Molyneux: Kickstarter can be destructive

Acclaimed UK developer Peter Molyneux has said that Kickstarting a game too early in its development can have a detrimental effect on the final product.

"What I’ve learned is that doing Kickstarter and Steam Early Access, before you’ve got something which is defined and playable, is a hugely risky undertaking that can be very destructive to the final quality of the game," hetold TechRadar.

I’m not saying I would never do Kickstarter again, but if I was to do Kickstarter again, I would say ‘look, we’ve done half the game, you can download this demo, you can play the game. You know what the game’s going to be, now we’re going to take it from this point to this point.’"

"What doesn’t work for innovative games, in my mind, is to put an idea down and say ‘Here’s the idea, give us the money so we can turn it into a game’. I don’t think that works. Because I think what ends up happening, and what ended up happening with Godus, is that people get a view of what the game is going to be like from what you’ve said here, and that view is quite often different from what the final game is.

"There’s this overwhelming urge to over-promise because it’s such a harsh rule: if you’re one penny short of your target then you don’t get it. And of course in this instance, the behaviour is incredibly destructive, which is ‘Christ, we’ve only got 10 days to go and we’ve got to make 100,000, for f**k’s sake, lets just say anything’."

Godus hit its 450k Kickstarter funding goal with just days to spare and has since release endured a rough ride in the press. Molyneux even apologised for the launch product when the game’s big 2.0 update was released in the spring.