Startup Tiny Speck announced that it will be shutting down its quirky browser-based, massively multiplayer game, Glitch, at the end of the year.

According to the website, Tiny Speck (helmed by Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield) will close the live game/world at 8 p.m. Pacific time on  Dec. 9, while the website and forums will stay open until the end of the year.

“For many of us at Tiny Speck, the creation of something like Glitch was a long-held dream. There’s no better word than ‘heartbreaking’ to describe what it feels like to have to do this,” the startup said.

Tiny Speck noted that Glitch had not “attracted an audience large enough to sustain itself and based on a long period of experimentation and our best estimates, it seems unlikely that it ever would.”

The whimsical title – a cross between 2D platforming and an acid trip – attracted a cult following, particularly among social gamers and jaded games journalists tired of standard MMO experiences.

Glitch’s trippy trailer explained all you needed to know – it placed you inside the brain of one of 11 giants who collectively imagined the world. According to the trailer, “you’re inside their thoughts,” and your task was to make them bigger.

The trailer had a zany energy that evoked deliciously wacky experiences like Katamari Damaci – no coincidence, since Tiny Speck enlisted the services of Japanese game developer Keita Takahashi, who created Katamari.

Glitch had a somewhat tumultuous history that had many rooting for the quirky little MMO that could.

Back in April 2011, Tiny Speck raised $10.7 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. After the game launched on Sept. 27, 2011, Tiny Speck “unlaunched” it a couple months later to resume beta testing.

And now the end is near for this social game that was perhaps too imaginative for its own good.

Tiny Speck will issue automatic refunds for recent purchases and will manually handle refunds for older transactions, beginning with the newest sales.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you’re a Google Voice user, today is not a good day to be sexting. The voice over IP calling service had a glitch this morning that associated incorrect phone numbers with outgoing text messages.

“Google Voice experienced an issue displaying the incorrect caller ID for outbound SMS. The issue should now be resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

People using SMS messaging ran into the problem earlier this morning when text messages were being sent with random numbers, as opposed to the person’s selected Google Voice number. The issue was spotted by The Verge when a number of people began complained the switch-up on Google Voice’s forums. Some on the forums explained that the problem spanned across operating systems, but didn’t affect calls.

To add to the confusion, however, the phone numbers changed with each text message, interrupting any conversation threads.

Google says the glitch has been fixed, but you should check each message throughout the day, just to make sure. You should also check to make sure you weren’t affected earlier in the day. Many businesses use Google Voice and if you missed the text message glitch, you might want to get in touch with your contacts to make sure there wasn’t any confusion.

Funny text message image via Shutterstock

In addition to being one of the largest initial public offerings ever, Facebook’s IPO drew so much interest that the system couldn’t keep up with demand.

Facebook expected to make its public debut at 8 a.m. PT this morning, but trading took an extra half-hour to get underway. While details weren’t provided, Bloomberg was able to confirm that NASDAQ was experiencing a delay.

The Wall Street Journal reported that traders were unable to confirm changes or cancellations made to Facebook orders as early as 4:30 a.m. PT. Once trading did begin, traders were unable to get a confirmation on if they got the stock at the intended price. These glitches ended up putting the social network giant’s stock price into a slump, which caused a sinking reaction among other tech stocks.

It’s possible the glitches were due to the extremely large volume of trades — over 460 million shares traded (with nearly half of those happening within the first two hours). NASDAQ was unavailable for comment about the glitches at the time of publication.

So lets recap: Facebook’s IPO was one of the largest ever, generated so much activity the system couldn’t keep up, and caused other industry stocks to mimic its behavior. However, all that demand didn’t translate to a great first day for the stock, which closed at $38.06, down $4 from where it opened.

But the company’s largest stakeholder and chief executive showing up to the bell ringing in a hoodie rather than stuffy business attire? That was no big deal. (To test this theory, Twitter’s largest shareholders should wear Jedi robes and plastic light sabers when it goes public.)

Photo via NASDAQ live feed video

The formula for this year’s big games seems to be something like this: launch a blockbuster, include game-breaking bugs. Those who have played Skyrim can probably agree. The latest game to be hit with a major bug? The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

First the bad news: this bug is game-breaking. This means that if you are unfortunate enough to stumble onto this one, there is very little you can do. Actually, according to Nintendo, there is nothing you can do. Your save file is pooched, and you must restart the game.

