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The Fall of Peter Molyneux

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So, basically, he's even worse of a human being: retaining his huge salary while dispatching the underlings.
Ken Levine went to the "I'm so evil I even kill my own men" school of super villainy. The game development industry is so sleazy it makes capital market banking look wholesome.
 

AN4RCHID

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:lol: Metro, you just confirm my suspicion that people only like the interview as a piece of vindictive schadenfreude, not because it has any journalistic purpose or value.

Ars Technica's Kyle Orland weighs in: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/02/on-kickstarter-everyone-is-peter-molyneux/

On Kickstarter, everyone is Peter Molyneux
The structure of crowdfunding encourages overpromising and under-delivering.
by Kyle Orland - Feb 13 2015, 9:30pm MST

3fe2d04838e948c09d7cd0f010027cbe84dfcd6b.jpg

I'm just a man with a dream, standing in a featureless cube.
Peter Molyneux and his team at indie developer 22Cans have not been having a good week. It started on Monday, when Rock Paper Shotgun published a report highlighting the fact that Kickstarter backers are still waiting for a promised PC version of god-game Godus, nearly two years after the game exceeded £500,000 in funding. Though the Kickstarter pitch promised development would take "seven to nine months," backers are still stuck with a buggy "early access" PC version that is missing key features like combat, a "hubworld," and multiplayer support (a mobile version of Godus launched last year with the help of a third-party publisher).
Despite this, recent reports suggest that 22Cans was planning to shrink the Godus development team in favor of a newly announced mobile project, The Trial. As one frustrated new 22Cans developer put it on the game's message boards, "to be brutally candid and realistic I simply can't see us delivering all the features promised on the Kickstarter page, a lot of the multiplayer stuff is looking seriously shaky right now especially the persistent stuff like hubworld." Molyneux and his team took to YouTube to reassure backers, and the public at large, of the game's continued development.


Molyneux and members of the Godus team offer apologies and updates on the game's status.
The bad news continued on Wednesday, when Eurogamer published a fascinating piece about Bryan Henderson, who had won the opportunity to share in the revenues from Godus in exchange for serving as the game's first "God of Gods." After some initial enthusiasm on both sides, contact between Henderson and 22Cans fell away, and the promised revenue share and "God of Gods" functionality are still pending more than 18 months later. In response to Eurogamer's article, Molyneux said he "totally and absolutely and categorically apologizes" to Henderson for not living up to his promises.
Molyneux's week culminated today in an extremely contentious hour-plus interview with Rock Paper Shotgun's John Walker, in which the journalist leads off with the extremely blunt question of "Do you think that you’re a pathological liar?" Things only go downhill from there, as Molyneux scrambles and stumbles over timelines and facts, alternating between apologies and defenses, while Walker vacillates between "tough but fair" and "tough but unfair."
The full interview is well worth your time, if only to see Molyneux accusing Walker of trying to hound him out of the industry and promising to cut himself off from the press completely in the future. That's a bold claim for a developer with a well-deserved reputation for grandiose game design promises that fail to pan out in the end (a reputation that has led to its own hilarious Twitter parody account). For what it's worth, the mind behind classics like Populous, Black and White, and Syndicate told Ars in 2013 that he thought "Godus is going to be the best game I've ever worked on."
In his Rock Paper Shotgun interview, though, Molyneux insists continually that there's a difference between this kind of naive early optimism regarding a game's promise and flat-out knowingly lying in order to secure funding. He also insists that Godus' many unmet promises simply haven't been metyet and will be in the fullness of time (with a few exceptions like a dropped Linux build).
The Kickstarter problem

Enlarge
/ Neal Stephenson and company blew through over half-a-million dollars working on swordfighting simulator Clang without delivering anything more than an alpha.
Whether Molyneux is a liar or merely a starry-eyed dreamer will continue to be a matter of some debate. But the most important point about the whole Godus debacle that I've seen so far comes from an interview Molyneux gave to TechRadar in December. There, Molyneux blamed much of Godus'troubled development, and even the lofty promises he made regarding the game, on Kickstarter itself.
"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 behavior is incredibly destructive, which is 'Christ, we’ve only got 10 days to go and we’ve got to make £100,000, for fuck’s sake, let's just say anything.' So I’m not sure I would do that again."


