Flickr creator’s social game Glitch announces closure

Glitch, the free to play social game from Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, has confirmed that it will terminate next month.

The developer said in 2010 that he had been working on Glitch since before the creation of Flickr. It combined elements of platforming and RPGs with social networking.

The gameworld will be deactivated on December 9th with the website and forums closing at the end of the year.

This is a horrible day. This is a horrible thing to have to say: Glitch is closing,” a notice on the game’s site confirmed. There’s no better word than ‘heartbreaking’ to describe what it feels like to have to do this. And we know that for many of you who poured your creativity, energy and imagination into Glitch and the community, it will be heartbreaking as well. We are sorry to have let you down.

Unfortunately, Glitch has 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. And, given the prevailing technological trends — the movement towards mobile and especially the continued decline of the Flash platform on which Glitch was built — it was unlikely to do so before its time was up.

Glitch was very ambitious and pushed the limits of what could be done in a browser-based game … and then those limits pushed back.”

Automatic refunds for recent purchases will begin immediately. Refunds for older transactions will need to be done manually and will be processed as quickly as possible, from most recent to oldest.”