Now the Good News: Nintendo is very aware of it, and they have found a workaround. You must simply avoid the specific sequence of events that triggers this nasty bug.

The following is the official statement from Nintendo on how to avoid trapping Link forever:

We have been made aware of the issue that results in being unable to progress in the Song of the Hero quest. If the game has been saved after completing the sequence of events, it will no longer be possible to proceed through the game on that save file. The only options at that point are to either start the game over or to use an earlier save file to continue.

The situation is caused by performing the following sequence of events during the Song of the Hero quest:

1. At the beginning of the quest, go to Lanayru Desert to retrieve the song of the Thunder Dragon.

2. In the Lanayru Mine, speak with Golo the Goron.

3. Complete the Thunder Dragon’s event, and receive his song.

4. Before heading to the forest or volcano regions, speak with Golo in the mine again.

5. At this point, the forest and volcano events will no longer occur, making it impossible to continue.

Solutions:

• This issue WILL NOT OCCUR if the Fire and Water Dragon songs have already been collected before collecting the Thunder Dragon’s song. Talking to Golo in the Lanayru Caves will also NOT trigger this issue.

• If the game has been saved after completing the sequence of events, it will no longer be possible to proceed through the game on that save file. The only options at that point are to either start the game over or to use an earlier save file to continue.

I wish I had a better answer, but I’m afraid there currently is no other fix available. I can assure, however, that we are documenting all feedback we receive on this issue. Thank you for your patience and support.

Sincerely,

Sharon Matheny

Yeah, it’s not wonderful news, but at least it’s avoidable. The other bummer is that it’s not something that can be fixed with a quick patch. Just one more thing for our very own Sebastian Haley to diss about Zelda (Just messing with ya, Haley).

(Via Zelda Informer)

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Fans have fallen in love with the zany title, said Stewart Butterfield, chief executive of San Francisco-based Tiny Speck, in a a post on the Glitch blog moments ago. But there are a couple of major improvements the company wants to make to change the way the game plays. I guess you could say that Glitch has hit a glitch.

“There are two obvious and huge improvements we need to make: the first is to make the early game reveal itself more easily to new players so they can get into the fun faster,” Butterfield wrote. “The second and larger task is to give those players who have gotten over that initial hump and fallen in love with the game — spending dozens or even hundreds of hours playing — the creative tools that they need to change the world in more tangible ways: building whole new locations themselves, designing new buildings, setting up resource flows and forming flexible organizations to create bigger things together.”

Butterfield added, “And we’re committed to giving people a square deal: we know going back to beta was not what you expected, so if you have bought anything from us and you don’t feel like you got your money’s worth or you don’t like the idea of everything changing, we will give you a 100 percent, no hassle, full and complete refund.”

The funny there here is that most other game companies do major revisions like this, and they simply require their users to download a big patch. They don’t announce that they’re “unlaunching.” It’s almost business as usual in online games for the games to change over time.

[Update: In an interview, Butterfield said that the company felt like it was making a couple of major changes and had to go through the formal process of "unlaunching" because it was already generating revenues from the game. He said that the game has more than 100,000 users and that it wants the customers to be happy or get their money back.

Tiny Speck will likely work on the new features for a period of months -- more than a couple of months but less than a year -- as it seeks to enable the changes. The biggest change will be making the world more malleable so that heavy-duty users can create their own major objects, such as buildings, and stay busy so they don't run out of content, Butterfiled said.

Butterfield said that the game would stay available but would have occasional down times as the company does the revisions. ]

Glitch is unlike most other games you’ve seen. From the moment you log in, you know you’re not in the real world anymore. You appear inside a brain, one of the minds of eleven giants who imagine the game’s zany landscape.

“It is super metaphorical,” the greeting for the tutorial says. “Your job is to grow and expand the world, shaping it while developing your own unique character.”

This journey into the imagination isn’t your normal game, so it’s no surprise it came from a startup that’s been working on it for a very long time.

Glitch is the brainchild of Butterfield’s Tiny Speck. Butterfield previously co-founded photo-sharing site Flickr. Video games are often slammed for their blockbuster mentality, not creativity. If Glitch takes off, it will show that there is still room in the perhaps overly commercialized game industry for artistically crafted and thought-provoking independent games. The animations of the persistent world are hand-drawn. The world has its own ecology and economy.