THE UGLY AFTERLIFE OF CROWDFUNDING PROJECTS THAT NEVER SHIP AND NEVER END
Even projects crowdfunded to excess enter tense, never-ending development hell.
Whatever you think of Molyneux and his history of lofty game design ideas, it's hard to argue that Kickstarter doesn't encourage this kind of thing. In the nearly three years sinceDouble Fine made Kickstarter a serious place to seek game funding, the site has gained a reputation for lofty promises that often don't pan out the way the backers or the developers expected.

Examples of this phenomenon are easy to come by in the gaming realm. Multiplayer horror game Haunts was one of the first big Kickstarter game failures, with two developers abandoning the project in favor of full-time jobs after raising $42,500. Swordfighting simulation Clang rode support from fantasy author Neal Stephenson to $526,000 in funding before running out of money and failing to deliver anything past an alpha version. YouTube sensation Yogscast raised $567,000 for a themed adventure game before officially canceling the project in July(backers got a different game in penance). I could go on.
Kickstarter gaming projects that don't fail outright often fail to deliver on promised features or timelines. Many "early release" backers of the Ouya didn't receive their Android-based console until after it was already on store shelves, forcing the company to provide them with store credit in apology. When Kickstarter darling Elite: Dangerous removed a promised offline mode from the final release, some backers demanded refunds. Even Double Fine's Broken Age, which kicked off the Kickstarter gaming boom, ended up significantly delayed and over budget by the time its first episode came out last year.
This doesn't mean that every Kickstarter project is fated to miss its goals; there are plenty of examples of successful projects that delivered quality games to their backers on time. But there may be fewer of those than you think. Overall, one analysis last year found only 37 percent of Kickstarter gaming projects had fully delivered on their promises to backers at least a year after their initial funding. Another 8 percent rated as "partial delivery," while only five percent had been officially canceled or were on hiatus. Much of the remainder had simply gone dark, taking the money and running, as it were.
A mismatch between rewards and penalties

Enlarge
/ Over 13,000 backers ended up with nothing but disappointment for backing Yogventures. The developers, on the other hand, ended up with the money.
This isn't a problem that's exclusive to crowdfunded gaming, of course. Games built under the traditional developer/publisher model get delayed and canceled all the time, sometimes very close to their promised release. The difference in these cases is that the publisher is the one assuming the risk inherent in these delays and cancellations. With Kickstarter, it's the potential players themselves that assume the risk, even though many users seem to treat the service merely as a way to pre-order interesting games.
The publisher model also serves to hide a lot of messy development realities from the end user. Big-name developers will often work on a project for months before they're ready to announce its existence or show an early conference build to the press. By that point, the developer usually (but not always) has a good idea of the game's structure and what features are possible in what sort of general timeline. Even in that case, though, they might be vague or reticent about making too many concrete promises regarding eventual features.
With Kickstarter, developers are often expected to make detailed promises about a game's features, budget, and development timeline before that development has even started or when it is barely off the ground. The culture of the service encourages developers to be as transparent as possible about the entire process, making any modification or delay an extremely public failure. That's in contrast to traditional development, where unannounced features may be attempted and canceled quietly behind closed doors. The fact that Kickstarter developers are often small independent outfits with less experience with the rigors of development doesn't make these problems any better.
And this gets back to Molyneux's quote about the "let's just say anything" nature of Kickstarter projects. When the site doesn't give a penny to projects that don't meet their minimum stated goal, developers are naturally going to lowball their budgets (consciously or unconsciously) to maximize their chances of getting any funds at all. Faced with a skeptical public and competition from dozens of other projects (many with established developers behind them), Kickstarter projects are also going to be as optimistic as possible regarding promised features in order to attract those backers. Being sober and realistic, in this case, is bad for business.
While Kickstarter's policies technically treat funded projects as a legal contract to deliver on promised pledge rewards, in practice there's almost always no penalty for failing to meet the goals laid out on a Kickstarter page (short of a class-action lawsuit from the backers). The only protection backers really have is the fact that a developer's reputation will be ruined if they fail to deliver—a fact that's little protection when it comes to newly formed studios full of no-name developers.
When Kickstarter's structure offers every benefit to overpromising and little-to-no penalty for not delivering, it's no wonder that those behaviors are so common to projects on the site. You don't need to be a serial, pie-in-the-sky over-promiser like Peter Molyneux for your crowdfunding dreams to outpace your funding and timing realities. When it comes to Kickstarter, everyone is Peter Molyneux, and the backers are the ones enabling their often unachievable dreams.
 

