
Peter Molyneux may have just monetized trolling - laurent123456
http://gamasutra.com/view/news/190865/Peter_Molyneux_may_have_just_monetized_trolling.php
======
aresant
"players have so far paid to remove nearly 14 million cubelets, while adding
an extra 4.7 million."

Wow I almost spit out my tea when reading that while wrongly assuming each
block was $0.99

Then I followed the link in page and discovered that the $6.99 point is for
100,000 units.

So figure ~200 of those sold or about $1000 after App Store fees.

I can now sleep tonight.

------
GuiA
After decades of trying to mke better and better videogames, always more
realistic, Molyneux shows that the average human is, in fact satisfied by a
Skinner box and will gladly pay for it.

~~~
Kronopath
Do you honestly think the _average_ human being is busy playing Curiosity?

~~~
GuiA
Re-read my post. I didn't say the average human being is busy playing
Curiosity; I said that the average human is fully satisfied interacting with a
Skinner box.

~~~
Dylan16807
Re-write your post. You said Molyneux showed something about the average
human. You can't backpedal that into a statement not involving Molyneux.

~~~
GuiA
> you said Molyneux showed something about the average human.

Yes.

> You can't backpedal that into a statement not involving Molyneux.

I didn't backpedal; you can change "I said that the average human is fully
satisfied interacting with a Skinner box" to "I said that the average human is
fully satisfied interacting with a Skinner box, as shown by Molyneux's
Curiosity", if it makes you happy, but it doesn't really change anything.

~~~
Dylan16807
Kronopath challenged the idea that the people playing Curiosity are in fact
average. I don't know if you read his comment as a silly statement regarding
billions of people playing the game or something, but there is legitimate
argument to be made that the average Curiosity player is far away from the
average western citizen.

If the average Curiosity player is not even close to an average person (such
as what if 80% of them had OCD), then your statement that Molyneux has showed
anything about the average person is incorrect.

So please, either disagree with Kronopath or point out a flaw in my logic,
let's not mess around with semantics and restatements.

------
downandout
_"...players have so far paid to remove nearly 14 million cubelets, while
adding an extra 4.7 million"_

Adding 500,000 cubelets costs $10.99, which implies that people have paid
~$103 to add cubelets over the course of 166 days, or around 62 cents per day.
Gross revenue from all cubelet sales in either direction is ~$405 or
~$2.43/day. He may have monetized trolling, but it doesn't seem very
profitable.

~~~
itafroma
> Adding 500,000 cubelets costs $10.99, which implies that people have paid
> ~$103 to add cubelets over the course of 166 days, or around 62 cents per
> day. Gross revenue from all cubelet sales in either direction is ~$308 or
> ~$1.85/day.

Your numbers are way off, as is the timescale. The ability to add or remove
cubelets is a new feature, released on April 17th. At ~$405.75 to change the
cubelet levels using the most economical price ($10.99 for 500k, or $21.98 for
1 million, over 18.46 million cubelets[1]), that's ~$101.44/day.

[1]: "...users have paid to remove 13,780,000 cublets and add another
4,680,000" from [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-19-molyneux-
adds-o...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-19-molyneux-adds-option-
to-re-grow-curiosity-cube)

~~~
downandout
Actually, they are not. The article indicated that the experiment had been
going for 166 days (164 days, but it was written two days ago).
$10.99/500K=$0.00002198 per cubelet. 0.00002198 X 18.46M total cubelets sold =
$405. $405/166 = $2.43/day.

~~~
itafroma
The experiment has been running for a few months yes, but like I said, the
feature to add or remove cubelets is new for version 3.0, released on April
17th. Check the Eurogamer article I linked to (also linked in the original
article).

------
rtpg
This is insane. This is literally just incrementing and removing a counter,
and 22cans has become the middlemen for this.

~~~
DanBC
PROGRESS QUEST.

Caps lock because it's that cool.

~~~
NelsonMinar
Sadly, Curiosity is not quite as good a game as PROGRESS QUEST; it still
requires too much player input.

------
vinkelhake
I'm amazed that people are still buying into his games. If you were to go by
Peter's history, it's quite likely that the "life-changingly amazing" thing in
the middle of the cube is a message like "Sorry Mario, but the princess is in
another cube".

I personally got burned somewhere around Fable and I'm never[0] going to get
one of his games again..

[0] except for maybe Godus.. maybe.

~~~
yen223
I don't care what people say, Black and White was an excellent game which was
much too far ahead of its time.

~~~
Zecc
[Disclaimer: I don't know B&W 2, I'm basing myself only on the first B&W]

Black and White was a good game which unfortunately was far behind what its
originating concept promised to deliver.

