
Peter Molyneux: 'It's over, I will not speak to the press again' - Red_Tarsius
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/peter-molyneux-game-designer-interview-godus
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viraptor
While he has a point about expectations and mismanaged time/budget... I tried
Godus lately and just cannot see how could it have any relation to what the
original games provided. It was a typical time-wasting wait-or-pay-to-play
app. At least on the phone it was free. On the PC you had to first pay for the
app, then you still had the microtransactions on top of that.

So people wanted something greater than Populus and instead got something that
actually had the mechanics of: another 2k belief will be available from this
building in 25 minutes, you need ~100k for your next bigger action - and you
better come back in the next 24h otherwise your civilisation will get worse
every day of not playing.

I can completely understand people who got pissed off after spending money on
that kickstarter and I'm slightly disappointed with the spin they put on this
article.

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celticninja
I think this happens with a lot of kickstarter projects but the project owners
are less well know and more likely to be able to just dissappear than someone
like Molyneux.

Although Molyneux's history of over-promising and under-delivering should
probably have been taken into account by backers. I don't think he was being
dishonest I just think he is passionate, optimistic and idealistic and doesn't
reign that in for pitches.

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Red_Tarsius
I agree with you, he messed up the kickstarter, albeit not by purpose. That
said, I'm surprised by how idealistic and passionate is Molyneux yet, despite
knowing too well the ungrateful target of his products. I may sound harsh, but
I really find the average gamer such a bad costumer.

> “People get so frustrated with me, so much so that they’ve threatened me,
> they’ve threatened my family and it just cannot go on, it really can’t.”

Seriously, who does suffer from such backlash outside of the videogame
industry?

~~~
nightcracker
I think it happens in every single mass consumer industry, not just video
games. If you have a crowdsourced backing of half a million dollars, then that
is a lot of people backing you. If you don't meet your goals it only takes a
couple of angry nuts to get these threats.

~~~
pjc50
Not sure about this. Maybe in other industries the threats are distributed
across customer service personnel and don't make it to the top. The only case
I can think of is animal rights activists vs. Huntingdon Life Sciences (
[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/animal-rights-
gro...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/animal-rights-group-
ends-15year-campaign-against-experiments-at-huntingdon-9687843.html) ) and
that isn't even customers.

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strictnein
I think Peter Molyneux's biggest issue is this: he's extremely smart and has a
wonderful imagination, but still, to this day, hasn't figured out that it is
extremely difficult to get great ideas from your gray matter into code,
especially if you're not the one coding.

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rdsnsca
Would of loved to pay it as a premium game not a POS IAP money grab.

Thats why it failed.

Played it until it required me to log into Facebook at which point i deleted
it.