From the very start, Glitch is different. You can water plants, but you can also pet them to make them grow. If you nibble a pig’s ear, it will give you some meat. You can find little “music blocks,” which play snippets of music when you click on them. If you find a butterfly, you can give it a massage. If you squeeze a chicken, you can get a piece of grain.

You have to do things that keep your energy and your mood high. In order to do that, you have to collect and eat things. Everything has to stay in balance. These complex systems, such as the world’s trees, have to be cared for in order to keep the world in order. Pigs have to be fed or they eat leaves off the trees. If the leaves are eaten, the trees die.

Tiny Speck’s own press release opens with a quote from James P. Carse, who said, “There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other, infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

Glitch is a web-based massively multiplayer online game. It is non-violent, highly social and is played as a two-dimensional cartoon animated world. Butterfield says the designers of the game and the players create the Glitch universe in tandem, with the designers constantly tweaking and improving the platform while the players cultivate a sophisticated and irreverent civilization.

Players can do just about anything, from curating an art installation to hosting a diamond-infused dinner party. Tiny Speck provides the raw materials and a stimulating environment. “The vision is to bring a new level of creativity, beauty and social engagement,” Butterfield (pictured at top) says.

Part of the mission is to bring art to a wider audience. The game mixes all sorts of original visual styles. The look varies as you travel up and down the boulevards of the world. It changes from psychedelic to surreal, from Japanese cutesy animation to hyper-saturated pixel art, classic cartoon to contemporary mixed media.

Players can adjust their avatars, or game characters, in many different ways. They can buy outfits and customize as they wish. They can go on missions. In one, they have to get some official papers from a government agency. They have to interact with bureaucrats, who keep saying they have to check with someone to get a proper answer. At some point, the bureaucrat finally delivers the papers.

The game invites players to come back a lot by getting them to learn skills. There are about four months’ worth of skills in the game now. The game also has hundreds of different objects.

You can also come back just to explore the surreal universe. If you want eggs, you can get them from an eggplant. Then you take them to a chicken to incubate them. Dairy products in the game come from butterfly milk. And pigs are born from the eggs.

On the social side, players can go on quests together or play multiplayer sports mini games. They can form conga lines and dance. The world is unified, so friends can interact with anybody in the world. The game is built in Adobe Flash, so it isn’t that demanding, technically. But Tiny Speck tried to push the limit on how many objects can be on the screen at one time. The game has cool lighting effects and faux 3D animations.

Butterfield and his wife Caterina Fake were thinking about making a game before they did Flickr. But Flickr took off like wildfire and they sold it to Yahoo in 2005. They then returned to work on the original game that they had started. Tiny Speck’s founders include Butterfield and three other original team members from Flickr: Cal Henderson (pictured above and below in green shirt), Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov. They started the firm in 2009 and it now has 40 employees. Tiny Speck raised $10.7 million in April from Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. Legendary game designer Keita Takahashi (no relation to me), the creator of Katamari Damacy, joined the team in July as a Glitch game designer.

Players can stay in touch with the game while on the run. The full Glitch site is accessible from a mobile app, Glitch HQ, for the Apple iOS platform. The mobile app lets players keep up with updates and chatter from their game friends. Third-party game developers are busy creating web and mobile extensions of the game using Tiny Speck’s applications programming interface.

The game is free to play, with virtual item sales. But you can subscribe to the game if you wish to get wider access to cool things. You can’t purchase anything in the game that gives you an advantage over other players. If you buy anything, it’s mostly for the sake of decoration or vanity.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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“It is super metaphorical,” the greeting for the tutorial says. “Your job is to grow and expand the world, shaping it while developing your own unique character.”

This journey into the imagination isn’t your normal game, so it’s no surprise it came from a startup that’s been working on it for a very long time. Glitch is the brainchild of Tiny Speck, a San Francisco company started by Stewart  Butterfield, who previously co-founded photo-sharing site Flickr. Video games are often slammed for their blockbuster mentality, not creativity. If Glitch takes off, it will show that there is still room in the perhaps overly commercialized game industry for artistically crafted and thought-provoking independent games.

“This world is built with hand-drawn animation,” Butterfield said. “It is a persistent world, with its own ecology and economy. It’s totally uncharted.”

From the very start, Glitch is different. You can water plants, but you can also pet them to make them grow. If you nibble a pig’s ear, it will give you some meat. You can find little “music blocks,” which play snippets of music when you click on them. If you find a butterfly, you can give it a massage. If you squeeze a chicken, you can get a piece of grain.

