Glitch

What did it do?

Glitch was a two-dimensional, multiplayer online game played in the browser, developed by Tiny Speck. It deliberately steered clear of combat mechanics, focusing instead on players gathering, making and shaping the world together. The game was free, and players could spend money on options such as avatar customisation.

Why did it shut down?

Glitch officially launched on 27 September 2011, but two months later it went back into beta, citing problems with accessibility for new players and depth for experienced ones. According to Wired, the game did not take off commercially, just as Butterfield's earlier Game Neverending, which turned into Flickr, had not. In November 2012 Tiny Speck announced that the game would close because of limited audience interest, and Glitch was shut down on 9 December 2012. The company turned the internal messaging tool it had used during development into Slack, and was renamed Slack Technologies.

The story

Stewart Butterfield had seen this film before. In 2002, while he was working on a game called Game Neverending, financial difficulties pushed the team towards a side project, and that side project became Flickr. Years after selling Flickr to Yahoo, Butterfield returned to his dream of a never-ending game: in 2009 he went back to British Columbia, founded Tiny Speck and named the new game Glitch.

Glitch was a two-dimensional, multiplayer world played in the browser that deliberately left combat out. Players gathered and made things together, grew plants and cooked food, and changed the persistent world through quests. The game was free; revenue was to come from optional purchases such as avatar customisation. Ars Technica found it fun and full of small, witty details. Having moved from closed alpha to beta in February 2011, Glitch opened to everyone on 27 September 2011.

After the launch came an unexpected decision. On 30 November 2011 Tiny Speck put Glitch back into beta, citing problems with accessibility for new players and depth of gameplay for experienced ones, and called the move an 'unlaunch'. The game was developed for another year, but the audience did not grow. In November 2012 Tiny Speck announced that it would close the game because of limited audience interest, and Glitch shut down on 9 December 2012 with a final party. The company was praised for giving players access to some of the game's resources and for the care it showed the employees it laid off.

The real turning point happened outside the game. While developing Glitch, the team had used an internal messaging tool, which it turned into a separate product. That tool became Slack, and Tiny Speck was renamed Slack Technologies. According to a 2014 profile in Wired, Slack had reached more than 120,000 daily users a few months after its public launch in February 2014. Traces of Glitch live on today: the jazz track played to a participant left alone in Huddles, Slack's audio call feature, was originally composed for Glitch. Fans, meanwhile, used the publicly released source code to build remakes such as Eleven and Odd Giants.

The lesson of Glitch is that a product's failure does not mean the team has failed. The game never found an audience, but the tool the team built to solve its own problem spoke to a far bigger market than the game itself.

Lessons for founders

• In a game or consumer product, measure the learning curve of the first session; losing new users kills faster than a lack of content.
• Look at the by-products of a failed product; sometimes the real value lies in a tool the team built to solve its own internal problem.
• Treating users and employees with care when you shut down builds reputational capital for your next venture.

Sources

1. Glitch (video game) (Wikipedia)
2. How Stewart Butterfield Created Slack From a Failed Video Game (Wired, 2014-08-07)
3. Butterfly milking and pig nibbling: building the strange world of Glitch (Ars Technica, 2011-11-08)

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