The God who Peter Molyneux forgot

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http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...

Molyneux insists 22Cans is in rude health, with the mobile version of Godus pulling in enough money to keep the company going. But what of the future of the game? He confirms the Godus development team has shrunk considerably to just a few people as resources are diverted to a new game, called The Trail.

Also, a few days ago on RPS, it's pretty clear that Godus won't meet most of its Kickstarter goals:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015...

He goes on to explain that his new game will, “build on feelings and emotions untapped so far.” The site also appears to attribute to Molyneux the statement that Godus, “lacked in narrative, progress and reward.” A fascinating use of the past tense for a game still being sold, for £15, as Early Access.

What an ass. I used to think he was just eccentric. Now I think he's just an ass.

That interview is depressing as hell. The kid and whole curiousity app were used as a big marketing tool. Is there no legal recourse or responsibility for them to follow through on something?

Really good read though thanks for linking this!

Rave wrote:

That interview is depressing as hell. The kid and whole curiousity app were used as a big marketing tool. Is there no legal recourse or responsibility for them to follow through on something?

It's Kickstarter if there was any legal recourse for not delivering on projects there would be a whole load of law suits flying around at the moment. At the end of the day, you back something and then hope they follow through and roughly on time but if they decide to go on "fact finding" missions to Turkey with your money instead of working on something then there is little you can do about it.

Wasn't there something like kickstarter where you only paid/they only got paid once they actually delivered?

This is the final straw for Molyneux for me. eff that guy.

I can't decide which is my favourite part. This bit:

"That's when they made us play Godus for three hours straight. It was our choice when to get up and stop playing, but I didn't want to seem rude."

Or this bit:

As the working day came to an end, 22Cans took Bryan and his friend for a drink at the nearby White House pub. Bryan had a pint of lager, his friend a double whiskey and coke. The group went outside to the patio for a chat.

Bryan remembers the evening:

"They were talking amongst themselves and didn't pay attention to me. For some reason they had their backs to me and my friend for the start of the evening. Then more people came and that's when we started having a conversation with someone. That was a bit strange. You're here because of me, and they weren't really paying attention. Maybe they were caught up in some interesting conversation.

"This guy called Tony, he comes with shots for me and my friend. [...] He got us Jägerbombs, and we just had to do them because they had already been paid for."

RPS already likened the 22Cans situation to a Ricky Gervais scene, and these bits could equally have been written by the cringe-comedy master.

I stopped trusting the guy after Fable. He's like that guy everyone has met who claims to be a black belt former Navy Seal who dated a Playboy centerfold but in reality has only watched a lot of kung-fu movies and works at Radio Shack. He's great at promising the moon before a game comes out but I've yet to see him deliver on almost any of it.

Kehama wrote:

I stopped trusting the guy after Project Ego. He's like that guy everyone has met who claims to be a black belt former Navy Seal who dated a Playboy centerfold but in reality has only watched a lot of kung-fu movies and works at Radio Shack. He's great at promising the moon before a game comes out but I've yet to see him deliver on almost any of it.

FTFY It was aptly named. After Black & White I was starting to have suspicions about this guy. The hype-fest that was Project Ego-turned-Fable pretty much ended my trust for the guy. I'd be willing to bet that he blames the people working for him for not being able to deliver on his promises, while they think he's an idiot who keeps promising impossible sh*t.

I don't believe Molyneux is being willfully misleading or anything. I think that a lot of the Kickstarter/Early Access/etc. issues, like this and what happened with DoubleFine, are starting to make it clear that a lot of creative people just have a poor handle on project management or financial planning of any kind. We can no longer just imagine the issues stemming from some big, bad publisher all of the time for these problems like we used to.

kuddles wrote:

I don't believe Molyneux is being willfully misleading or anything. I think that a lot of the Kickstarter/Early Access/etc. issues, like this and what happened with DoubleFine, are starting to make it clear that a lot of creative people just have a poor handle on project management or financial planning of any kind. We can no longer just imagine the issues stemming from some big, bad publisher all of the time for these problems like we used to.

PeterMolyneux wrote:

There's this overwhelming urge to over-promise because it's such a harsh rule: if you're one penny short of your target then you don't get it. And of course in this instance, the behaviour is incredibly destructive, which is 'Christ, we've only got 10 days to go and we've got to make £100,000, for f**k's sake, lets just say anything'. So I'm not sure I would do that again.

From here.

