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MOLYNEUX: WHAT ARE WE DOING? By Mr Biffo

15/2/2015

31 Comments

 
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I still remember buying Populous. I went into my local games shop, and the sharp-suited guy behind the counter (in those days, games shop staff wore suits - imagine that!) said "You're here to buy Populous". 

I reacted with surprise at his precise clairvoyance... but apparently, everyone who'd been in the shop that day had been there to buy Populous, such was the must-have appeal of the pioneering god game.

Populous was Peter Molyneux's first big hit, and the game that put him on the gaming map as something of a visionary. 26 years on, he has seemingly become the most hated man in the games industry, a "pathological liar", a breaker of promises, and the crusher of a young man's dreams. 

Just what the hell happened there?

RUBBER-NECKING
I, like many, have watched the unfolding drama - if that's even the word for the slow-motion car crash that has surrounded the Godus debacle - with mounting horror. But before we go on, here's a very quick, very broad strokes, recap in case you don't know:

  • Three years ago Peter Molyneux formed development studio 22 Cans.
  • 22 Cans' first game is Curosity: What's Inside The Cube, a social experiment whereby players tap on squares of a giant cube to reach the prize in the middle. The prize is said to be "life-changing".
  • December 2012, 22 Cans takes to Kickstarter to raise funding for Godus, a spiritual successor to Populous. Funding of £450,000 achieved, Molyenux predicts the game will be complete within 9 months.
  • May 2013, Curiosity is won by 18 year-old Bryan Henderson, from Edinburgh. His prize is to become an all-powerful god within Godus, and share in the game's profits.
  • Godus is released on Steam early access as a beta.
  • August 2014, a version of Godus is released as a freemium iOS title, with an Android version released the following November. But still no completed PC title.
  • February 2015 all hell breaks loose. Molyneux is hauled through the gaming press and held accountable for making promises he has failed to keep, not releasing Godus when promised and is accused of shifting focus away from Godus to a new game. Also, Bryan Henderson goes public over not yet receiving his prize and being "ignored" by 22 Cans, and Molyneux announces in a series of farewell interviews that he's never speaking to the press again.

That's the very simple version. The more complex version is this: it's starting to look like Molyneux is being torn apart for sport. Of course Molyneux's Kickstarter backers have every right to be angry, and he should be held accountable for his undelivered promises - or, at least, asked what's going on. So something has gone very wrong indeed when the man who caused all this actually starts looking like the victim in the situation.

Much as it pains us to do so, we have to lay a lot of the blame for that at the feet of the online gaming press. 
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BLOOD SPORTS
Somehow, in all the years I wrote Digitiser, I never met Peter Molyneux. At least, not to my knowledge. 

I was once asked to tone down one of my Biffovision columns for Edge, as it was felt to be an overly harsh criticism of the man's notorious habit of failing to live up to his claims. And, frankly, I dare say I was overly harsh - such is the nature of being a columnist, that you eventually find yourself trying to polarise and provoke, Richard Littlejohn-style. 

Nonetheless, given some of the boundless vitriol thrown at Molyneux over the past week, it seems a bit ridiculous now that anyone would ever try to protect his feelings. He's a right bastard, yeah?

Not knowing Molyneux personally, never having met him, I can't comment first-hand on the man himself. Many of the interviews and articles that have blown up this past week have been written by those who have, and they call his vulnerability and sincerity into question. According to some, he has a habit of portraying himself as the victim and of crying in interviews, and in more than one article the writer has raised the question of whether he was playing them.

Others, however, have simply taken his public statements - and history of failing to live up to those statements - at face value, and used that as sufficient ammunition to make wholesale judgements on his character.

Some of the rhetoric surrounding the Godus debacle has verged on the hysterical (and not the funny sort of hysterical). Some of it has felt like shameless clickbait, some of it has felt like attempts at playing the hard-hitting interviewer, but a portion of it just comes across like The Day Today's jam festival interview - not being satisfied until the subject has been broken, and admitted some sort of culpability just to get the interviewer to shut up. It's journalistic waterboarding.

