Who is Tiny Speck? Well, only the guys behind Flickr. The Flickr photosharing service was eventually sold to Yahoo in 2005 for around $35 million USD.

Man, hasn’t Yahoo made some people rich? It seems they have bought so many startups and thrown around millions to promising developers and promising web entrepreneurs.

Anyway, back to the Glitch Game.

Well what is it?

Stewart Butterfield, the mind behind Flickr and new game Glitch – says he wanted to stay away from traditional MMO games, most of which focus on either fighting, battling and dragons coming at you.

The focus of Glitch, the game – is to give players the option to go back in time, essentially time traveling to fix ‘Glitches’ in a future world.

“Gamers will be able to band together into groups in the game and interact with the it through SMS, widgets and possibly social networks,” said Butterfield the mind behind the game.

It’s interesting to note that Butterfield essentially started Flickr as an actual online game. In the original game, players were to use or upload photos as part of the game. After time, Butterfield found more users were using his MMO as a ‘photo storage’ method, hence switching it to Flickr and the rest as they say is history – with yahoo weighing in and the public going nuts for Flickr.

But apart from Butterfield having roots in MMO online gaming, just look at what we’ve seen in the past 12 months in the free online gaming space.

Evony Free Forever – the big name release of 2009, now approaching 20 million gamers.
Kingory Game – a spin off, very similar to Evony thats growing strongly.
Grepolis Game – a unique, Greek mythology based title from Innogames recently released
World of Lordcraft – the latest player, boasts potential to be the next mini-World of Warcraft.

Why all the game titles?

Because while Blizzard has cashed in big time on the biggest MMO of all time, World of Warcraft. The original Warcraft design still needs software to be purchased (costs a user day 1), then the user much purchase a monthly subscription.

Now, regardless of these hurdles – Blizzard got this off the ground, and WoW pulls in multiple-millions a month
for them.

The original opportunity was there for old school gaming company Sierra. They had a possible killer game on their hands with he MMO called The Realm. The Realm got plenty of nibbles from gamers, but Sierra refused to be patient, they stopped pumping development money in and eventually flicked it.

Blizzard picks up after a few others tried, now Blizzard has cleaned up.

But the potential for online MMO profits is much more. The attach rate for browser gaming is even more huge. ZERO startup costs for a gamer and if they like the game, they can buy game coins, armor, weapons, special items – what ever.

Take Evony for example, with around 20 million accounts, lets say only 5 million accounts are active. If they charge their users $1 a month to play, there’s $5million a month !!

Then take the facebook angle, games such as Farmville/Farmtown, MafiaWars and others stand to get an eventual pay day when they can extract a profit, but they have 10,20 and 30 million players each – which even without money coming in – they are mining enough data from the facebook accounts to onsell to 3rd parties which is worth plenty of money too.

So, online gaming is where it’s at. A genuine, quality MMO that cracks English, Asian and European markets will seriously clean up for it’s owners.

Glitch Online Game is a post from: World Portal