The development of Godus has been, unfortunately, one of the reasons Kickstarter has lost a bit of it’s shine, and Peter Molyneux recently spoke out rather frankly on the mistakes he has made.
This whole thing came about because of the latest community update on the Godus Kickstarter fundraising page, where both Molyneux and the designer Naszynski answered questions from backers.
One of the backers challenged Molyneux on his recent statements, basically claiming that he was dodging his responsibilities during development and “blaming the community instead.”
Peter’s response was as such;
“Firstly, I don’t think the community can ever be blamed. Because you know we need to appreciate all the range of comments form the positive to the negative. I do however take the blame and put blame on my shoulders.
Hindsight is always a perfect way of looking at life and you can look back on the past and say ‘why did I do this?’
“But there is a catalogue of things that I did badly and incorrectly because I had never done a Kickstarter campaign before, I had never released on Steam Early Access before, I had never done a mobile game before, and [on] all of these things I made some horrendous mistakes.”
He then provided an example of how the PC development should have been brought further before moving onto the mobile version, which is something Naszynski echoed. Naszynski has also previously said that;
“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.
“Quite frankly it’s been exhausting, but I’m starting to feel cautiously optimistic. If I had it my way I wouldn’t bother with mobile, not worry about cost and just work on improving the pc experience, but that’s never going to happen.”
The full community update is rather large, and you can find it in the video below.
It’s a shame that the development of Godus has turned into such a mess, especially as it has also damaged people’s view of Kickstarter, but perhaps this will serve as a lesson to Molyneux. Just saying that you’ve “never done a Kickstarter before” isn’t a valid excuse in my eyes.
I may not be a games developer, but I sure as hell know that if I wanted to release a project through a new and unknown (to me) platform, I would do my research rather than just jumping in head first and hoping for the best.
I might accept that excuse from a newbie developer, but Molyneux is far from that. Here’s hoping this disaster teaches him something, but that may be too optimistic of me.