HYSTERIA LANE
There's a slightly worrying trend in the games industry to react with hysteria over every little thing, as if the slightest misstep by those in the public eye is justification enough to tear them down. Whether it's buggy game releases, journalistic integrity, or - as in this case - letting down thousands of paying supporters and a young competition winner.

Regardless, who of us would want to be Peter Molyneux right now? Whatever we've done, does anyone deserve such a wholesale assassination of character, to have their career blown out of the water, to be accused of being a deliberate, manipulative liar? What we've seen over the past week has reeked of pack mentality - the brave gladiator gouges a chunk out of his weakened opponent, and the crowd roars for more... 

I don't really want to comment on Molyneux's responsibility to Bryan Henderson or his Kickstarter backers - though given the nature of crowd-funding and competitions, it's arguably a moral obligation rather than any contractual one - but I do appreciate the anger felt by those directly affected.

However, much of the anger (if you can call it that) feels more like glee, like the snickering kid who hangs around with the bullies so that he doesn't become the next target. It feels like it's coming from the spectators, or those who want to be perceived as the crusading, righteous hero, not those with a real vested, emotional stake in the situation. As much as anything, it feels, sadly, like Molyneux's perception as a rich, famous and privileged individual - whooh! He gets to stay in hotels! - is marking him out as a justified target. Let's bring the wealthy show-off down to our level, right?

And that's a shame, because it's getting in the way of Molyneux's mistakes, and any opportunity for balanced, reasoned, reporting.
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VICTIM COMPLEX
In a lot of the interviews with Molyneux this week he does seem to play the victim card a little too easily.

But, then, I'm sure most of us would struggle to do otherwise when it felt - as it must do for Molyneux - like the entire world is out to persecute him. 

He's been pushed to talk about being depressed, of having his career destroyed, of being shouted at by his wife and letting down his son... it's heart-breaking, frankly. Even if we pledged £30, £50, £100 to the man - is it really payment enough, to push someone to breaking point? Is that what we want in lieu of a completed version of Godus, featuring Bryan Henderson? 

Maybe Molyneux is a lunatic, maybe he is a deliberate liar, a player of the press. Or maybe he's just a man who gets whipped up by his own enthusiasm, is a terrible businessman, and has bitten off more than he can chew this time, by getting funding from his fan base rather than a faceless publisher. 

He has been the first to admit his mistakes, the first to apologise, the first to call himself stupid. Yes, he's done that only when faced with the accusations first-hand... but when is he supposed to do it? 

IT'S A WONDERFUL THING
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Looking back, his "finished in nine months" claim seems absurdly tight, and his £450,000 funding goal - that's nothing in terms of a creative project, and is about the budget of an episode of Mrs Brown's Boys - is piffling, in the current climate. 

We can all speculate as to why this has happened, and call Molyneux's excuses into doubt, but the short of it is... we don't know. We don't know what has happened behind the scenes to cause this - something pretty serious, I'd imagine - and we don't know the steps that 22 Cans and Molyneux have tried to take to keep the project on track. 

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Similarly, we don't know Molyneux: The Man. None of us do - not even those who have interviewed him. 

Press/developer relations or not, Molyneux is not a politician - his decisions don't affect our country, or any of us individually beyond - say - the backers of his game, who took a gamble and fear being left out of pocket without a game to justify their investment. 

And yeah, it's disappointing for little Bryan Henderson too, of course. I totally get his hurt at feeling shunned.

But Molyneux is just some guy, making games, who has ballsed up... and I just look at the debate and reporting, and think... get a grip. Get over yourselves. What are you trying to prove here? How important is it? How important is he? Is this situation really serious enough to risk hurting an individual to such a degree? Has this not become hugely disproportionate to the hurt and disappointment on the other side? 

