Peter Molyneux is by quite a wide margin one of the biggest bullshitters in the gaming industry lol.
Flashback to that time when he was at Microsoft in charge of selling the Kinect and he tried to make everyone believe that you could use it to hang out with an AI boy.
Calling Peter Molyneux a scammer is rather unfair. He does not set out to cheat you out of your money. He's simply a game designer that once was one of most brilliant talents in the industry, trying to capture the muse again.
It is an undisputed fact that most of his recent projects massively over promised and undelivered. It's an unfortunate truth that his claims cannot be trusted anymore.
That said, there is no malice behind it. Simply ambition that's not matched by ability to deliver.
I keep hoping Molyneux will once again succeed in one of his projects. It would be glorious, and it would shift gaming landscape, just like his old works did. At the same time, I'm no longer expecting it to happen, and certainly not getting invested emotionally or financially in any of his promises.
There's the thing about "'Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." But then there's it's corollary "any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
I'm other words, Molyneux should know better by now, and the fact that he clearly doesn't can only come from a willful refusal to.
We can definitely debate the merits of the term scammer, but at this point it's definitely undeniable that Molyneux is a liar. The Project Milo demonstration at E3 2009 is just a series of deliberate falsehoods, from the actor hired to behave as if she's interacting with Milo improvisationally, to claims that Milo can identify subtle changes in human users' moods by analyzing their facial expressions to the repeated claim that "this technology works now" even though the entire thing is pre-recorded.
If he wasn't stating things like "This is true technology that science-fiction hasn't even written about, and this works today, now," you could pass it off as him just being enthusiastic about what they can achieve. But he openly and repeatedly stated that they had already achieved all of this, which he knew was not true. Again, we can say E3 or any other PR presentations are all lies on some scale--there's kind of a line you have to ride in marketing where you present things in the best possible light--but Molyneux consistently steps way over that line by making obviously, verifiably false claims.
It's easy to say there's no malice behind it, but the fact is he's a businessman selling a product, and it benefits him personally if people buy his product. He's not some innocent childlike imp creature whose motives are always selfless, he's a human being who likes money and is sometimes willing to say things that aren't true to secure more of it. Is that "malice"? I don't know. It's at least "avarice".
He's a great developer and a shitty producer. When he's in charge of his own projects there's nobody holding him accountable and it just spirals into madness and then halfway through when all the hard and fun work of really designing the game is complete, and all that's left is the boring business of production and finishing the damn thing, he just ADHDs off into the distance chasing the next cool idea/design challenge
Somehow he's able to keep funding that arrangement, so it hasn't changed.
And here I thought he had finally disappeared from gaming.
Let's be realistic: this is another scam by him. Everyone likes to brush it off as him as dreaming bigger than he can pull off and getting caught up in his own hype or whatever. But no, after you do it enough times in a row for enough decades without deviation, it's hard to deny what it is.
I didn't know he was behind Godus, that explains so much. I found it on the app store and loved it to bits, came back some time later to replay it and the game was completely butcherd, I never knew what happened to it.
I didn't know he was behind Godus, that explains so much. I found it on the app store and loved it to bits, came back some time later to replay it and the game was completely butcherd, I never knew what happened.
It'd be great for him to manage to pull a rabbit out of his trick hat and make another legend again. Some of his older games are absolute gems, but I wasn't astonished by The Trail: Frontier Challenge which lowered my expectations for his future works. Hopefully his next not-Fable is a fun experience worth playing that brings some solid gameplay to the table.
The fact that this dude is still getting coverage is crazy. Remember when he tried that mobile, cube game that was supposed to have some mind blowing reveal once people got to the center?
The thing was so forgettable and a let down that I don’t even remember what it was. Tamper anything this man tries to hype up with a skyscraper sized amount of skepticism.
The winner of the cube game got to be the "god" of Peters next game which was an MMO-like thing. Only after he won his prize the studio kind of forgot about it and just moved on so he never really won anything
There's a really good piece about it but I don't recommend reading it, it's just frustrating and predictablely shitty behaviour
What Molyneux did say, however, was that this all-new mechanic would be part of a more "familiar" environment that was "more like a kind of Fable, Black and White, Dungeon Keeper kind of experience".
Does he know what kind of a game he's making? That seems like 3 wildly different game styles...
That was interesting, I ended up reading the wiki entry for 'Curiosity: What's in the Cube?' (having never heard of it) and that is one wild ride. Sucks that he didn't quite follow through with the promises for the winner / Godus game, but the concept is amazing
Based on the article, they're not sure if this is the same game he's had in development since 2019, Legacy, which is some kind of business sim where you have to buy your land as NFTs then create more NFTs to sell to other players.
It's a shame that PM has garnered the reputation that he has. He's a legitimate legend of the industry and is clearly incredibly passionate and ambitious. Students study him and his games.
His recent track record of overpromising and underdelivering is no more egregious than the other major players in the space. Players that actually have more scope and resources to execute, to boot.