It's not as if this is his first dog and pony show, but it was his first Kickstarter, so I'll give him a little breathing room here. However, "lets just say anything" to get money is sad. Well, not sad because it's probably exactly how most Kickstarters work, but it's not something I like hearing this explicitly.

kuddles wrote:

I don't believe Molyneux is being willfully misleading or anything. I think that a lot of the Kickstarter/Early Access/etc. issues, like this and what happened with DoubleFine, are starting to make it clear that a lot of creative people just have a poor handle on project management or financial planning of any kind. We can no longer just imagine the issues stemming from some big, bad publisher all of the time for these problems like we used to.

I've suspected for a while that execs at publishers are smirking at every bad piece of news to come from these various Kickstarters and saying to themselves, "See? We're not evil. This is the sh*t we deal with every day."

I'd lost patience with Molyneux after he took Godus, which was kind of okay, completely fouled it up in a new revision, and crowed about how much better it was. He turned a semi-acceptable game, with some promise, into an utter disaster, and then praised the disaster to the skies.

The man is a goddamn idiot, a liar, or both. Don't give him any more money. Ever.

However, "lets just say anything" to get money is sad.

Some people, like prosecutors, could call it criminal.

garion333 wrote:

Well, not sad because it's probably exactly how most Kickstarters work, but it's not something I like hearing this explicitly.

I wish I had saved some links so I could cite my sources better, but I've seen a few other developers who Kickstarted games mention the enormous pressure they feel to hype new stretch goals in order to get backers excited and make the pie higher. That's inevitably going to lead to over-promising on what you can deliver for the funds you have. (If I recall correctly, this is in part why A Night in the Woods didn't have stretch goals.)

kuddles wrote:

We can no longer just imagine the issues stemming from some big, bad publisher all of the time for these problems like we used to.

I feel like I've been saying this a lot lately, so I apologize if I'm repeating myself, but gaming enthusiasts, and to an extent the gaming press, have historically been really taken with the idea that creators could have done so much more if only they hadn't been held back by those darn publishers. And to an extent that's doubtless true, and it's not hard to find stories of studios demanding that suddenly trendy features get added to games whether they make sense or not.

But as developers and designers are breaking out of that studio structure, or as they're getting huge budgets and a lot of freedom to develop what they want, what we're finding out is that sometimes people really thrive in that environment and produce great things, but just as often they might have beautiful minds but absolutely stink at project management. Sometimes it's that restriction and oversight that gets games out the door at all.

kuddles wrote:

I don't believe Molyneux is being willfully misleading or anything. I think that a lot of the Kickstarter/Early Access/etc. issues, like this and what happened with DoubleFine, are starting to make it clear that a lot of creative people just have a poor handle on project management or financial planning of any kind. We can no longer just imagine the issues stemming from some big, bad publisher all of the time for these problems like we used to.

I don't think Molyneux gets a free pass on this because he's been in management/production roles before while at Bullfrog and Lionhead. I have a little more tolerance for Tim Schafer and some of the Sierra alumni for screwing up their schedules since they seem to be mostly in the creative divisions at their (former) companies rather than having experience with the management/production side of things. That said, I completely agree that crowdfunding has been a good case study as to why publishers are a necessary evil for certain teams. Some teams have done very well (Banner Saga, Sunless Sea, Invisible Inc., Shovel Knight, etc.) with crowd-funding and the lack of publisher oversight, but obviously crowd-funding isn't the panacea some people were expecting.

Malor wrote:

The man is a goddamn idiot, a liar, or both. Don't give him any more money. Ever.

Now I just want someone to pull up interviews from the 90's and find what he was promising for Syndicate, Theme Park, Magic Carpet, and Dungeon Keeper.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Well, not sad because it's probably exactly how most Kickstarters work, but it's not something I like hearing this explicitly.

I wish I had saved some links so I could cite my sources better, but I've seen a few other developers who Kickstarted games mention the enormous pressure they feel to hype new stretch goals in order to get backers excited and make the pie higher. That's inevitably going to lead to over-promising on what you can deliver for the funds you have. (If I recall correctly, this is in part why A Night in the Woods didn't have stretch goals.)

Except, to make matters worse, in this case they were promising stuff just to meet their funding goal and not as stretch goals.

beanman101283 wrote:
kuddles wrote:

I don't believe Molyneux is being willfully misleading or anything. I think that a lot of the Kickstarter/Early Access/etc. issues, like this and what happened with DoubleFine, are starting to make it clear that a lot of creative people just have a poor handle on project management or financial planning of any kind. We can no longer just imagine the issues stemming from some big, bad publisher all of the time for these problems like we used to.

I've suspected for a while that execs at publishers are smirking at every bad piece of news to come from these various Kickstarters and saying to themselves, "See? We're not evil. This is the sh*t we deal with every day."