As I said at the start, Molyneux is in the wrong, and I understand the anger from his supporters. But as for the rest of us... if he's stupid enough to immolate his own career, let him do it. There's good, balanced, investigative journalism, and then there's adding petrol to the pyre. WHY are we getting so angry over this, so involved, if not for sensationalist entertainment? Why does this happen time and time again in the games industry?

Is this really who we want to be?


FROM THE ARCHIVE:
  • FOR GODUS SAKE: That Molyneux video
  • PREDICTIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF GAMING

31 Comments
Mr Smith
16/2/2015 03:12:09 am

A fantastic write up - I've been following events myself, and I've yet to read anything that wasn't hysterical (well, the Guardian interview sort of OK).

Well said, very logical, and very true. I think instead of airing my own views on this I'll just link people to this article. Easier that way.

I was disgusted by the RPS interview. There are better, calmer ways of doing a serious interview and challenging someone - the writer just came across as spiteful. I've never actually played any Molyneux game, but given his history, this feels like a crowd left a well-intentioned pyromaniac in charge of the fireworks shed, and now they want to lynch him because it's all gone wrong. You kinda knew it was gonna happen, surely.

In a broader more generalised sense, this feels like it's all part of a growing unpleasantness in games (and I suppose the world), fuelled by social media and the amplification of small voices it brings about. In the days of print only (or early days of the net) this would never have escalated like it has. Rise of the Robots never had this kind of grilling. Did it? Everyone in gaming seems to hate everyone else now. It's an endless spiral of escalating hatred.

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Timboid
16/2/2015 03:16:32 am

'He has been the first to admit his mistakes, the first to apologise, the first to call himself stupid.'

Which is fine and admirable, but when someone does it again and again, having apparently learned nothing from all the previous mess-ups and grovelling apologies, you start to wonder if you can trust anything that comes out of their mouth.

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GigerPunk link
16/2/2015 03:35:21 am

He's been like that ever since leaving Bullfrog. All interviews with him after that have been the same; promise the world, deliver something cut down but vaguely similar to that and move on. Interviews with the rest of the staff at Lionhead, Webley and Hassabis in particular, were pretty much the same, you never quite knew if they were genuinely excited about things they were doing (or at least *planning* on doing), hopeless optimists, or just plain bullshitters. I wonder if there were people at Bullfrog who reined in some of his more ludicrous excesses, people who didn't move with him to Lionhead.

Either way, whether it's deliberate bullshitting or simple naivety, it's probably about time he had to face the music. But RPS's attack piece didn't really help things, it just came across as any excuse to put the boot in.

He'll probably be back in six months or so, when the next game's due for release. Unless he decides to stick to his word for once and employ someone else to do the pr instead of him.

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Mr Jonny T
16/2/2015 03:29:30 am

Molyneux always comes across like a guy who has all of his ideas in the pub after a few sherbets. At the time it seems like a brilliant idea and you have such plans to make it all work - at which point he tells everyone these ideas and gets them all excited, just to later realise he can't deliver.

It's a shame as he always comes across like he really wants to make it work.

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Dan Smith
16/2/2015 03:31:10 am

Good article.

The Rock Paper Shotgun interview was insane, just far too over the top and ultimately cringeworthy.

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Frank Chickens
16/2/2015 03:47:43 am

I'm curious in that people keep trusting a man who makes Arthur Daley look like a bastion of honesty.

Still, let's hear it for hope over experience.

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Frank Chickens
16/2/2015 03:53:41 am

Thinking about it Del Boy would be a better fit.

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Cybernetic Ghost
16/2/2015 04:15:58 am

The RPS interview was...outstanding. Exactly the kind of thing we need more of. It was no worse than a typical Paxman grilling, except it's rare for the gaming press to do it because they're too busy grovelling at developer's feet and too scared of being shunned by PR.

