Godus Kickstarter: 'Maybe People Don't Want Originality' - Molyneux
David Lynch
Godus is 22 Cans and Peter Molyneux's chance to reinvent the god-game genre, but there's a chance Kickstarter might not deliver.
Published on Dec 5, 2012
Godus is 22 Cans and Peter Molyneux’s first experience with Kickstarter and the long-standing British developer is more than aware that if Godus is to succeed it needs to secure funding.
For Molyneux, Kickstarter is the answer because it removes the need for publishers and encourages developers to take risks and innovate.
But, even games such as Godus, coming from high-profile developers like Molyneux, need funding and it can’t be done out of their own pockets.
“We have to have money from somewhere,” explained Molyneux. “If we don't, then we're going to have to go to a publisher or we're going to have to get some outside investment, because we just can't fund out of our own pocket.”
"Maybe people don't want originality, maybe people don't want games from indie developers, they want, you know, tried and tested experiences. I'd rather suffer the slings and arrows of testing that than sitting back and going to some existing publisher relationship.”
“It's an expensive thing to run a studio of 20 people. A lot of people think that my Kickstarter's safe because of who I am, but it's not. It's not safe. I define myself as being an indie, I define myself as taking those risks and Kickstarter is a huge risk for us, maybe we won’t get funded."
For Molyneux, being able to innovate and experiment is key to exploring the boundaries of genres like the god-game and Kickstarter is the perfect competition to the current publisher setup.
“For me Kickstarter is about innovation that is hard to get through the existing structure of the industry. It was almost impossible for me to sign the original Populous up because there was no Kickstarter, we had to go around 12 publishers and most of them said no.”
“You might think that with Godus you could just sign it in a dot, but most publishers said 'Could you possibly consider a role-playing game?'. They see the god-game genre as a genre that doesn’t have as many followers as an RPG. They've got their pie chart, look at it and say “if you did an RPG you'd do better.”
You can support Molyneux, 22 Cans and Godus via its
Kickstarter. Or read the
full interview about Project Godus.