Creative people being bad a project management is not exactly news. Or, well, it shouldn't be, though it seems to be a bit of a surprise to some people. That doesn't let the creative people off the hook, though.

See, I take extreme objection to Molyneux's I-had-to-promise-anything arguement. The worst case scenario for a Kickstarter is not failing to get the funding. That's the obvious narrative, the underdog hero barely crossing the finish line, but it's seductively wrong. No, the real danger is that you get the money and it isn't enough. A failed Kickstarter is valuable information: there weren't enough people willing to give you money. Or you didn't reach them effectively. You want your Kickstarter to fail in that instance, because it saves you endless time, money, and heartbreak. Which is not a mindset that artistic people like, but that's why creative projects often have producers to keep an eye on the costs and make sure everything stays on track.

Promising stuff that you knew you had no plans to deliver? That's a no-no. Happens all the time in sales, which is why no one trusts the marketing guys. But your lead designer should not be standing up and promising features that the development team never heard of before they passed your lips, and Molyneux has a documented history of doing just that.

DoubleFine, on the other hand, is the opposite side of the coin. They were pretty clear with what they were trying to produce, budgeted it appropriately, and then got blown out of the water by the overfunding. They overcorrected at first, but managed to bring it down to a landing. Anyone who complains about how much they spent on Broken Age has no clue how much development actually costs. (I'm leaving Spacebase DF-9 out of this consideration; Early Access is a separate issue that they're not as well tooled for as they thought.)

And that's the other problem with Kickstarter: most people have no idea how much games cost. If you want to make a game on a reasonable Kickstarter-level budget, you either have to be Brian Fargo (who, you'll note, has been able to streamline his studio and get away with some '90s era shortcuts, like isometric viewpoints) or know how to run things with a minimal indie team, which is harder than it looks.

Gremlin wrote:

And that's the other problem with Kickstarter: most people have no idea how much games cost. If you want to make a game on a reasonable Kickstarter-level budget, you either have to be Brian Fargo (who, you'll note, has been able to streamline his studio and get away with some '90s era shortcuts, like isometric viewpoints) or know how to run things with a minimal indie team, which is harder than it looks.

A lot of KS projects are also not upfront as to whether or not the KS money is being used as a way to show VCs/investors that there's sufficient interest in the product to get additional funding. I think one of the few projects that was mostly honest about the costs of development was Robot Entertainment's Human Resources which had a KS goal of $1.4 million, and they barely raised more than 30% of that before prematurely killing the project.

I've always like Peter's games, loved the Fable series. But I feel bad about this kid that won the contest. He is owed actual money and if they don't pay him, I am done with this company and Peter. It's a total dick move to do.

Hope someone over there does the right thing.

Feature creep is neither new nor unique to kickstarter. Feature creep has been there since the dawn of the video game industry.

All kickstarter does is give the opportunity to backlog feature creep and market it during pre-production. At which point, games have an increased chance of failure should they follow the typical pattern of adding feature creep during production.

I bought Godus early on. It's my last Molyneux game unless Goodjers tell me otherwise post-release (not beta or early access versions).

Gravey wrote:

RPS already likened the 22Cans situation to a Ricky Gervais scene, and these bits could equally have been written by the cringe-comedy master.

That video was indeed pretty amusing.

Edit:

I wish that Kickstarter would add in to their terms that any projects backed by them would have to have their financial books made available to the backers, and that any IP made developing the project would have to go into Escrow to the backers.

Once the project was announced finished and delivered a 2/3 vote by the backers (weighted by how much they had paid) that the project didn't match expectations would release the IP in escrow (source code being the most important) to the backers.

To keep people from sticking some guy in a closet to code the game forever and avoid the release, once the planned release date passed a 4/5 vote by the backers would also release all IP in escrow.

Peter Molyneux always has really great ideas, but also doesn't have the patience or talent to get those ideas out. I equate him to the writer who has a great novel in his or her head but just can't write it out in a coherent manner (or even at all). I loved the idea of Godus when the Kickstarter came out, I saw Molyneux's name and passed; I saw the early access and remembered his name and passed.

I'm sure he has several good games in his head but don't we all? I may play another game that he makes; but I doubt that one will be truly finished and even then only after release and reviews.

Peter Molyneux always has really great ideas, but also doesn't have the patience or talent to get those ideas out.

Or he never really intended to get them out in the first place. I mean, reread this quote:

Peter Molyneux wrote:

'Christ, we've only got 10 days to go and we've got to make £100,000, for f**k's sake, lets just say anything'.

That's fraud. Outright, deliberate fraud.

That sort of thing, they put people in jail for.