Molyneux has a long history of hyping up his work and failing to deliver on his promises, and he's been a joke for some time because of it. The difference here is that there wasn't a publisher footing the bill, it was his fans. Taking money from normal people and then failing to make good on the promises, and outright lying while doing it...well it's hard to find room for sympathy.

The backlash has been a long time coming and I'm glad RPS had the balls to call him out on it.

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Chris link
16/2/2015 04:23:51 am

He's obviously very enthusiastic and passionate about what he does. The problem with that is enthusiastic people promise things they can't deliver (whilst believing they can), and end up being overly ambitious and under estimating the amount of time and money required to achieve those goals. You only have to watch an episode of Dragon's Den to see these individuals in spades - the over-enthusiastic have some crackpot scheme that is clearly not going to achieve the projections... and from there it's a downward spiral.

I believe Peter is well intentioned but but if he'd applied for investment on Dragon's Den instead of Kickstarter, he'd have Duncan Bannatyne shouting "I'm Ooot!" before he'd got through his second year profit forecast.

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optimark prime
16/2/2015 05:43:01 am

Really good article, nicely balanced.

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Fun Ding D'Barcle
16/2/2015 05:44:45 am

Perhaps one of the main issues here is that Kickstarter just isn't a very good model as soon as you start getting into the realms of serious spondoolicks.

"Backers" get no redress if things go breasts up, nor any share of the profits if things go mammaries down. The 1% would soil themselves with mirth if presented with this type of "investment opportunity". (Or alternatively they'd now manage to get some kind of taxpayer bailout).

BEWARE OF CAVES, as they say!!!!!

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RevStu
16/2/2015 12:24:00 pm

Wah wah pity the poor millionaire. If he can't hack game development any more, he can retire and stop stealing people's money.

You say "it's just videogames". Well, that cuts both ways - if he's so concerned about spending time with his kid, he never needs to work another day in his life, so just DO it, Peter. Quit and spend your life being a dad. Nobody NEEDS any more disappointing, over-promised videogames, we'll survive.

I haven't played any of Molyneux's games for more than 20 minutes since 1993, I have no dog in this fight, and Mr B knows I love him. But I really object to the attack on John Walker, the most insanely principled journalist ever to work in this stinking industry. He wouldn't attack someone maliciously if you put a gun at his baby's head. He conducted that interview the way it needed to be conducted, and Molyneux got all the time to explain himself anyone could ever ask for.

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Mr Biffo
16/2/2015 12:55:29 pm

Oh, I know you love me. Love you too.

But I'm a bit pained that you felt this came across as pitying Molyneux, or an "attack" on John in any shape or form - I think he's a brilliant, brilliant journalist, and part of the reason he (and RPS) isn't named in the feature is I wasn't targeting this at any one person.

What I was trying to say was an issue that I felt with most of the Molyneux coverage over the past week. Which is... that if even I reached a place where I actually feel sorry for the "poor millionaire" - who I really don't want to be feeling sorry for, and who absolutely should be held accountable - then something has gone drastically wrong with the tone of the reporting, across the media.

Again, John's a brilliant writer. This wasn't an attack on any one person - though John's lengthy interview was obviously searing, and a key part of what I was talking about, but not the totality of it.

I had a good dozen or so people forward me that interview with the sort of glee that people used to reserve for public stonings, which in itself troubled me. I accept I'm probably a fat old hippy, but I can take no pleasure in Molyneux's discomfort and distress, however much he might deserve it. Maybe a public flogging is what Molyneux deserves in the eyes of a lot of people. But not for me, I'm afraid. I think there are better ways to hold someone accountable for their fuck-ups. Maybe legal action against 22 Cans - if the Kickstarter backers don't get their product - would ensure future creators think twice before making outlandish promises.

