We’re now in the early part of 2015, but if you’ll cast your mind back to 2012, you’ll remember that Peter Molyneux and his indie studio, 22Cans, did a couple of interesting things. First, they had a mobile game entitled Curiosity that promised a “life changing prize” for whoever it was that first uncovered the heart of this little tapping game. Second, they successfully went over their Kickstarter goal for a god game called, appropriately enough, Godus. The two were linked in that the Curiosity contest winner was, in fact, declared of a “god of gods” in the upcoming Godus game, which was going to have single player, multi-player and mobile versions.
Of course, this is Peter Molyneux we’re talking about. Anyone familiar with his name knows that he has a tendency to overpromise and then not deliver. Now, in 2015, neither of his promises have materialized.
“So the moral of this story is that perhaps a new generation of gamers unfamiliar with Molyneux’s notorious reputation have learned their lesson.”
In an in-depth article on Eurogamer, it’s revealed that not only has Bryan Henderson, the contest winner, been largely ignored in the years since his win, but Godus itself is going through the usual Molyneux growing pains. Henderson has received little to no communication from either 22Cans or Molyneux, something which, during the course of the Eurogamer interview with Molyneux, he vowed to correct, though at the time of this writing it still hasn’t happened. Godus itself is going through the more familiar cycle of looking like the fabled features Molyneux promised were a tad unrealistic. This is despite the fact that the conventional understanding in the world of crowdsourcing for Kickstarter is that when a milestone is reached, that promise will be kept. Molyneux is already looking at developing another game, reassigning his small team to prioritize the new project. So the moral of this story is that perhaps a new generation of gamers unfamiliar with Molyneux’s notorious reputation have learned their lesson. Of course, anyone old enough to remember the development history of Fable is already bitterly aware of all this, but education, however disillusioning it might be, is always a valuable thing, right?