It's not about patience or talent, the man is a deliberate liar.

edit: and then, look at that kid he's defrauding out of his supposed winnings.

second edit: perhaps neither example would quite reach the legal definition of 'fraud' -- but they're certainly fraudulent.

That kid signed that contract. He could've walked away, but why would he, it was "free" money ... eventually.

Malor wrote:
Peter Molyneux wrote:

'Christ, we've only got 10 days to go and we've got to make £100,000, for f**k's sake, lets just say anything'.

That's fraud. Outright, deliberate fraud.

It's almost like Kickstarter was the perfect platform for Molyneux to be... well, Molyneux

As far as I'm concerned, Molyneux used up the last of his accumulated Bullfrog-era good will when he released Black & White in 2001. Nowadays I assume that everything with his name attached is an over-promise of some sort.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that the man is a compulsive liar.

Gremlin wrote:

See, I take extreme objection to Molyneux's I-had-to-promise-anything arguement. The worst case scenario for a Kickstarter is not failing to get the funding. That's the obvious narrative, the underdog hero barely crossing the finish line, but it's seductively wrong. No, the real danger is that you get the money and it isn't enough. A failed Kickstarter is valuable information: there weren't enough people willing to give you money.

I feel like everyone is taking that quote out of context. He's clearly trying to give a worst-case scenario of how the Kickstarter mentality could end up being destructive, not describing what he did. I believe the specific issue with Godus, along with a lot of other Kickstarters, is how sketchy it is to provide a detailed feature set for a game that has barely begun development. I feel like almost every post-mortem of a game involves aspects that were in the original design documents but had to be removed at some point because what the game became was quite different from imagined in the beginning. That's something less easy to do when you listed that aspect as being in there to the public.

That said, I'm not giving Molyneux any kind of a free pass here. At this point, his actions have been disgraceful and embarrassing. Although just as embarrassing is how the public clearly encourages this behaviour - he probably would have a better incentive to stop doing it if people would stop falling for it every time.

DoubleFine, on the other hand, is the opposite side of the coin. They were pretty clear with what they were trying to produce, budgeted it appropriately, and then got blown out of the water by the overfunding. They overcorrected at first, but managed to bring it down to a landing. Anyone who complains about how much they spent on Broken Age has no clue how much development actually costs. (I'm leaving Spacebase DF-9 out of this consideration; Early Access is a separate issue that they're not as well tooled for as they thought.)

Uh, no. I would not say it's the opposite. There was talk of both Brutal Legend and Psychonauts getting dropped by their original publishers specifically because of deadlines and budgets not being adhered to by Doublefine, and that kind of checks out now. They said they needed 400K to make the game they wanted, they received 3 million+, and then said they used up all the money and only had half the game and it's sales would determine whether they ever would make the other half. To me, that's at least just as bad as what happened with Godus.

kuddles wrote:

Uh, no. I would not say it's the opposite. There was talk of both Brutal Legend and Psychonauts getting dropped by their original publishers specifically because of deadlines and budgets not being adhered to by Doublefine, and that kind of checks out now. They said they needed 400K to make the game they wanted, they received 3 million+, and then said they used up all the money and only had half the game and it's sales would determine whether they ever would make the other half. To me, that's at least just as bad as what happened with Godus.

If they had stuck with their original vision, what should they have done with the excess $2.6 million (or whatever the actual difference would've been)?

kuddles wrote:
DoubleFine, on the other hand, is the opposite side of the coin. They were pretty clear with what they were trying to produce, budgeted it appropriately, and then got blown out of the water by the overfunding. They overcorrected at first, but managed to bring it down to a landing. Anyone who complains about how much they spent on Broken Age has no clue how much development actually costs. (I'm leaving Spacebase DF-9 out of this consideration; Early Access is a separate issue that they're not as well tooled for as they thought.)

Uh, no. I would not say it's the opposite. There was talk of both Brutal Legend and Psychonauts getting dropped by their original publishers specifically because of deadlines and budgets not being adhered to by Doublefine, and that kind of checks out now. They said they needed 400K to make the game they wanted, they received 3 million+, and then said they used up all the money and only had half the game and it's sales would determine whether they ever would make the other half. To me, that's at least just as bad as what happened with Godus.

The twist there, and what I meant by overcorrection, was that their plan was to spend the 400K on making a simple Flash-level adventure game; the project was originally going to be more about the documentary rather than about the game. Once the thing blew up, they scaled the project up accordingly, and then had to scale it back down again. So they made more of a game than they were planning at the start of the Kickstarter and less of a game than they were planning at the end of the Kickstarter.

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