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Bo
17/2/2015 03:20:17 am

Maybe it's just because I don't actually read loads of the gaming press, but the only thing close to over-the-top about Molyneux this week has been the RPS interview, so when you mention a feeding frenzy, no matter how obliquely, it's pretty much inevitable that I (and no doubt, many others) will assume that's what you're referring to.

It might not be what you're referring to, but I still feel the need to help justify it. The reason for the tone was quite obvious to me - sometimes you need to cut straight through the flak and try to pin someone down. For so many previous projects, Molyneux has gotten away with apologies and tears to absolve his previous mistakes, and what would we have gained by dancing through that routine again? John Walker's harsh questioning was an attempt to throw him off-balance, and maybe, possibly, see that this over-promise/over-apologise circle isn't actually helpful.

Really, none of the questions in that interview were THAT tough. Someone called you a liar? Oh no! Nobody asked you to work ridiculous hours and neglect your family for Godus, so don't use that as your defence when the questioning gets tough.

Reviewer 2457F
16/2/2015 05:50:17 pm

I'm sort of torn on this. On the one hand you definitely have an unhealthy 'Look Mavis a man-in the-stocks. Lets fetch the rotten cabbage!' attitude among the press and gaming public. This doesn't really help encourage useful discourse.So yeah there is a problem with tone.
On the other hand... You have PM. A man with a repeated track record of failing to deliver on his promises. A man who always apologises profusely and then repeats the same behaviors. That pattern suggests to me that he is not sorry for his actions and will continue to repeat them on future projects.
He needn't break down and weep. What I would like is for him to stop dong the shitty things he does. Things that negatively impact a whole lot of people and foster a culture of mistrust. As hard as this process may be for him, what PM absolutely needs is the kind of interviews like the one RPS gave him. I know people are out there giving PM flack for the sake of it but John Walker is different. He is a journalist pursuing the truth and cannot easily be bullshitted.Unlike PM, I believe John when he responds to Peters usual waffle (I work hard/you can't plan for the future/I didn't lie. I just got the facts wrong/pity me, I'm a flawed human being) with the following statement:
'No, look, this is ridiculous. Everyone is a flawed human being. My purpose here is not to hang you out. My purpose is to get to the truth of what’s going on here.'

If Pm sat down for 5 minutes and thought about everything JW said to him, he might have a chance of genuine self-reflection and change for the better. Instead he comes across as self-pitying and petty:PM in the same interview: ‘OK John, fine, I won’t talk about my development process, I won’t talk about my games.’ That’s what I’m going to do! There you go, you got what you wanted.'

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Mr Biffo
17/2/2015 12:25:59 am

Actually, I continue to be a bit conflicted on it too. I read through a bunch of past Molyneux interviews last night, and he does seem to be trotting out the same old excuses/rhetoric this time. There seems to be a frustration with him, an irritation almost, in the gaming press (which obviously extends to gamers). Whatever he's really like, he does come across as a something of a knob, and I think a lot of the pieces this past week were a sort of catharthis. Like the industry finally snapped and went "Y'know what, Molyneux? Just shut up, will you? We've had enough of your bullshit. Go away". I still stand by the general thrust of my piece (matron)... but I TOTALLY get the frustration and anger directed at him.

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lottalass
17/2/2015 02:11:37 am

Well i can relate to that boy Hendeson, The chap who won the competition, Around six or seven months ago i too entered a so called competition, After paying £378.92 in "donations" on patreon, i secured the title of "Brown Trumpet Grand Winner"
So here we are three years later, and not a sausage, My workmates think i am some delusional attention seeker, After i blurted out i had won a copy of Pudsey the Movie. , signed by David Walliams and Simon Cowell.So i say these purveyors of these shoddy scams should be held to account.
PS
All,some or most of the above is fabrication

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Mr Biffo
17/2/2015 02:17:07 am

Ha! That's us owned. Voucher and defaced DVD are on their way already. Portrait en route.

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Mr Smith
17/2/2015 02:13:25 am

So if one were to play only one PM game, and it was their first PM game, what should this game be?

