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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.

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Rachel Weber avatar
Rachel Weber has been with GamesIndustry since 2011 and specialises in news-writing and investigative journalism. She has more than five years of consumer experience, having previously worked for Future Publishing in the UK.
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