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Comment by dgreensp | Hacker News Reader

I played Glitch for a couple hours once and it's pretty obvious to me why it didn't work.

After all the pre-launch hype about changing the face of gaming forever, the game was dreadfully boring -- you basically walk around and click on things. I described it to a friend as "FarmVille where you don't get your own farm." Sure, there was a lot of art; I think I had my pick of several dozen hairstyles and encountered hundreds of types of objects. They must have drawn thousands of art assets.

There is no lesson to take away here except that games live or die on their mechanics and depth. Zynga has shown us exactly how far you can go with pretty, social games that give you just enough little dopamine kicks to keep the window open.

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Two hours? You got some real patience. I was in the early pre-beta and they lost me few minutes in, right after I was given a "pet rock" that I was expected to talk to.

(edit) I also got a strong impression it was a single guy's visionary pet (for the lack of better word) project, and he had some spare money from a previous exit to throw at it. So he kept pulling it in his own direction. I might be and probably am off here, but that's the impression I formed by hanging around the project for a bit.

Stewart did Flickr, so yeah.

Remember the power of the usability study people!

I suppose my experience was similar, but what really lost me was that this "revolutionary" game that was supposed to be so different from the standard fare was running on Flash taking up all my CPU cycles. Even back in 09, I was sick of it (but I was sick of all Flash in general). And of course, that's one reason they cited for their closing, and possibly a large reason.

Replying to myself... but on that same note, we can look to Jagex and note their sustained success with Runescape, perhaps the "original" in-browser MMO. More impressive is that it's Java-based and has been since 2001, yet they've continually updated it to run on more powerful hardware.

I play flash games all the time on Kongregate, and 9 out of 10 make my laptop sound like an helicopter, but I keep going back, and so do a bunch of people, from what I can see.

Glitch was not the case, and even if it were I doubt flash performances may be an issue for why users didn't get in the game. The game was just terribly boring.

Of course, there are plenty more sensible reasons for giving up flash, but "the continued decline of the Flash platform" seems more like "game does not run on iPad".

I tried this game out when it was in pre-beta too. I found it novel and refreshing that there was an MMO aspect to a flash-based game, but I didn't find myself going back to the game. I have no recollection of what the aspiration was supposed to be, and like you, all I remember about the core mechanic of the game is clicking on things I see and performing various actions on them.

> you basically walk around and click on things

Sounds a lot like Diablo III / Torchlight II, which supposedly aren't all that boring...

I suppose a difference would be that in Diablo III you don't feel like you are just walking around and clicking.

Funnily enough, I have the same complaint about those types of games.

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