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GigerPunk link
17/2/2015 02:19:37 am

Hi-Octane, obvs.

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Mr Smith
17/2/2015 02:25:12 am

I was thinking Black and White... Populous looks too fiddly these days. So does Syndicate.

Anyway, apparently he coughed up $6 million for B&W. If he's a multi-millionaire why doesn't he fund Godus himself for the rest of development?

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Mr Biffo
17/2/2015 02:58:48 am

Well... IF he is as rich as some people think, I reckon - given the PR nightmare he's found him in, and the amount of work left to do on Godus - he'll end up having to dip into his own pocket sooner or later.

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Mr Bump
17/2/2015 04:18:03 am

Good article as always. It will be interesting to see if Molyneux actually does get someone else to talk to the press now to promote his games and just focuses on development, which could be for the best. This Jim Sterling video on the subject is quite interesting, covering why some of his actions are called into question but not going overboard with personal criticism:

https://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=lGo63oAEN20

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Mr Biffo
17/2/2015 04:33:19 am

Brilliantly said by JS as always.

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Mr Biffo
17/2/2015 04:27:20 am

RE: Bo's comment. I do kind of agree, broadly with what you're saying. I do think that PM suffers from that George Lucas syndrome, whereby he needs someone to reign him in, and say no... and in lieu of that, the gaming press is being that voice.

Unfortunately, I think it's reached a point with his broken promises that everyone is feeling very frustrated, and emotions are spilling over. It's not just the press - it's the gaming audience too. People have had enough, and they're fuming. And additionally, the gaming press has become the voice of those who have felt wronged by the Godus debacle - the voiceless supporters, who feel somewhat powerless in the face of what's perceived as a wealthy, privileged, powerful man. The RPS article - while certainly the most overtly combatative piece - wasn't the only one I read that I felt went a bit far, but it's more a cumulative effect. I guess... I didn't want to feel sympathy with PM, but somehow... for whatever reason... I reached a tipping point where I actually started to feel sorry for him. Which irritated me, because I didn't want to. He does need to be held accountable for why Godus has taken two years longer than promised, and why pledges haven't been met.

I'd probably change the article somewhat now - not massively - but that's with a degree of hindsight. Reading up further on all the promises he's broken over the years, his hyperbole... it started to wind me up too. I get why people were frustrated and angry. Unfortunately, coming at him from a position of attack - I feel - is only going to make him instinctively adopt a defensive position, and pull out the victim card. Which is what it feels like happened. I'd rather disgruntled backers would just sue him.

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Bo
18/2/2015 05:00:46 am

The trouble is that the sudden clamour of attention often looks like an intentional pile-on, when in reality it's simply a result of a large number of people all looking the same way. What once was just a "media storm" is now a "Twitter storm", because now we're all online, and we can all air our grievances directly, with minimal effort.

So we see ten thousand people tweet something to the tune of "Hey Peter, you've been kinda shitty with stuff", and dozens of journalists write pieces about what Molyneux is like in person, and we (completely understandably) think the cumulative effect is all too much, but on a individual level, none of those people have gone out of their way to harass PM*. To each of those tweeters, it's one tweet, expressing their disgruntlement, and then they move on. To each journalist, Molyneux is in the news right now, so they felt like writing a piece about him, preferably drawing on personal knowledge. Hey, you've even added two of your own! ;)

But how do you stop that? As I mentioned before, this is something that existed long before the internet, when the press would (and still can) be all over whatever the topic du jour is, with what seems like frothing rabidity - and we never figured out how to keep it in check then either. Do we set a hard limit on how many articles, or tweets, can be about a particular subject? Obviously not, because that's silly, but it's all I could think to suggest.

* I think it's desperately important to separate out actual harassment from the rest of the "storm" here. It's depressing to have to say that I'm sure Molyneux has had some truly nasty messages from people because of this, but that's very much a separate situation from the general noise of large groups of people looking at the same thing. One that we're unfortunately really terrible at dealing with right now.

