Curiosity attracts 158,000 tappers on day one
User numbers cause server issues for 22 Cans' tapping app
Peter Molyneux's gaming experiment Curiosity: The Cube became a victim of its own success last night, as thousands of users overloaded servers.
"I now understand what's going on, basically we and our server are overwhelmed by the number of people trying out the experiment," tweeted Molyneux late last night.
"Everyone please remember something as concurrent as this has never been attempted before, and we're just a tiny company."
His last tweet of the night at around 1am revealed 22 Cans was trying to make live changes on the server to fix the issues, which included people being unable to connect to the game or hitting error messages when looking at stats or friend's info.
97 million "cubelets" have already been destroyed on the first layer, with the average daily destruction rate for each user clocking in at 306. At 2pm yesterday Molyneux reported that 2 billion in-game coins had been spent and 625 people have purchased the 1 million coin chisel. That number could easily have doubled by now.
Curiosity: The Cube is free and the first of a series of "experiments" devised by the 22 Cans studio. Users strip away layers of a cube by tapping, but only one user, the one who removes the final cubelet, will get to see what's at the centre of the cube by video link.
Hm, I can't access the in-game store - both the store and info buttons are greyed out for me. The actual game seems to be working fine though, as far as it goes.
The real problem is that so far I've not seen any sign of anything I'd describe as actual gameplay. You literally just tap on squares as quickly as you can to clear them and earn coins that (so far) I can't spend. Maybe something more interesting will happen when people break through the outer shell of the cube to the next layer, but if this is all there is to Curiosity then it's a bit disingenuous to call it a game at all. It's an impressive tech demo, showing how thousands of people can collaborate on a single online object simultaneously, but that's about it.
You can draw on the surface of the cube by selectively removing squares, but as thousands of other people are destroying the cube at the same time, you often find your creations are destroyed before you can finish them, even when you pick a fairly remote corner of the back face of the cube, So far I've not seen much in the way of large scale structure being created by players. I'm not quite sure what Peter was trying to achieve here, but I've no particular urge to "play" it again.
Posted:6 months ago