Edit: Duplicate topic from Jason’s article, published earlier today.
I’ll make this clear, I was never a fan of Peter Molyneux. I always felt like he promised more than he could deliver on, relying heavily on smoke and mirrors to hype his upcoming game projects. However, he is still an important figure in gaming, basically pioneering the “god game” genre with the classic Populous . And while I think the way he has treated the Curiosity winner is kind of crappy, and the way he presented Milo at the Kinect conference was goofy, I certainly don’t think he should be the receiver of death threats. Unfortunately, it seems like anyone in the gaming industry could be the recipient of Death Threats these days.
“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 said in an interview with The Guardian . “I think I’ll get this over and done with, I’ll answer some of the things backers are saying, but after that I feel the best thing I can do is just … I think people are just sick of hearing from me. They’ve been sick of hearing from me for so many years now. You know, we’re done.”
Molyneux even commented on his reputation for overpromising and under delivering. “I say these ideas so passionately, people think that these are hard and fast promises,” he said. “I truly believe them when I say them, but as you know, sometimes they don’t come to pass. They don’t come to pass because they’re too technically difficult, they don’t come to pass because maybe they don’t fit and people see this as being a promise.”
It really makes you look at this developer in a different way. I still can’t say I agree with his practices, but I certainly have more sympathy for him.
As a result of this recent controversy, Molyneux has turned over development of Godus to Konrad Naszynski, a young designer who joined the team as a passionate fan. Godus has a lot of promises it needs to fulfill to a lot of Kickstarter donators, and that may be a lot of weight for a young designer to take on.
As for Molyneux himself, he has decided to step back from the whole thing. He will keep tinkering with games, but he will also try to step out of the public spotlight, saying that he has decided he will stop talking to press.
“I love working on games, it is my life,” he said. “I am so honored to be a part of the games industry, but I understand that people are sick of hearing my voice and hearing my promises. So I’m going to stop doing press and I’m going to stop talking about games completely.”
Do we really want to become known as the community that makes death threats to anyone we don’t like? #GamerGate is one thing, as people have taken that issue incredibly personally, and for good reason. But, Peter Molyneux? Are we going to threaten the people who underperform now? Are we a gaming dictatorship, where we hold our designers at gunpoint and force them to make good games under duress and threat of death?
How screwed up is that?
Source: The Guardian