Godus - train wreck in progress

[Falconeer]

I prasie that interviewer for bringng to Peter Molyneux the first and most crowdfunded question: "are you a pathological liar?" It's what a lot of people would have wanted to ask him, regardless of the bullshit answer.

[Samwise]

This is so fantastic.

Peter Molyneux: What you’re almost going to get out of this is driving me out of the industry.

RPS: No, what I want–

Peter Molyneux: And well done John, well done! And if that’s what you want, you’re going about it completely the right way.

RPS: If you were to be driven out of the industry it would be as a result of your own actions. I’ve done nothing but quote back things you’ve said and done.

Peter Molyneux: No [inaudible] me being hounded, which is what you’re doing.

RPS: I’m quoting back things that you–

Peter Molyneux: I must have given about fifty thousand hours of interviews and I’m sure if you go back over all of them you could– The only result of this is, I’ve already withdrawn mostly from the press, I’m just going to withdraw completely from the press.

[Since this interview was recorded, Peter Molyneux has done at least two other interviews with press on the same subject, including one with The Guardian which he says will be his last.]

[Merusk]

I learned my lesson with Molynooooooo with Black and White 14 years ago.

I can understand if people weren't playing games at that point they might be fooled now, but man. If you were there, you learned your lesson.

I recall this as well and was amazed that people - sometimes even the same ones - swallowed all the same bullshit when Fable was announced and then The Movies.  True believers will always be true believers, I suppose.

[Jeff Kelly]

The whole affair is another indictment of a business that is just fucking hopelessly pathetic.

Fellow game journalists, designers, publishers and "gamers" keep piling on Walker on social media. Developers openly vow to never talk to him again, fellow journalists criticize him for being antagonistic and unprofessional, fans side with the "naive but well meaning visionary" over the interviewer that just made it so PM could expose and essentially hang himself.

Fellow journalists from other game sites are apologetic on Neogaf and try to explain why they never do such interviews and why being another PR outlet for the publishers is a customer service instead of being a corporate shill.

Developers go with the "over promising and under delivering is part of the business" excuse and try to tell us that being a designer means that most of the things you claim to do will never happen anyway and why this somehow doesn't make them clueless bullshit artists. They also claim that actually holding designers responsible for their promises is naive, immature and unrealistic.

..and many, many gamers side with them.

Turns out they don't actually want ethics in game journalism after all.

[Jeff Kelly]

This business is shit and everybody involved really, really deserves that it is shit and should never ever be allowed to complain about it being shit ever again.

[schild]

I wish RPS had asked him how much money his stupid cube game had made off microtransactions. I expect it was a decent amount.

Anyway, Peter's mom loved him too much. Case closed.

Edit: I would have RELISHED critics jumping at me for McQuaid, but beating up on an idiot manchild isn't exactly hateful behavior. Molyneux was beloved. I'm not sure why. He hasn't actually ever made a GOOD game. He made some ideas, but his games are shit.

[Xanthippe]

I liked Populous when it came out. The very first one. Haven't really liked any of his games since. Played a few of them a couple of times, and stopped buying his games.

[Samprimary]

The games I want the most in life are

- the game Molyneaux said Fable was going to be

- the game that you thought Spore could be based off of that video of that demonstration by will wright that one time

those games would be kickin' rad

[schild]

Fucking gaming industry. Kick all the old people out. They're awful. Universally.

[Malakili]

- the game that you thought Spore could be based off of that video of that demonstration by will wright that one time

 

[HaemishM]

Both Populous and Syndicate were good games. The Movies was an amazing machinima engine (the game part was meh) that had it been developed fully apart from the game, it would have been something people would use for the next decade. Hell, even if they'd built it with full modding support, it would have been spectacular. Fable was fun if not even close to what was promised. Black and White sucked monkey balls and I haven't played anything else he's been involved with, nor do I want to.

[Maven]

I have fond memories of Syndicate.

[Sir T]

I loved Black and White 1 and 2. Dislked Fable.

Biggest problem with B&W was that the creature "programming" system was ass and generally resulted in a crap missprogramed creature that did nothing you wanted and you wound up ignoring it. It didn't help that the story took it away from you twice so you learned to work without it. B&W 2 solved this problem, but was a crap wargame and an ok sim city type game, which was the side i liked.

Also, B&W tried to hide the keyboard shortcuts for no good reason, and those that found those fast had a chance of loving the game, whereas the people who didn't would always hate it.

