Glitch - Social MMO Browser Game that became Slack

TL;DR: Glitch was an innovative collaborative MMO browser game created by Tiny Speck, founded by Stewart Butterfield (who previously founded Flickr). The game deliberately avoided combat mechanics and focused on social interactions, resource gathering, and world-shaping. With $12.2M from Andreessen Horowitz and Accel Partners, the team built an ambitious product that needed 200K players to be profitable. The game faced several critical problems: heavy reliance on Adobe Flash (becoming obsolete and mobile-unfriendly), poor onboarding that left players confused ('I don't know what the fuck I'm supposed to do'), and an innovative but unfamiliar concept that most players didn't understand. Despite a dedicated core audience, Glitch never reached the player numbers needed for sustainability. In 2012, with $6M remaining, Butterfield made the difficult decision to shut down rather than continue investing in a failing product. Crucially, he convinced investors - including a skeptical Ben Horowitz who called it 'a really horrible idea' - to let him pivot to commercializing the internal communication tool the team had built. That tool became Slack, which reached 60K daily active users and 15K paying customers just 10 weeks after exiting beta, eventually being acquired by Salesforce for $27.7B. The story exemplifies both the sunk cost fallacy trap and the power of recognizing when internal tools are more valuable than the main product.