Peter Molyneux: 'It's over, I will not speak to the press again' | Hacker News Reader

Peter Molyneux: 'It's over, I will not speak to the press again'

theguardian.com

16 pointsRed_Tarsius10 comments

While he has a point about expectations and mismanaged time/budget... I tried Godus lately and just cannot see how could it have any relation to what the original games provided. It was a typical time-wasting wait-or-pay-to-play app. At least on the phone it was free. On the PC you had to first pay for the app, then you still had the microtransactions on top of that.

So people wanted something greater than Populus and instead got something that actually had the mechanics of: another 2k belief will be available from this building in 25 minutes, you need ~100k for your next bigger action - and you better come back in the next 24h otherwise your civilisation will get worse every day of not playing.

I can completely understand people who got pissed off after spending money on that kickstarter and I'm slightly disappointed with the spin they put on this article.

I think this happens with a lot of kickstarter projects but the project owners are less well know and more likely to be able to just dissappear than someone like Molyneux.

Although Molyneux's history of over-promising and under-delivering should probably have been taken into account by backers. I don't think he was being dishonest I just think he is passionate, optimistic and idealistic and doesn't reign that in for pitches.

I agree with you, he messed up the kickstarter, albeit not by purpose. That said, I'm surprised by how idealistic and passionate is Molyneux yet, despite knowing too well the ungrateful target of his products. I may sound harsh, but I really find the average gamer such a bad costumer.

> “People get so frustrated with me, so much so that they’ve threatened me, they’ve threatened my family and it just cannot go on, it really can’t.”

Seriously, who does suffer from such backlash outside of the videogame industry?

The problem is the consumer has expectations. If you tell them they're getting X and you give them Y and Y is demonstrably of lesser value than X they're going to be pissed off. He just over promises and under delivers.

Now with that said of course he doesn't deserve threats, and I agree that gamers tend to be quite the vicious bunch. It's pathetic on their part. I still bought Godus, I was disappointed by it and believe Molyneux deserves criticism for once again delivering something that's not what was promised but I don't understand how/why people go to such extremes.

Kathy Sierra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra ) had the same problem.

There are various industries where this happens (heck, I've seen it happen in local mom and pop shops). I think it is the intersection of Molyneux celebrity status and being vocal on the internet and a high number of internet users (gamers). You probably have the same stuff happening with actors/musicians, but they usually not around blogging and raising funds through kickstarter, so while they are more public in a sense, they are more distant from the end customers on the internet. Also, they have assistants that filter that crap, forward it to the police, etc. Molyneux probably has his email somewhere public where he gets the threats directly.

I think it happens in every single mass consumer industry, not just video games. If you have a crowdsourced backing of half a million dollars, then that is a lot of people backing you. If you don't meet your goals it only takes a couple of angry nuts to get these threats.

Not sure about this. Maybe in other industries the threats are distributed across customer service personnel and don't make it to the top. The only case I can think of is animal rights activists vs. Huntingdon Life Sciences ( http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/animal-rights-gro... ) and that isn't even customers.

unfortunately gamers are more likely to be internet users and it is easier to threaten someone over the internet. i dont think this means that gamers are necessarily worse than other groups its just that the vocal minority are really vocal.

I think Peter Molyneux's biggest issue is this: he's extremely smart and has a wonderful imagination, but still, to this day, hasn't figured out that it is extremely difficult to get great ideas from your gray matter into code, especially if you're not the one coding.

Would of loved to pay it as a premium game not a POS IAP money grab.

Thats why it failed.

Played it until it required me to log into Facebook at which point i deleted it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com