Anyway people seems to have missed the video sent out on Godus by PM, which is hilarious in its pure sleaze

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0P9yYG0G5I

For those that don't want to sit through that, here's an overview

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/02/10/22cans-confirm-godus-team-shrinkage-admit-mistakes/

[HaemishM]

I love how "passionate" seems to be the buzzword for "such fanatical devotion to a project that is quite clearly being made by utter incompetents that we can pay him peanuts" - it really is five-star drive with three-star talent.

[schild]

Lionhead doesn't even have five-star drive. They have five-star childlike desire and dreams.

[Khaldun]

The thing that pissed me off the most about Molyneux's earlier work, before he really just became a ridiculous serial sleazemongering liar, was that you could sometimes see something that could work in there, if only there had been good project management and a good understanding of how to build an actual game. Black and White is the best example--the creature was actually great, but then there was this absolute oozing sore of a game that it was dumped into that actually broke your relationship to the one good element of the whole thing, plus they evidently let the crack-addled monkey on the team design the control system. And yeah, then when you dug deeper there was nothing under the hood in lots of parts of it. But basically if Molyneux had been one guy in a project team that was run by somebody else, he'd have been a useful source of design ideas. Nobody ever, ever should have let him run anything.

[Ginaz]

The thing that pissed me off the most about Molyneux's earlier work, before he really just became a ridiculous serial sleazemongering liar, was that you could sometimes see something that could work in there, if only there had been good project management and a good understanding of how to build an actual game. Black and White is the best example--the creature was actually great, but then there was this absolute oozing sore of a game that it was dumped into that actually broke your relationship to the one good element of the whole thing, plus they evidently let the crack-addled monkey on the team design the control system. And yeah, then when you dug deeper there was nothing under the hood in lots of parts of it. But basically if Molyneux had been one guy in a project team that was run by somebody else, he'd have been a useful source of design ideas. Nobody ever, ever should have let him run anything.

This is a recurring theme.  "Idea" guys should never be allowed to run the whole project.  Ever.

[Sky]

The difference between Wright and Molyneux is that when Wright didn't deliver the game he wanted to, he left the goddamned building. I get the feeling he was more crushed than we were at how Spore became such a Sporbortion.

Molyneux just keeps on rollin'. This spate of interviews as his new company implodes is the most entertaining thing he's done since Bullfrog.

[Samprimary]

Especially because it was the actually-make-shit-work guys who constantly end up getting rammed full speed into the real life consequences of his overambition and pipe-dream management. Probably having to have their worth challenged over and over again when they are constantly having to bring the reality of the project to attention over and over again. He delivered nearly nothing promised in Fable. He said you could go so far as to poison a town's whole water supply, or carve your initials in a tree that would grow over ten years like all the foliage, and it would still be there. He said you could go anywhere and there would be no limitations on where you could travel. The game came out and it was a highly segmented handheld experience down a series of open world corridors where you were penned in very tightly and the world was a series of small paths where you could walk inbetween two hip-level fences and that was all.

Throughout all of that there had to have been a million uncomfortable 'we can't do that' messages.

[Khaldun]

You know, the Spore authoring tools would make Molyneux instantly look like less of a fucking phony if he'd ever delivered even something that useful. That's the point--even his best stuff is buried in six layers of shit intended to disguise that's it's not finished. Wright actually wasn't hiding anything with Spore--he just didn't know how to go from the great tools to a game worth playing. But at least he made the tools! Molyneux couldn't ever do even that much.

[Samprimary]

Wright's threshold of understanding that he was not up to snuff for this anymore was when he dropped to a point that was still better than much of anything Molyneaux still offers was a radical paradigm-smashing game changerer.

[Sir T]

Black and White is the best example--the creature was actually great, but then there was this absolute oozing sore of a game that it was dumped into that actually broke your relationship to the one good element of the whole thing...

I don't know if you ever played the expansion to it, Creature isle, but it was really well done. It took the best element of it, the creature, and let you play with it trough 20 or so minigames. The creature was the focus of it with minimum God management. Great fun.

[Jeff Kelly]

As we all know Molyneux was always that way. Hell he even started out in this business by defrauding Commodore out of ten Amigas. From the horse's mouth himself "Due to the game's failure, Molyneux retreated from game design, and started Taurus Impex Limited — a company that exported baked beans to the Middle East. Commodore International mistook it for TORUS, a more established company that produced networking software, and offered to provide Molyneux with ten free Amiga systems to help in porting 'his' networking software.'... it suddenly dawned on me that this guy didn't know who we were', Molyneux later said. 'I suddenly had this crisis of conscience. I thought, 'If this guy finds out, there go my free computers down the drain.' So I just shook his hand and ran out of that office'." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molyneux)

He also always has been the 'ideas guy' and also the guy shamelessly hogging the limelight. He isn't even credited as developer on Populous 'only' as designer/producer.