Metro

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Of course, who gives a flip about journalistic integrity?
 

markec

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Of course, who gives a flip about journalistic integrity?

Really? Journalistic integrity? RPS? Really?

Dont get me wrong, its about time Molyneux is called out for all the bullshit he is responsible, its something that should have been done ages ago. Problem is that the way the interview is done and who done it. John Walker is a piece of shit who should not be mention in a same sentence as journalistic integrity and he is trying way too hard to increase his street cred in this hit piece and in the process looks nothing more then a spiteful bully. When people talk more about tone of the "journalist" then the interview itself you can pretty much say the the article is a failure.
 

Angthoron

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What fucking journalistic integrity? Journalistic integrity that let Mollynuke collect £525K on KS without giving a word of proper warning to people dropping their cash on him? That journalistic integrity? Or maybe the integrity that lets shits like Levine and Taylor and [very fucking long list] of similar conmen get away as long as they regularly pay their ad banner tribute? Yeah, very fucking integral indeed. Or maybe the journalistic integrity that would be sending Mollynuke cakes and setting up Patreon donation drives for him if he were a chick with blue hair? What is this I don't even.

Yeah, Mollynuke is a crook one way or another, but he's a crook that these very same hounding shills gave a rise to, helped him get his cash time and again, never, ever fucking questioning him, or his likes. Now that there's nothing else to get out of him, why not do the hounding, he'll get the image of a martyr, they'll get Hard-Hitting Journalism creds, fuck yeah. Another scam at best. A gang of Klansman pots, at worst.
 

Love

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Seeing, that people seriously expected a finished product from Molyneux living up to the expectations might warrant such a line of questioning. Maybe it has become to easy in the industry to label Molyneux's promises as the usual prelude to disaster. Maybe we have become too acceptive of it and people unfamiliar with his name don't know what to expect.

Does the interviewer need all the history to pinpoint Molyneux for the bad job he has done? Does he need do bring his weird views into it and force Molyneux to concede to them, or wouldn't the look at the simple facts suffice?
The interviewer asks about the budget situation and the answer is, that they fucked it up royally. The reader sees the answer straight up in the beginning. What's the point of leading on with that over and over again, if you don't have a follow up to go anywhere new? Does he expect Molyneux to admit his mistake? He already did it!
Why bring up the 30 years career of a person in the industry repeatedly, when you don't accept his insight on the other hand? Why mention his previous achievements, when he's open about the struggles with them too? It doesn't count, because those were backed by a publisher. Does that mean Molyneux has no obligations towards them? Why is wasting their money a granted thing?
Yes, Molyneux hasn't delivered to his backers yet, but don't make all your complains about the missing icing if you received a spoiled cake. There is a serious allegation, that the team was shifted to another project evident by all the missing progress of the game over the last year. After Molyneux tells a very sad tale of abandoned server technology and thereby caused middleware problems he goes on naming people and their assignments. I'm none of the wiser after that intermezzo than I was before. Instead I do now know, that Molyneux enjoyed a one time stay in some high class hotel he got as a gift from a friend, which for whatever reasons is conspicuously viewed at from the interviewer. What the fuck?
How was the guy who won Curiosity screwed over? I admit he was dragged into the spotlight, but I guess he could have expected that after seeing the video message and agreeing to do the interviews.
What sense does it make to mention, that a person working on a product to sell, does indeed do promos for it? Is that a bad thing?
He doesn't want him to hype people up. That's a nice sentiment - and he expresses it to the one person who hyped up millions of people to click on a digital cube - but in this interview it doesn't come off as much as a genuine wish as it should be.


I think the sites views on Kickstarter have been discussed further in this thread. It's just a bit confusing, because the interviewer seems to be advocating save formulas and targets for games to be financed by crowdfunding. I hope this isn't what we were supposed to take form this interview...
 

Lyric Suite

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Reminds me of that scene in the Casa Bonita South Park episode where Eric Cartman beats up the handicapped kid to get on Kyle's good side.
 

