What’s Stopping Glitch From Becoming Farmville?
What is a Glitch?
Glitch is a new MMORPG from Tiny Speck, so new, pre-new even, that it’s still in beta and you need an invite to join. It’s more than a little bizarre, with piggies inviting you to “nibble” them for meat and massaging butterflies the primary course to acquiring dairy products. There is as yet no combat, though recent signs point to a change there. The future combat looks to be rare, however, and the primary focus of the game will remain cooperation and friendship between players in the world that they in some ways create and no doubt affect.
During the Glitch beta period, which seems to last for an infinite “six weeks,” the game is periodically “open” and “closed” to players, and while the developers give hints as to when the game will next be available to play, nothing is ever written in stone. The elephant in the room is that at some future date, when the beta is ready to go public, the game will be reset and all progress gained during the beta period will be lost. Beta players understand this to be a way to level the playing field for new players just entering the world, but there is an underlying fatalism that everything done in the game isn’t going to last much longer. While the devs are entirely upfront about the reset, I wonder how many beta players will be discouraged by their loss of progress and not return when the game goes public, not as a conscious decision but out of lack of continued interest. The Glitch beta players are no doubt valuable to the community, as they will serve as ambassadors for the new, post-reset players, shepherding in refugees from Farmville and similar Facebook games. While Google+ remains Restaurant City-free, it may be non-combat MMORPGs that fill the time-sink hole for those fleeing Facebook.
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