You have to do things that keep your energy and your mood high. In order to do that, you have to collect and eat things. Everything has to stay in balance. These complex systems, such as the world’s trees, have to be cared for in order to keep the world in order. Pigs have to be fed or they eat leaves off the trees. If the leaves are eaten, the trees die.

Tiny Speck’s own press release opens with a quote from James P. Carse, who said, “There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other, infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

Glitch is a web-based massively multiplayer online game. About 27,000 players have already tested the game. It is non-violent, highly social and is played as a two-dimensional cartoon animated world. Butterfield says the designers of the game and the players create the Glitch universe in tandem, with the designers constantly tweaking and improving the platform while the players cultivate a sophisticated and irreverent civilization.

Players can do just about anything, from curating an art installation to hosting a diamond-infused dinner party. Tiny Speck provides the raw materials and a stimulating environment. “The vision is to bring a new level of creativity, beauty and social engagement,” Butterfield (pictured at top) says.

Part of the mission is to bring art to a wider audience. The game mixes all sorts of original visual styles. The look varies as you travel up and down the boulevards of the world. It changes from psychedelic to surreal, from Japanese cutesy animation to hyper-saturated pixel art, classic cartoon to contemporary mixed media.

Players can adjust their avatars, or game characters, in many different ways. They can buy outfits and customize as they wish. They can go on missions. In one, they have to get some official papers from a government agency. They have to interact with bureaucrats, who keep saying they have to check with someone to get a proper answer. At some point, the bureaucrat finally delivers the papers.

The game invites players to come back a lot by getting them to learn skills. There are about four months’ worth of skills in the game now. The game also has hundreds of different objects.

You can also come back just to explore the surreal universe. If you want eggs, you can get them from an eggplant. Then you take them to a chicken to incubate them. Dairy products in the game come from butterfly milk. And pigs are born from the eggs.

“Everything is super whacky,” Butterfield said. “If you play it for a while, it makes sense. It’s a surreal wrapper around the world.”

On the social side, players can go on quests together or play multiplayer sports mini games. They can form conga lines and dance. The world is unified, so friends can interact with anybody in the world. The game is built in Adobe Flash, so it isn’t that demanding, technically. But Tiny Speck tried to push the limit on how many objects can be on the screen at one time. The game has cool lighting effects and faux 3D animations.

Some of the sections of the world reflect the influence of some of the giants, but the world isn’t divided into territories. The basic story is that one giant became too powerful at one point and things “glitched apart,” Butterfield said.

Butterfield and his wife Caterina Fake were thinking about making a game before they did Flickr. But Flickr took off like wildfire and they sold it to Yahoo in 2005. They then returned to work on the original game that they had started. Tiny Speck’s founders include Butterfield and three other original team members from Flickr: Cal Henderson (pictured above and below in green shirt), Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov. They started the firm in 2009 and it now has 40 employees. Tiny Speck raised $10.7 million in April from Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. Legendary game designer Ketia Takahashi (no relation to me), the creator of Katamari Damacy, joined the team in July as a Glitch game designer.

Takahashi is busy building zany missions for the game. Butterfield said that Tiny Speck will take advantage of web-based software to release new content on an hourly basis. He showed me how quickly he could create an object, give it characteristics, and set it loose in the world. Half the development time, he said, was creating tools to quickly create game elements.

Players can stay in touch with the game while on the run. The full Glitch site is accessible from a mobile app, Glitch HQ, for the Apple iOS platform. The mobile app lets players keep up with updates and chatter from their game friends. Third-party game developers are busy creating web and mobile extensions of the game using Tiny Speck’s applications programming interface.

“Those developers can create something and have it be in the world in an hour or so,” Butterfield said.

The game is free to play, with virtual item sales. But you can subscribe to the game if you wish to get wider access to cool things. You can’t purchase anything in the game that gives you an advantage over other players. If you buy anything, it’s mostly for the sake of decoration or vanity.

VentureBeat’s readers can get a “fast pass” access to the world of Glitch by clicking on this link. The company may not be able to add everybody all at once at the very start.

# # #

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Takahashi (no relation to me) is the creator of Katamari Damacy, a whimsical game that has sold millions of copies and was a rare example of independent creativity in the video game industry. Katamari Damacy was an insanely creative game, where you took a ball and rolled it over things that stuck to it, generating a huge snowball with a patchwork of items sticking out of it.