Angthoron

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Reminds me of that scene in the Casa Bonita South Park episode where Eric Cartman beats up the handicapped kid to get on Kyle's good side.
Yeah, also the Britney Spears episode where it turns out society needs to sacrifice fallen pop stars to get better harvests.
 

commie

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I guess some of you don't remember Grunker gem of an interview with 'ShitComposter' a while back.
I remember that and I also remember saying it was a fucking retarded way to conduct an interview.

Bullshit. It was a GREAT way to conduct an interview. After all ShitComposer...DEComposer'ed soon enough, for the benefit of all mankind.

Now we need to send Grunker to interview Bethesda and Bioware next...maybe Deep Shit Silver in the meantime while he waits for an invitation....
 

evdk

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I guess some of you don't remember Grunker gem of an interview with 'ShitComposter' a while back.
I remember that and I also remember saying it was a fucking retarded way to conduct an interview.

Bullshit. It was a GREAT way to conduct an interview. After all ShitComposer...DEComposer'ed soon enough, for the benefit of all mankind.

Now we need to send Grunker to interview Bethesda and Bioware next...maybe Deep Shit Silver in the meantime while he waits for an invitation....
"So Todd, you fucking cunt, why do you keep raping Fallout?"
:obviously:
 

Metro

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Apparently you all thought I was being sarcastic... I really don't give a shit about journalistic integrity or the fact that RPS guy was being a douche or inconsistent or whatever.

Although we definitely got a bunch of 'Moly-pologists' up in here.

:troll:
 
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no.
molyneux stopped making games with the end of bullfrog. he's been selling smoke for years now and he knows it. he knows it or he's sick. whichever is, i don't want people like that on my planet.
 

buzz

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I think this thread confirms one thing: Codexers literarily give more of a fuck about sticking it to the SJWs than hating shitty video games and people scamming them of their money.

"HURR, MOLYNEUX DID SOME BAD THINGS BUT JOHN WALKER WAS A MEANIE TO HIM"


Fuck you and your bullshit. Peter Molyneux took over half a million pounds and just took a shit on them, doing whatever the fuck he wanted and not following one simple promise. Even some shmuck like Tim Schafer (and anyone who've read the DF threads knows I hate him as much as the next guy) was never this big of an asshole. For all that counts, at least you can't buy ingame items (for now) with real life money in Spacebase DF9 or whatever. At least he didn't promise some poor sod some money and fame and gave him the finger. And whatever he did wrong, we criticized him for it just as much as we do this asshole.


I don't give one tiny amount of fuck of who John Walker is and what did he do with his life. He means literal zero to anyone actually giving a fuck about video games in this day and age. He didn't just scam people of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars by abusing their nostalgia and memories of good video games. He's as relevant to the general context as Infinitron or me or anyone on this forum are.

Peter Molyneux means/meant much more, due to his past history of making both good and disappointing and absolute shit games. Whores like him and Warren Spector or Ken Levine, with their pretentious speeches and lack of proof to show anything worthwhile for the last 10+ years, those are the real problem in here. People who are venerated by hundreds and thousands of people for no explicit fucking reason and who fool their audiences into throwing tons of money at their feet. While the raw, passionate and young talent sit in the dust and and is happy if their campaign gets a few tens of canadian dollars.


I'd say fuck Fargo too but at least that one tried to fulfill his promises and he succeeded for the most part. Wasteland 2 was not the greatest thing ever made but it's a fun romp and it does its job. When the games needed extra money, he gave them out of his own pocket, not make a phone version with publisher deals and other bullshit. Even if InXile has done a lot of shady bullshit, it wasn't as blatant or annoying as project Godus or Star Citizen.

Remember when Fargo was talking about some social network implementation in W2? Remember the backlash and how they quickly changed their minds?
If Peter Molyneux was in charge of InXile, not only would Wasteland 2 have Facebook integration, but he would also hype it as the most original and most interesting thing he ever did in his life and the reason why he's so forward-thinking. And you'd also have to pay extra if you don't want it.


So no, RPS was actually quite nice to him by starting the interview with that pathological liar question. If I was doing the interview, my first reply would've been to tell Peter to go fuck himself.
 

