Glitch
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Glitch was a browser-based 2D massively multiplayer online game developed by Tiny Speck under Stewart Butterfield, the Flickr co-founder. Launched on September 27, 2011, the nonviolent social game let players roam the minds of eleven cosmic giants; its design team included Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi. Citing accessibility and depth issues, the game reverted to beta status on November 30, 2011.
02 / Glitch FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Glitch never attracted an audience large enough to sustain itself. The studio said that after a long period of experimentation it seemed unlikely it ever would, citing prevailing technology trends: the movement toward mobile and the continued decline of the Flash platform on which the game was built. Tiny Speck also tried, and failed, to find a buyer willing to keep the game running.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Launch
Glitch officially launched on September 27, 2011, but reverted to beta on November 30, 2011 over accessibility and depth issues.
- Shutdown
On November 14, 2012 Tiny Speck announced Glitch would shut down; the servers went dark on December 9, 2012.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
On November 14, 2012, Tiny Speck announced that Glitch would shut down within a month, saying it had not attracted a large enough player base.
- 02
The servers went dark on December 9, 2012 at 8pm PT after an End of the World party attended by thousands of players.
- 03
Tiny Speck refunded all unspent in-game currency in real money and laid off roughly 30 people, keeping a smaller core team to develop new products.
- 04
The internal messaging tool built during the game's development became Slack; the company was later renamed Slack Technologies.