The hiring shows the disruptions happening in the core video game market and how talent is migrating from the older part of the industry to the new. It’s also a great endorsement for the team at Tiny Speck, which was created by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield. Tiny Speck raised more than $10 million in funding in April.

Takahashi has left Tokyo and relocated with his family to Vancouver to work with Tiny Speck.

In a blog post, Tiny Speck said of Takahashi, “His power of imagination and ability to realize something wholly unique and different stands out in the history of games.” Takahashi started having a conversation with the Tiny Speck team a few months ago and played some Glitch, which is in testing. He and the team found they shared values such as “deep beliefs in curiosity, humor, absurdity, and above all a belief in the positive power of play.”

We call this topic the “talent migration” and it’s one of the topics we will talk about at our GamesBeat 2011 conference next week in San Francisco.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.
Our sponsors include Qualcomm, Flurry, Greystripe, Nexage, Tapjoy, Fun
Mobility, TriNet, Zong, Sibblingz, OpenFeint, Spil Games and
WildTangent.

The company is also launching an invite-based beta test of its social online game, Glitch, next week. The fact that the company has attracted considerable funding from marquee venture capital firms shows that the game market, particularly online social games, is still a hot category. While some are calling this a bubble, the number of success stories — from Zynga to Ngmoco — is high and it’s inspiring more money and more entrants to come into the market.

Tiny Speck is headed by Stewart Butterfield, who is known for creating photo-sharing site Flickr with his wife Caterina Fake. Yahoo bought Flickr in 2005 and Butterfield created Tiny Speck with a number of core employees from Flickr, including Cal Henderson, former head of engineering at Flickr.

Glitch is a zany massively multiplayer online game “with a very social undercurrent” that will debut on Tiny Speck’s web site. In the game, there are 11 giants “who thought of funny things until their thinking came alive.” You play beings inside their thoughts and your task is to make them bigger.

In an interview, Butterfield said that raising the money was relatively easy, particularly since Andreessen Horowitz and Accel have supported the company from the start. He said that the game is taking longer to make than the usual social game, but he said that Glitch is much more ambitious than other games as a social game world.

“Ours is more of a quest for self-identity, with richer and deeper game play,” he said.

Butterfield said that developers can actually tap into the services Glitch enables via a set of applications programming interfaces (APIs) to build game add-ons or new games.

Butterfield said the company started its first alpha testing of Glitch a year ago. Hundreds of features have been added or trimmed during that time. There are 85 different skills and hundreds of different items in the game. There are also thousands of locations for players to explore.

Tens of thousands of people are waiting in a queue to test the game. Butterfield said the investment allows Tiny Speck to move faster in developing the unique game world and the technology infrastructure behind it. He said the company is hiring and wants to get in touch with independent game developers. The company has 22 employees.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The first time around, Butterfield had an awful time getting support. But this time he raised $6.5 million from well-known angel investors. He’s got a team of 16 people, and they’ve taken their time in getting their new online virtual world off the ground. Not many game makers have such luxuries, but Butterfield is trying to build a next-generation social game. We talked to him yesterday about his plans.

VB: Can you talk about what you did before Flickr?
SB: Before Flickr, we started Ludicorp in 2002. The intent of the company was to create a web-based massively multiplayer online game. It was sort of like what we are doing now, but was a lot less technologically ambitious. The core nugget of the idea was the same. It was very social, not about killing but it was also more than just a puzzle game. It was about creating a world that was open-ended. Not so much like Second Life, but enough so that the player had freedom to drive the way the world evolved. The original idea was different from Sim City, with one person running a world from the top down, like a god. This was a bottom up, emergent, more collaborative simulation where all the individual players could contribute and control the society. It is not totally free form, but with game elements such as missions.

VB: What happened?
SB: Well, 2002 was the all-time crappiest moment to start a company. It was in the wake of the dot-com crash and Worldcom and Enron and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It was not a good time to raise money for anything, but particularly hard for consumer game companies. So in an act of desperation, we developed Flickr.

VB: You kept this idea for the game on the backburner?
SB: Yes. There are four us who formed the core of Tiny Speck. We wanted to do this ever since then. Flickr was a great product and it was life-changing to work on. It was awesome. But we decided we wanted to do this.

