Molyneux: Godus Is "Invest-To-Play," Not F2P

[Li Mu]

Peter! Just make a game that is actually good. Make a good game, put it on Steam and I'll actually give you money for it.
No gimmicks. No false promises. No silly little marketing schemes. Just try and make a GOOD GAME! Remember those? You used to make good games until around the early 2000s.

 

[Skeleon]

Sounds like it will simply be an "honest" pay-to-win game then, doesn't it? Or will the "investments" be to unlock new content, more like DLCs for larger titles than to gain an advantage? We'll see, I guess.

 

[Icehearted]

I feel like he's game development's version of Jerry Springer; mindless fluff and bullshit that either you get a guilty pleasure watching or just ignore because it's too ridiculous to be taken seriously. Re-branding an old idea or nailing gimmicks to it doesn't make it new or exciting, especially when it's from his bullshitting mouth to our ears. This whole thing might have been better served by his silence.

 

[lacktheknack]

I wish he would just shut the fuck up and stop making games. His games are terrible

Just finished a "The Movies" binge and I'd like to disrespectfully disagree. His games all have two to four immense flaws, but I'll be damned if they aren't all fun as hell.

OT: Well, at least he's being honest about what he hopes for. Although really, it just sounds like a slightly protracted demo.

 

[teamcharlie]

Say it with me now. Investment: the investing of money or capital in order to gain profitable returns, as interest, income, or appreciation in value. Unless the game gives you real-world money or you have assurances (reasonable or not) that it will do so, you cannot in any sense be said to invest in that game.

I'm beginning to think 'investment' is the new 'ironic' in terms of wads of people so blatantly misusing the word that people eventually give up trying to correct them. Gotta stop that trend at the ground floor if possible.

 

[Gezzer]

This sounds like the old shareware method, give you a few levels for free then you have to buy the rest.

Couldn't be further from the truth. The old shareware concept was more of a "here's a demo, if you like the game you can buy the rest for XX dollars". F2P or Pete's new I2P (which I personally think is splitting hairs) works more on the auction phenomenon.
Auctions are a great way to sell things which have a hard to pin down value. It's because people have a tendency to get sticker shock. If I have a car that would normally sell for 50 to 100 thousand and I ask 75 for it even people that could easily afford the car would go "75,000 are you nuts?" But if I put the car in an auction I might only get 50 to 60 but I might get the full 100 or more, because each bid is only 5,000 and 2 or 3 people get caught up in the excitement of bidding and bid the car up.
These games take advantage of the same thing. You're playing along and enjoying yourself and the game in one way or another tells you, for only 99 cents you can have this game enhancing feature. Most people go, "WTF, it's only 99 cents" and they do it. Over and over again because they lose track of how many times they've done it. Next thing they know they've spent 70 bucks on a game that wouldn't of sold, under the old pay once model, for more than 20.
A even more insidious trick is one they've learned from casinos. There's a reason many casinos use chips for everything. While they represent money it's hard to view them in the same light so people will often be less cautious when betting with chips then with real cash. That's why many F2P games have an in game currency that you buy with cash instead of straight cash transactions. 5 or 10 bucks for a digital mount might sound out of line. But for 450 megastar jewels it creates less of a negative reaction even if you bought them in lots of 1000 for 30 bucks which would make the mount cost 13.50.

F2P is a very insidious marketing method that takes advantage of our human weaknesses. What's worse is a lot of publishers (like EA)are becoming really brasen with their calculated methods to separate a person from their cash. What's worse is there's enough people that still fall for it, even when it's really obvious what they're doing, that it's still sadly worth the effort and any bad PR it might bring.

 

[Strazdas]

My issue with this strategy is where you have to pay later in the game experience. That's just another way of getting the player invested in a game and shackling them to make them feel as though they have to pay to keep progressing, which is just not something I want in a game.

Its not perfect but it works. This is a deal with World of tanks. the economy is set in such a way that at low levels even being a complete idiot you will still earn money every battle, however at high tier battles even doing 4 times more than you need to win if everyone done the same will not even give you a net possitive because your repair and ammo costs are that high. Which brings in two options: 1. farm money with low tier tanks. 2. but a premium tank that farms money very fast. At the end of the day, i did buy a premium tank, because after all a game that has already gave me over 500 hours of fun (674 to be exact) is worth getting his 60 dollars for it. And i never paid for anything else (there are plenty of other stuff to buy) because avoiding this economy pitfall was all i needed. i could win agaisnt people with golden ammo even with my regular one often so that wasnt an issue.

