated, but it comes down to this: if that were a transaction that made sense to the purchaser, we wouldn't be shutting the game down.

Obviously that's pretty opaque, but i think this suggests that they've cut a deal to sell the assets. I dont't know a lot about that market but it seems to happen pretty commonly when 3d online games flop. Somebody in a market that never was exposed to the game buys them and repurposes them or uses them as a jump start in some tier 2 freemium project.

I'd guess they've licensed libraries or patents from the non-open source world or developer their own that they're not willing to release.

proprietary solutions and licensing issues are the first things that come to mind, followed by being haunted by the existence of the project in the wild (unwanted questions, judgment, publicity). I guess they decided it's just best to rip off the band-aid and move on.

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