VB: What is the core of the idea now?
SB: The initial experience is as a side-scrolling platform game, hearkening back to Mario games. That lets people get a handle on the basic control of the game. Stylistically, it’s a mix of all different kinds of things with contemporary illustration. It’s different from traditional console games or social games. There are some indie games doing similar stuff. We have a lot of traditional two-dimensional artists. The game takes place inside the minds of 11 giants who are imagining the world. As you go from place to place, the style is different and the world changes. Your imagination brings the different parts of the world to life.

VB: Would you describe it as a virtual world or a user-generated world?
SB: It’s definitely a virtual world, though not as open-ended as Second Life. We don’t just drop you in the world and say, “go crazy.” There are quests and missions. You can earn skill and achievements over time. It’s not user-generated in the sense that users contribute art or animation. It’s possible we would allow some of that in the future. We will put in the time and foot the bill to create the world for people. It is a flexible world, where we can expand the size of the world and add new content.

VB: Can you talk about the Rook, the crow with the bloodshot eyes? It looks like a destructive element in the game.
SB: Yes, it is a balancing element. Part of the destructive element: balancing element. Part of the game is that players develop new locations in collaborative multiplayer quests. The players can unlock a part of the world, and players can choose which direction they want to go in the upgrade. They balance that against the need to protect and maintain the world against attacks from the Rook. You have full-blown attacks. We are still fiddling with the actual way it works. The Rook can appear and attack plants, animals or players in the world. It can warp them, and players have to do some work to heal the injured animals and plants around the world.

VB: That gives players a motive to pull together and go to a section of the world and defend it from the Rook?
SB: Yes, it can be expensive to defend against the Rook. You need a lot of different resources and skills to do that. Some people will have alchemy spells. Others will have medication to heal players under attack.

VB: It’s a web site game, but is it also a Facebook game?
SB: We will use the Facebook applications programming interface, but you won’t be able to play it on Facebook as it is now. That’s because we don’t have enough real estate on a Facebook page, and we don’t want ads in the game. Having said that, the longer-term plan is to have our own API for limited playability. People should be able to participate in the game without launching the whole game from within Facebook, Twitter, email or other apps. There are potential mini games that could tie into the bigger game.

VB: Can you tell me more about the team?
SB: There are 16 people, evenly split between San Francisco and Vancouver. San Francisco is the engineering and Vancouver is the creative production. I am in Vancouver about 75 percent of the time.

VB: Caterina (who started Hunch) is not part of this company?
SB: No, she is not part of this one.

VB: Who are your investors?
SB: Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, is one. So is Rob Solomon, president of Groupon. Brad Horowitz, vice president of product at Google, is another one. Ron Conway is an investor. There are some friends and family as well. We have no plans to raise money. We have money in the bank and are aiming for a higher average revenue per user than most social game companies. We are aiming for deeper engagement and retention. Never say never. But the plan is to become profitable with the money we have raised so far.

VB: Tell us more about the business plan.
SB: The business plan is established. We have traditional virtual item sales for decorative items. You can customize your house and your avatar. We will also have subscriptions for premium features. We want to try ads in the game. Players can buy billboard space in busy transit hubs to advertise a new company they start in the game or advertise a crazy cult so they can get new adherents. You can buy things that help you accelerate skill learning. We will also have distributable mini games on other platforms. You can have iPhone and Android games that tie into the big game. There could be an alchemy game that unlocks a skill in the big game. We will have a free-to-play MMO as a distribution platform for other games that can be purchased. We will experiment. One of the things we learned was that you have to have multiple options for people. There are a lot of people who would pay us more if we could have them sold them more. There are mini games. There are teleportation tokens to get around the world faster. There are virtual items together. All of those things will blend. We don’t want to hit people over the head with the business pitch.

Our goal is to create a next-generation social game. The first generation blew the world wide open and radically increased the number of players out there. There is also a high burnout rate because the games are very simplistic, partly because there is such an emphasis on driving purchases. That is dangerous. It’s a scorched earth policy. We wanted to avoid that. We want to develop a longer-term relationship with the player. There was a lot of ad fatigue in the late 1990s through now. People created bigger banner ads and pop-ups that drove users nuts.