The benefit of such system that i see is that new players can test the game for many hours to see whether they like it or not without paying anything and then decide if they want to "buy" the game. Sort of like a free trial, except instead of time limit its progress limit.

 

[Robert Marrs]

I found LOTRO to be the closest thing to invest to play. It does not really limit you until you get to a certain point but by the time I got to that point I actually wanted to spend money. I never felt cheated by the game it just got me interested. I think it might be the only f2p game I have ever spent money on.

 

[TheIceQueen]

Snip.

I'm not convinced to support the system, whether it's pay to progress or any of the other freemium variants. Whether it's now or later, if you're going to limit me in any way I'm not going to play your game. It's why I quit Perfect World, it's why I won't play World of Tanks, it's why I won't play any other freemium game, and it's why I'm going to be avoiding Godus like the plague unless Molyneux can deliver on his 'revolutionary' talk - which I highly doubt.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

ill never understand the hate for good old pete

then again i dont listen to even a 10th of the stuff he says, maybe thats the secret

I found LOTRO to be the closest thing to invest to play. It does not really limit you until you get to a certain point but by the time I got to that point I actually wanted to spend money. I never felt cheated by the game it just got me interested. I think it might be the only f2p game I have ever spent money on.

indeed, that game offered a very substantial amount of free content, MMOs arent my thing, but i enjoyed my time with that game

 

[Strazdas]

Snip.

I'm not convinced to support the system, whether it's pay to progress or any of the other freemium variants. Whether it's now or later, if you're going to limit me in any way I'm not going to play your game. It's why I quit Perfect World, it's why I won't play World of Tanks, it's why I won't play any other freemium game, and it's why I'm going to be avoiding Godus like the plague unless Molyneux can deliver on his 'revolutionary' talk - which I highly doubt.

I look at it this way: they allwoed me to have hundreds of hours of fun for free - they deserve some of my money. They dont limit you. You can play the game without ever paying a cent. you just wont progress as fast due to need to play with more profitable tanks once in a while. The developers called the system: "Grinding for cash, and you choose whether you grind in game or in real life".

 

[TheIceQueen]

Snip.

"You can play the game without ever paying a cent" is always a red flag for me. Always. I've heard it so many times, over and over again, word for word. And I suppose you're right. Technically, you don't have to, but being technically correct is not the best kind of correct, despite what Bureaucrat 1.0 says. On paper, sure, in practice... no. Because at the end of the day, you've got to pay if you want to keep up. And the developer's words prove it - that's exactly how I'd describe most freemium models: Grinding. And grinding isn't fun.

It's always when it's straight out of the horse's mouth that I know best when to avoid a game. As the case with the example you gave and Peter Molyneux.

 

[HK_01]

I like Peter Molyneux, but Godus is just a huge letdown. I actually bought that piece of junk. Granted, I had some fun with it, but overall it's far from what was promised and far from the quality of his previous games. Really turned me off of the whole Early-Access thing. I wasn't a huge fan of it before, but slightly optimistic. Seeing as Godus hasn't received an update since October, I honestly feel slightly cheated.

 

[josemlopes]

I wish he would just shut the fuck up and stop making games. His games are terrible and he's one of the biggest liars in the industry these days. Nothing he says ever makes any sense. He'd make a good politician.

Well, at least he does make some rather unique games, not all the times and they usually have some insane design choices that ruin the whole thing and are nowhere near what was promised but at least they are unique.

I... I liked The Movies, m'kay.

 

[Rattja]

This sounds oddly familiar..
I can think of a few MMOs that did something like this, where you could play and do most things, and you did not really need anything you could pay for until way late in the game. And by then you'd probably sunk so many hours into the game that you would be totally fine with it.

I don't really have a problem with anything like that.. IF! yes, and ONLY if the free part is good enough. What is good enough? Well enough to let you have fun, and not constantly remind you about what you can't do, rather give you things you can do instead.

When it works, I think it's actually a rather good way to do it.

 

[veloper]

Molyneux can do whatever he wants. I won't be playing godus anyway.

Still, it would be highly amusing if he manages to 1-UP EA's DK mobile game, with something even worse and he's well on the way already.

So he does a Kickstarter, funded by his last remaining fans and asks a entry fee like any regular old videogame and then he plans to incorporate freemium/pay2win aspects into the game aswell?

EA may actually be fairly even-handed and honest in comparison.

The only remaining question is, which grandfather is going to fuck his last remaining fans harder: Molyneux, sneaking P2W into a crowd-funded game, or "Lord British" with his virtual real-estate scam?

 

[CriticalMiss]

He could call them 'Microinvestments' and they will change the way people play games forever!