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Hello Hello Hello link
17/2/2015 04:43:37 am

The thing is that your average punter (or so-called games journalist) has no understanding of the way a creative's mind works. Molyneux is a man of ideas, who sometimes gets a little too excited by those flights of fantasy, and seems to have no-one to rein him in.

I don't think that's a bad thing, because we need those creative minds out there to fuel the fire of any creative industry - without them the world would be a much browner place. The problem comes when you involve the public directly via crowdfunding, because unless their expectations are met in a timely fashion, you will be encouraging them to reach for their torches and pitchforks as soon as the deadline is passed.

Whereas in the world of business, where those grubby little oiks from the general public are not allowed, creatives are given elbow-room to wiggle out of deadlines as long as the product arrives...eventually. So it is a clash of cultures, where real people get upset by the way the creative industry works. Mainly because they are too thick to figure out that bringing a product to market these days is a long and expensive process - they just see the £50 they've donated to the cause and no result.

And remember, Molyneux helped bring the gaming world not only Populous but Theme Park, Powermonger, Dungeon Keeper, Magic Carpet (remember that?) as well as Black & White and the Fable games - a little bit of respect is due, surely? Because I remember him bullshitting about those games and the public eating them up when they were released.

But then the Internet came along and ruined everything by giving every single scrote a powerful sense of self-entitlement that could kill a goat from ten paces.

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Bo
18/2/2015 04:41:38 am

I don't think it's fair to just say "he's a man of ideas" any more, as though he's away in some airy-fairy la-la land where his fabulous ideas can't possibly be met by the crushing reality his developers have to actually work in, because that doesn't explain the way he'll double down on how shit his previous game was, or the times he's promised something well after the point where that feature could possible be implemented*.

To me, in these situations he's a salesman, not an ideas man. There are particular brands of salesmen, and we've probably all encountered them somewhere, who will say anything you want to get you to sign on the dotted line. They don't really care about whether the thing you want is really doable, or even an apt fit for what they're trying to sell you, but if it'll get your cash, they'll pretend it'll work.

If you look at it through that lens, I think it makes his actions a lot more understandable.

* "In this case I'd spoken to him roughly two months before the game launched. No features are added to AAA games in the last two months of work - the team is rushing to the finishing line and ironing out bugs. In this case it would have been strange if Molyneux's intention was to motivate his team. It felt more like he'd tried to get me more hyped about Fable 2 by exaggerating an aspect I was clearly interested in, with the certain knowledge that what he was talking about was not in the final game."

From: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-14-rich-stanton-on-requiem-for-a-dreamer

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Matt W
17/2/2015 12:51:49 pm

I don't know, I always saw Molyneux as someone that aimed for the stars but ended up getting to about tree height. I can't blame him for having lofty ambitions to his games and I genuinely feel he doesn't intentionally fail to match his promises.

Some people will never forgive him over the Fable Tree thing (tree height, get it?), and generally us gamers have been ripped off far worse than Molyneux's lofty ambitions have ever annoyed us. He was always going to run into trouble eventually bit its funny how one medium sized controversy and a few cuss ups over the years and we all forget the genuinely fun stuff he has produced.

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Simon
20/2/2015 05:53:52 am

As Bo says - I feel he is just like a used car salesman who will promise anything to everyone and when he gets caught he brings on the tears and "woe is me" attitude. Taking people's money and not delivering is obviously the final straw for everyone and years of pent up aggression have been unleashed on him in one go.

No sympathy from me

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davemate
20/2/2015 06:38:46 am

It is easy to forget that on the whole PM has been a very good game developer. True, he gets caught up in his ideas and fantastic idealism of what is achievable. After that interview I think he is right to just take the direction to shut up, develop the games and let them be judged for what is delivered rather than what is promised.

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