Love

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Codexers don't get their panties in a bunch about Molyneux because they know what to expect of him. The seeming ambiguity about comes from the fact, that onetime spearheads like Ken Levine, Todd Howard or the Yerli brothers have become the riders of decline willingly, while there is this little irrational shred of hope, that Molyneux just fucks up out of sheer incompetence.
 

buzz

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There's nothing incompetent about willingly setting yourself to make pay2win games. Just pure villainy.
 

Lyric Suite

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I think this thread confirms one thing: Codexers literarily give more of a fuck about sticking it to the SJWs than hating shitty video games and people scamming them of their money.

SJWs are worse so i don't get you point here.
 

made

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I think this thread confirms one thing: Codexers literarily give more of a fuck about sticking it to the SJWs than hating shitty video games and people scamming them of their money.

"HURR, MOLYNEUX DID SOME BAD THINGS BUT JOHN WALKER WAS A MEANIE TO HIM"
More like "They are both disingenuous cunts so who gives a fuck what bullshit stories they tell each other?"
 

Korron

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I can't imagine publishers or backers ever wanting to give money to this man again. Apparently they need their PR handlers. I give two shits about any of his past work though, and he had a reputation before the KS. If you backed this game (especially at a higher level) then I have no sympathy for complaints. If you'd like to pay more idiot tax I have a bridge to sell you.

Fuck that edgelord John Walker.
 
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the world being full of retards is not an excuse to let such a hack as molyneux rob their money and pass like the victim.
 

IDtenT

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My view of Molyneux and his fake promises had been that he was more like the huckster Wizard of Oz or Iam Hammond (only without the fake science to pull it off) -- i.e., someone who likes the attention but who also likes to make people happy, and is lying to make them happy more than he is lying to defraud them -- than like Bernie Madoff.
It saddens me that there are good people out there that believe that lying is a method to make people happy. They'll never truly understand that life is not disconnected from one instance to the next - that actions have future inconcieved repercussions. They'll never hold friends for long and they will wander aimlessly from one impressionable person to he next. It also definitely feeds their ego that they get to make people happy - so much so that they start to believe their own bullshit.

Maybe this is what Moly really needed, but I doubt he'll take it to heart.
 

Matalarata

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I think the main problem here is that some people will read that interview and feel sympathy toward MolyPoly... One could even argue it's the backers fault, for not having researched enough about the man before pledging. Hell, info on him are readily available!

I think a more generic but still caustic interview, with less ad-hominem attacks and more "facts" or questions about his past projects, would have been a lot better.
As it is, this is just another piece of infocrap, clearly the sharks frenzied once they tasted blood. And already a dividing line has formed...
 
Last edited:

NotAGolfer

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What a bunch of drama queens. That John Walker is an exceptionally nasty and hysteric one, seems like it was his time of the month.

So Kickstarter and Molyneux aren't compatible in the first place? Wow, what a surprise.
Fuck this grocery list mentality on the pledger side of Kickstarter games. That shit isn't helping.
And I would never ever measure Molyneux by his promises, but if the end result is a good game. Talk is cheap, especially when coming from this guy. Give me an eloquent and constantly bullshitting designer who still makes great games even if they constantly fail to live up to the hype he creates and I would never complain, I'd just be a bit amused.
I honestly can't tell if Molyneux is that kind of designer anymore though. Didn't play Fable II and III and I'm hearing conflicting things about them (seem like popamole in any case, so I'm not overly curious) but the stuff he worked on at Bullfrog is amongst the best out there. So add me to the crowd that doesn't like that Walker dumbfuck playing bad cop on him that way, especially with no good cop in sight. With all these nobodies who did 1 or 2 good games back in the day getting put on oldschool (TM) pedestrals everywhere they could go a little softer on someone who actually was important and made original games full of fresh ideas. Maybe ask him what went wrong instead of jumping to conclusions and putting words in his mouth like some cheap sensationalist yellow press ... Oh wait, this is RPS we're talking about. Nevermind. ^^
...
But from what I read it really seems like he ripped them pledgers off with that Godus game. Which would be sad and nearly justify every flak he gets. It's mobile shovelware or something, right?
no.
molyneux stopped making games with the end of bullfrog. he's been selling smoke for years now and he knows it. he knows it or he's sick. whichever is, i don't want people like that on my planet.
No. The Movies was a gud game.
 

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