To see that PM was never a "misunderstood creative soul" and that he always designed games the way he does still to this day I'll leave you with this gem from the wikipedia entry on Populous: "Initially Molyneux developed an isometric landscape, then populated it with little people that he called "peeps", but there was no game; all that happened was that the peeps wandered around the landscape until they reached a barrier such as water. (...) The endgame – of creating a final battle to force the two sides to enter a final conflict – developed as a result of the developmental games going on for hours and having no firm end. Bullfrog attempted to prototype the gameplay via a board game they invented using Lego, and Molyneux admits that whilst it didn't help the developers to balance the game at all, it provided a useful media angle to help publicise the game. During the test phase the testers requested a cheat code to skip the end of the game, as there was insufficient time to play through all 500 levels, and it was only at this point that Bullfrog realised that they had not included any kind of ending to the game. The team quickly repurposed an interstitial page from between levels and used it as the final screen." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populous)

[Jeff Kelly]

One example of the way 'game journalism' generally sides with the perpetrator instead of their customers is Kyle Orland's piece for Ars Technica written in the wake of this week's disclosures about 22 cans and Peter Molyneux On Kickstarter, everyone is Peter Molyneux.

Never mind the countless success stories like Psychonauts, Banner Saga, Shovel Knight, et al.. Never mind that 37% of all Kickstarter projects deliver on time and on budget and another 8% 'partially deliver' - an amazing success rate. Never mind that Molyneux himself admitted to outright lying in his kickstarter pitch to get funding even though he knew that the funding goals were impossible to implement on the proposed budget. Never mind that Peter Molyneux admitted that he has no clue how to manage a project or a development team and has no idea how to estimate efforts and calculate an initial budget even though he has 30+ years of experience in the business.

No, blame it on kickstarter and the naive and greedy fan base: "The site has gained a reputation for lofty promises that often don't pan out the way the backers or the developers expected."

[Khaldun]

Except that statement is completely true. The site has in fact "gained a reputation". You can have a reputation that's not actually accurate in the strict sense.

I'm also not sure why a success rate of 45% overall is anything to write home to Mom about. It might be if most of the rest were good ideas that just met reality and reality won, but I would say that with games at least, the lion's share of the remainder are either conscious con jobs or are the equivalent of Glitchless promising to make Dawn, a kind of psychotically naive group of friends who have two character models and think that's a game.

None of which excuses Molyneux--but a fair number of people on KS are his descendants. And I think the issue with Molyneux for some time now has been why anyone lines up to buy a product he's associated with. It's not like it's a secret that he's a fraud.

[Jeff Kelly]

In R&D - where I come from initially - 90% of all greenlighted projects fail. They either fail directly or get to a point where you realize the idea itself isn't viable or there's no real business case. All companies that are R&D heavy survive on the remaining 10% that actually succeed. In angel investing or VC the rate is even worse with less than 5% or even 2% of the funded projects ever turning out to be successful.

Usually you'll never hear about those failed projects, they'll quietly get cancelled at some point and the company, investor or publisher eats the costs, relocates or fires the project team and moves on. If that happens too often or the projects involved are very costly the company will get shuttered. Once in a while you'll hear about a 'project from hell' that will get media coverage or a highly publicized CEO driven milestone project fails and you'll hear about it but most of the time those failed projects just get quietly buried with no one outside of the company ever hearing about it.

KS might be more of a patronage platform than a place to meet investors or VC firms (most backers see it more like a shop to preorder stuff anyway) but a 1 in 2 success rate is actually quite good.

[Fabricated]

Molyneux doesn't just promise features that don't quite work as well they should on release, or deliver them late, or have to scale them back a bit due to technical/budget constraints, or just take longer than usual for entire projects. The guy promises stuff that literally cannot be done within the scope of the technology or budget he has, as loudly and as often as possible.

I dunno why people give Molyneux's horseshit so much credit every time he pulls this. It's either because of his record (seriously?) or because it seems like he really believes his own bullshit and people somehow pick up on that and trust it.

