There are two new interviews this morning with Peter Molyneux about the failure of Godus to ship a finished PC version two years and change after the game’s kickstarter crowdfunding completed with over half a million pounds which had an expected delivery date of September 2013.
First up is Laura Kate Dale’s interview with Molyneux titled It’s over, I will not speak to the press again via Gameranx where we find out that he’s both quitting giving out interviews anymore and that his family is being harassed:
“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,” he says.
Awful. Failing to ship a game successfully isn’t worthy of harassment.
The second interview is from John Walker, which is just an incredible read. Super long, but well worth going through.
It makes particular mention of the Linux version, a financial stretch goal on the original Godus kickstarter that was reached, but will probably never ship due to an issue with the engine:
Peter Molyneux: No, it wasn’t shitty of us. If you look at Kickstarter campaigns a lot of people do this, and at that time, you know, Linux seemed more than possible, and we’re waiting for an update from Marmalade to do Linux and they just haven’t supplied it. At that time, it was on the cards for them to develop. They haven’t developed it. And us going back and re-writing the whole of the middleware is, would mean that the development of Godus would stop. We’ve considered it. But you know, it’s months of work.
In both of these interviews Molyneux says it is the last he’ll ever do, which is what both journalists believed until reading the other interviews.
I still hope that Godus eventually becomes a great game, but it does not seem likely based on the mobile version at least. The world-sculpting there was as much fun as it seemed like it would be from the kickstarter, but the game limited the sculpting and gated all progress through micro transactions or the standard free to play timers thave have been with us since the old facebook game Mafia Wars.
If Godus hadn’t been free-to-play on mobile it would have been work that could have gone into the PC version and both versions could have been better and probably would have been completable.
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