------
kayoone
As someone who had paid money to remove cubelets before this was introduced id
feel somewhat ripped off.

I also wonder how this game would be doing with similar marketing but without
Molyneux' name to it. Imo the golden days of the guy are long gone.

~~~
Xcelerate
> As someone who had paid money to remove cubelets

As someone who never pays for in-app purchases, I am quite curious why you did
this. Did you feel the purchase was worth it?

~~~
kencausey
To quote more fully:

"As someone who had paid money to remove cubelets before this was introduced
ID feel somewhat ripped off." Note the emphasized (by me) "ID" or "I'd", aka
"I would". This one word changes the entire case of the verb and implies
empathizing with a hypothetical victim versus actually being one.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Except... can you use "id" instead of "I'd"? My language parser also rejected
this as invalid token and I ended up interpreting that sentence the same way
Xcelerate did.

------
tekromancr
Holy motherfucking shit. This is not a game, this is something else. This is
sick. This is abusive... This feels akin to exploiting a mental vulnerability
that exists in a portion of the population to earn money. Its a strange
situation where it is legal to do something to a human that is illegal to do
to a computer.

~~~
mikecane
>>>This feels akin to exploiting a mental vulnerability that exists in a
portion of the population to earn money

Ermmmm, that is what some advertising and marketing are all about, creating
insecurities in people and then selling them the "cure."

~~~
tekromancr
At least when you are being advertised you actually get something out of the
deal. If I convince someone to voluntarily empty their bank account and give
me everything in exchange for nothing, that would make me a shitbag. Or a
televangelist, I guess.

------
infrec
This exemplifies that making money and making a good product are two quite
distinct things.

------
bochoh
I wouldn't exactly say that this is monetizing 'trolling'

~~~
kevinpet
I'm also appalled that a gaming site would confuse "trolling" and "griefing".

~~~
kcbanner
Hm?

~~~
jarin
Griefing is just being annoying, while trolling is both a art and an science.

~~~
etvmueller
I see what you did there.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Did he? I'm fairly sure I saw that on the _PetetMolydeux_ parody Twitter
account.

~~~
corin_
According to Eurogamer [1] it is announced in the app itself, but yes it was
also tweeted by @PeterMolydeux [2] - I guess it's never been easier to parody
someone...

[1] [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-19-molyneux-
adds-o...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-19-molyneux-adds-option-
to-re-grow-curiosity-cube)

[2] <https://twitter.com/PeterMolydeux/status/325281598444556288>

------
mikecane
Now I can't help wondering how many other things this "Get them coming and
going" idea could be applied to in games. Is this as unprecedented as they
make it out to be in the article?

------
bagosm
I'm very surprised at the gullibility towards the whole project. Who's to say
they don't add more cubelets by themselves for free?

------
Oxxide
well, I have to give Molyneux some credit where credit is due.

This is incredibly clever and a great way to use IAP-type stuff.

------
cpeterso
What is the estimated number of cubelets or layers remaining?

~~~
itafroma
There were 4,096 total layers; currently 262 layers have been removed with
17,758,801 cubelets left on the current layer. So 3,834 layers and
112,689,867,042 cubelets remain.

The cube age is 166 days, so at the current rate of progress (~148,787,753
cubelets per day), it should take another 758 days to complete. However, the
rate has been slowing from over 2 layers/day at the start to just over 1.5
layers/day. Combined with user attrition and this new ability to add/remove
layers, it's hard to say when exactly it'll be completed.

~~~
danbruc
There are only 2048 layers. I used the statistics from [1] at 5:20 from day
one.

Layer 1, 66,631,501 cubelets remaining on the current layer and 33,982,651
cubelets destroyed in total. Because it is the first layer it is made up out
of 66,631,501 + 66,631,501 = 100,614,152 cubelets. An estimate of the edge
length is obtained by dividing by 6 faces and taking the square root and this
yields 4,095.0000407. It is a bit counterintuitive - at least for me - but the
actual edge length is 4,096. I would have expected that counting the edges
twice and the corners trice becomes insignificant for large edge lengths but
if you do the math you will see that this approximation has the limit n - 1 as
n goes to infinity.

So because every layer adds 2 to the edge length there are 2048 layers. That
is bad - there is no central cubelet because the edge length is not odd. Maybe
this is the hidden secret. I guess they used 4096 because it simplifies
texturing the thing, implementing level of detail or stuff like that, does it?
Or they have 8 secrets in there to make it a tiny bit more fair.

One more thing, the number of cubelets on the surface of a cube with edge
length n is n^3 - (n - 2)^3 - the whole cube minus the smaller cube under the
surface. Plugging in 4096 yields the number obtained from the statistics so we
probably made no mistake.

Okay, let's fix the other numbers, too. The cube started with 68,719,476,736
cubelets. I assume the current layer was 263 - the statistics gives the number
of layers removed and layer 263 seems to be more consistent with the time of
the comment - and there are 23,220,183,736 cubelets in those layers.
Subtracting the 17,758,801 cubelets remaining yields 23,202,424,935 cubelets
destroyed in 166 days or roughly 139.8 million cubelets per day. There are
45,517,051,801 cubelets remaining and assuming the same rate of destruction
this yields roughly 326 days to go.

[1] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giEykqDoUCQ>