VB: Can you tell us more about the video trailer. It has a lot of sound and music. It’s zany. Is that the way the game will be?
SB: It has a higher pace of action than the game, but those are the things you will do in the game. The musicians who worked on the music for the video are also doing the game music.The artists are also the same. We are in alpha stage right now. We will be in beta early next year and launch sometime in the spring. It’s still early and we are constantly producing new stuff. But people can get a sense of the style of the game.

VB: It looks like you are putting a lot of emphasis on creativity and originality.
SB: There are tens of millions of people who just got their taste of gaming. People who identify themselves as gamers have been a minority. With FarmVille, that has changed. People have had a taste of gaming now. We are shooting for higher production values for people who want something more sophisticated. Some want quick diversions. But there will be people who want something richer and deeper.

VB: Isn’t it tough to take on Zynga?
SB: I don’t think so. It’s still such early days. The field is wide open. Zynga, Playfish, CrowdStar and Playdom all started early enough. They could take advantage of the news feed posts to get more users. But there was tragedy of the commons. They put too many messages into the news feed and Facebook viewed it as spam. Facebook cut back on that kind of distribution. There is a big enough audience for games now. There is an audience for indie games, beyond those reviewed by the games press. It helps that we have a reputation. It helps getting an initial PR. We are taking a long view. We started 18 months ago and won’t launch for another four or five months. We have been doing a lot of testing. We have gotten a lot of feedback and want to create a real community. This is an uncharted world. Everyone plays in the same world. The strength of the community will matter. We are investing heavily in that. We’ll have new cool features that other people haven’t done before.

VB: It seems like a bigger effort than the usual social game. It took maybe six weeks for Zynga to do FarmVille with a small team.
SB: We are willing to invest. I have no idea whether FarmVille could have been better with more investment. That came at the right place and the right time. I don’t think someone could launch FarmVille today and have it take off. First, the distribution avenues are closed. Second, people have different tastes now. Zynga can launch games that its existing users will play. But that won’t last forever. Zynga has learned that, and they have invested in better games, like FrontierVille. The good thing for us is that people won’t play just one game. They will play on Facebook, the iPhone and other platforms. People don’t have a lot of extra time. But they will spend more time playing games if there are better games to play.

VB: You were outside of the game industry for a while. Now you’ve come back into it. What is the state of the game industry?
SB: We are in the middle of it and it is hard to tell how it will play out. It’s like Netflix, which will not continue to ship DVDs forever. Digital distribution is changing things radically. At some point, you won’t need the relationship with the retailers. People won’t have to go to the mall to get games. Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network are successful. So is the iPhone. The larger companies have been entrenched. But Zynga, Playfish, Playdom and CrowdStar came out of nowhere. They are doing acquisitions or are getting acquired. The usage numbers for all the social games are very high. We are in the middle of a very big disruption. It’s almost like the last two years have been like a compressed version of the shift that took place for the web from 1995 through 2002. People experimented with brand new companies. Google was tiny. Facebook hadn’t been conceived. Now the game usage is moving from the 5 percent or 10 percent of the population to 50 percent or more. Just look at Angry Birds. These games are passing the time. They’re not competing with $60 games.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Butterfield started the company last year. He’s better known for creating photo-sharing site Flickr with his wife Caterina Fake, a site that was bought by Yahoo in 2005. Butterfield created Tiny Speck with a number of the core people from Flickr, including Cal Henderson, former head of engineering at Flickr.

In the game, there are 11 giants “who thought of funny things until their thinking came alive.” You play beings inside their thoughts. “Go and make them bigger, and you’ll play for a long while,” the song says.

Offhand, it looks like a cute kids virtual world, akin to worlds such as Club Penguin or Fantage. But the trailer closes with the scary image of a crow, known as The Rook, with bloodshot eyes. So while this looks like a children’s game, it will likely have some scary elements too. The Rook, according to the site, “is dark and opposes all creativity. And they will try to attack the game world, especially locations which are left a little too neglected.”

You can sign up for beta testing now, but the game looks like it will launch in the spring. Techcrunch reported that Glitch underwent extensive user testing over the weekend with thousands of players. Based on the video, it appears to be very zany and original.

Butterfield told the New York Times that he has been thinking of a return to video games for a long time. The company has raised $6.5 million from investors including Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and several prominent angel investors. The game will be free to play to start with, but users can buy virtual goods or take out subscriptions to access additional levels. Users can also open stores within the game and pay Tiny Speck to advertise. The game will be on Facebook as well as on its own web site.

Check out the video below to see the new Glitch trailer.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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