[Sky]

What Fab said. He's been in fantasy land a long time, but for the first few years before he became a 'gaming god' or whatever, he was still delivering some pretty decent games despite his nonsense.

As far as over-promising on KS, well yeah. Look at Divinity Original Sin. The over-promises were definitely do-able in the reality we live in, but they honestly fell short with resources (day night cycle AI for instance). People bag on KS, but it's only as bad as the people you're handing money to. Hand it to competent people that know what they're doing and good things happen, I've had way more success stories than failures (especially if you remove the ones I knew were gambles like TUG), and I've backed a shitload of stuff on KS.

It's really been awesome for exposing the frauds in the minis industry, and getting a feel for how each sculptor works (some guys are sooo slow, but still awesome...impatient people hate them!).

[Lantyssa]

I dunno why people give Molyneux's horseshit so much credit every time he pulls this. It's ... because it seems like he really believes his own bullshit and people somehow pick up on that and trust it.

It is this.  My boss displays this same behavior all the time.  He'll believe the passionate presenter over the dour one if they say what he wants to hear.

[HaemishM]

One example of the way 'game journalism' generally sides with the perpetrator instead of their customers is Kyle Orland's piece for Ars Technica written in the wake of this week's disclosures about 22 cans and Peter Molyneux On Kickstarter, everyone is Peter Molyneux.

The writer of that article needs to be punched in the dick. He is literally apologizing for the willful fraud of Kickstarter backers by saying "it's Kickstarter's fault for making it so easy to lie." Or you know, a developer could just be goddamn realistic, honest and open and if he knows X amount might make the KS goal but still won't be enough to do the game, DON'T FUCKING DO THE GAME. That's not Kickstarter's fault - KS may be the enabler, but the one fucking lying their ass off is the developer. Or in this case, Peter Molyneux.

[Jeff Kelly]

We all know that Molyneux is a fraud, the generation after us doesn't necessarily. It's easy for the press to now come out and say that 'well everyone kind of knew that Peter Molyneux is a bullshitter'.

Except no, not everyone knew because those drooling cockgobblers from the gaming press never thought of telling anyone that wasn't around during the Populous and Black and White era. Worse they made themselves again and again part of his bullshit PR and were fawning over his every word and giving him all kinds of compliments (legendary designer of hits like...) instead of maybe asking about whether or not he is still full of shit. This makes Mr. Walker's question "are you a pathological liar" not only valid but pertinent to the debate, because he is, provably so. And 'everyone kind of knew' even the people that now give RPS shit over the interview style and his 'unprofessional' behaviour.

This is a failure of the enthusiast press even more so than a failure on the part of the backers. Caveat emptor all you want if nobody tells you that the person you give your money to has a history of lying and bullshitting even though they knew. Even worse if the people you maybe trust to tell you something like that actively legitimize his bullshit claims by giving him a platform where he can spew forth his bullshit uncontested.  Every time that an outlet ran a godus preview without telling people about PM's history of lying and bullshittery or calling him out on his totally unrealistic claims they legitimized what is essentially a con artist. Even though 'everyone kind of knew'.

I know and you know. I'm 40, I have a background in SW development and I can look back on nearly 3 decades of bullshit artists promising the moon as far as games are concerned. The 16 year old game enthusiast that just built his first own PC might not because he has no outlet that would tell him that. Yes people should have known better but it's not like they had any help from for example professional journalists that report on the game business and might know about PM's shenanigans. That's because everyone is too afraid to bite the hand that feeds.

Shitting on the people they failed because 'they should have known better' is low though.

[Paelos]

Didn't Peter promise some idiot who won a box game that he'd be part of the Godus process and share in the profits? That guy should check his asshole to make sure he's not the hook for the losses.

[Jeff Kelly]

The God who Peter Molyneux forgot (Eurogamer)

[schild]

Kyle Orland sucks Jeff, stop it.

[Jeff Kelly]

You're right, I probably should.

It would be easier though if he just wasn't so obviously and unpretentiously partisan - and mainstream - though. He's no outlier, no black sheep the rest of the business ridicules or ignores. He's just less subtle than his fellows, so even easier to get angry about.

What I can't get over though - although I probably should for my own sake - is that the whole business is pretty open about being useless. They right out tell you that they won't do their jobs because they fear developers and publishers would freeze them out if they did. Yet they are the first to blame every failure on the consumer. It's one thing to admit you're a toothless tiger it's another to also shit on the people that pay your salary for being naive and expecting you to do your job.