~~~
Dylan16807
I can help your intuition with the n - 1, I hope. It's true that it's
negligible when you're handling cube roots. But when you're cutting down to
faces you end up ignoring the entire inside of the cube, so edges can cause
problems. Looking at a single face, you have four edges that must be shared,
so give away two edges a keep two edges, and you very easily result in a
square of n-1 on every face.

~~~
danbruc
I like the idea of embedding n - 1 squares in each face, it is quite
intuitive...but not fully satisfying. It would be nice if exactly six n - 1
squares would fit into the surface...but no, there are two additional
uncovered cubelets. Two is again unintuitive to me - 6, 8 or 12 and I would be
happy. On the other hand unintuitve results make me redo the work to find the
mistake and so unintuitve results are less likely wrong and that in the end is
a good thing.

After spending some more time thinking about my initial reasoning it became a
bit more intuitive. I thought there are O(n^2) cubelets on each face and the
error with the edges is only O(n) so the error should become negligible and it
does - the linear error becomes a constant error of less than 1. I just
expected it would approach 0 and this is not true.

And now I will stop bothering - my intuition is not the best in this area and
I will just have to calculate everything. I just realize that I can not even
easily say if the approximation over- or underestimates...we use some cubelets
twice, so we under...over...underestimate the area of a face...no,
over?...under!...

------
danbruc
I find it odd that the edge length is even.

------
michaelochurch
It's hilarious when someone finds two actions that are opposites of each other
and collect on both sides from people who want to take part in each.

I had a similar thought. I worked for a truly evil (management-wise; the
engineers and PMs are fine) startup in the winter of 2011-12 and I've been
debating whether to name-and-shame. The ethical problem I have with it is
that, while I could easily kill the company (publicity-wise, but that would be
enough) it would be low-level engineers who get fucked and the shitbag
managers would probably bounce along fine. That's why I haven't done it.
(After embarrassing a less-deserving company whose name starts with G, I'm
more hesitant about public whistleblowing.)

However, if I ever end up in financial hardship I can't get out of, I'm going
to start a Yes and a No project (maybe on Kickstarter, if they don't mind?) If
"Yes" raises more money, then I name the evil startup that inspired my hatred
of VC-istan, and out its scumbag executives in excruciating detail (including
stuff about their families that I found later on). If "No" wins, then I keep
it a secret. (Obviously, the losing side gets back their money.) I'd probably
have to preclude the company itself, and its managers, from funding the "No",
lest I get an extortion rap.

This could be a brilliant or fucked-up-evil startup idea. People who are cash-
strapped and need to raise money take issues in their lives from the mundane
("should I sell my furniture?") to the important ("should I go back to
school?") to the extreme ("should I out my scumbag ex-manager?") into the
public and set up Yes/No races. On one hand, it would help a lot of people. On
the other hand, it'd be hard to set it up so it doesn't become a vehicle for
extortion.

~~~
jcc80
Maybe save it for an example in your book? Your blog already has enough great
material to establish your place at the forefront of modern philosophy. Now
it's just a question of marketing. Kickstarter campaign for your book sounds
good. And to those who have down voted Mr. Church I can only say, how dare
you.

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
Well played; I read your post while taking a sip and now I can't stop
coughing/laughing.

------
youngerdryas
A sucker and his money were lucky to get together in the first place.

------
benihana
I think that in by this point in time, it's a pretty safe rule of thumb to
take everything Peter Molyneux says with a very large grain of salt.

------
Snoptic
Title doesn't really make sense. This is just a lottery, with a bit of a PvP
angle. Spending more increases odds of winning.

~~~
geon
> Spending more increases odds of winning.

Does it? I was under the impression the winner would be whoever removed the
last cube, which would be un-affected by how many cubes users removed earlier.

------
drivebyacct2
Can someone reference the post here (or possibly on reddit) that described how
technically infeasible this project is to be accurate?

~~~
lost-theory
<http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2012/11/12/death-by-million-cubes/>

