From console to mobile: Game designer Peter Molyneux’s journey to reinvention (interview)

LONDON — You can’t find a more seasoned elder statesman of game development than Peter Molyneux. During a decades-long career, he has created monumental works such as Black & White and Populous. Yet Molyneux admits that he was surprised by the challenges in making the leap from console games (like Fable) to mobile games. And that experience has forced him to reinvention himself and relearn how to make games in the modern era.

It started in 2012 when his startup 22cans in Guildford, England, raised $881,571 in a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to build Godus, a new “god game” for the touch-screen interface. Molyneux had to learn how to craft a free-to-play game that monetized well yet didn’t alienate players with aggressive marketing tactics.

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Godus finally debuted just before the holiday season in 2014. Molyneux found to his dismay that players raced through content in a matter of days when he expected them to take weeks. That meant the team had to accelerate its schedule for creating new content. Over time, the team created 35 updates for Godus. The result has been “tens of millions of dollars” in revenue, Molyneux said.

22cans now has two teams, one with 22 people and another with six. And Molyneux has started making a new game, which he is keeping under wraps. We caught up with Molyneux on a recent visit to London. We met at the Playhubs game accelerator at Somerset House in central London. We talked with him about his journey, the publishing of Godus, the United Kingdom’s game industry, and his cautionary view of virtual reality and augmented reality as envisioned by the Facebook Oculus Rift and Microsoft’s HoloLens projects.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

GamesBeat: How are you doing lately?

Peter Molyneux: I’m good. It’s an incredible world to reinvent yourself in. That’s what my objective was, to reinvent myself from a console designer to starting a new business and embracing multiplatform, relearning the skills necessary to make successful games. It’s been an amazing journey.

I went with the intention of embracing things like Kickstarter and Steam Early Access and releasing on mobile, all in the end to learn this new world. If you don’t think of yourself as being someone who needs to go back to school, needs to reinvent yourself, then you’re not able to do the thing you’re passionate about. That’s to create and invent and innovate.

We did a Kickstarter game and released it, Godus. That was enormously successful. It’s had 190,000 five-star reviews, No. 1 in 54 countries, featured multiple times, released in Asia, and doing amazingly well. But what that showed me was it highlighted the mistakes I made. They’re schoolboy mistakes, but I accepted I was going to make mistakes.

GamesBeat: Did you give a speech on that? It almost sounded like a confessional.

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Molyneux: Well, I’m always a bit harsh about the things I’m doing. First of all, I don’t think there is any world expert in free-to-play, all these new monetization techniques. Second, if you’re going to take something like free-to-play — if you think it’s been defined and cast in stone, it hasn’t. It has to evolve just like anything evolves.

Yes, I could have released Godus — if I had more experience I’m sure I would have done the monetization in a very different way. It still made tens of millions of dollars. I’m not complaining at all. But the opportunity was there to make a lot more.

GamesBeat: It’s a good return given the size of your team.

Molyneux: It’s been downloaded tens of millions of times. It goes on and continues to make tens of thousands of dollars a day across all its formats. That’s very exciting. But the real question for free-to-play and myself is, first, is it delightful enough? Do our consumers enjoy spending money? That sounds an insane thing to say, but it is something — if you feel incentivized to spend money, then you’re much more likely to spend it. When you do, do you feel good about what you spent it on? That’s the fundamental point where I failed. I could have put a lot more harsh gates in there and possibly could have made more money, or it could have been more delightful and people would have wanted to spend more money.

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GamesBeat: How did you structure the monetization?

Molyneux: I always said, at the start of 22cans, that we would experiment. We experimented with different monetization techniques in Godus. We had some events that you could go on which were time-limited. That didn’t work terribly well. When events are bolted on to a game and not a central part of the game, they distract people from the main flow. We had the opportunity to buy one-off items, gifts for your little people. That worked a lot better. We had some of the standard approaches of monetization. If you ran out of a resource you could top that resource up. We played around with wait times.

Anyway, we did all this not in a destructive way, but hopefully in an additive way. We wanted to learn how to approach monetization in the next title. That’s what we’re working on at the moment, something called Betrayal. It’s a completely different approach to monetization. It would be foolish of me to tell you what it is without being able to show it to you, but the key point for me is, if you’re going to redefine what monetization is, if you’re going to make people excited about spending money, there are some very important things to do.

One of those things is to find a way to group people together. If I spend money on something and the people I’m with get a benefit from that thing, you’re more likely to spend money. You’re not spending it just for yourself, but for the good of all. If I can make spending money feel natural — this is one of the problems I have with things like gems. They feel an abstract away, and you’re already abstracted away once from your money. If I can make spending money feel like a natural part of the game mechanic, that’s exciting — if I can make sure that people feel like they’re investing, rather than just spending.

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Lastly, and perhaps most mystically, is there an invisible way to encourage people to spend more money? We’re working on that now. It’s a long road to market these days.

GamesBeat: Do you have two teams now?

Molyneux: Yes, exactly. One of the benefits of Kickstarter is that you have thousands of people who can help you. The designer on Godus now is one of the backers from the Kickstarter campaign. We brought him in and he’s now running that team and doing a fantastic job. The main part of 22cans is just focusing on Betrayal and trying to use — it’s not just mobile, but trying to think of innovative ways of interacting with a game.

GamesBeat: In Asia, an interesting thing might be that you have very different tastes as far as what they like about monetization. They don’t seem to mind some of the harsher methods.

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Molyneux: No, it’s really interesting, isn’t it?

GamesBeat: The thing I hear about the Chinese is that you can log back in and someone’s burnt down your village and you have to build it all over again.

Molyneux: It’s fascinating to be able to experiment with different territories. It’s somewhat frustrating as well, though. There’s always this delay on iOS between submitting a release and — the ability to have different versions in different territories, you can’t actually do that, other than via some server stuff.

Anyway, that’s where I stand. I’m obsessively creating this new title, which I’m incredibly excited about. It’s very brave in terms of its simplicity, but it’s doing things with game mechanics that perhaps you’ve never seen before. Godus is chugging away. It’s a fantastically exciting time.

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GamesBeat: How many people do you have now?

Molyneux: 22cans is 22. The other arm of 22cans, called 14 Steps, at the moment there’s only six. That will keep going for as long as it can. Again, this is a fascinating world. You have a graph. You can see your costs here and your development here and very accurately start predicting how long things are going to go on.

GamesBeat: How many updates have you done for Godus?

Molyneux: About 35 total across all formats. That’s including Steam, of course.

GamesBeat: Are you approaching platforms the same way with the new game?

Molyneux: With Godus, we did Steam Early Access, Android, and iOS. It was quite a rocky road going through all those hoops. Steam is probably the easiest to release on. We’ll probably do the same. There are differences between the PC and mobile, but it’s a fascinating design challenge, to come up with something that can be played on all those devices and try to release simultaneously. It is a very back-breaking task for a small team like ours to release on all those formats. We’re always releasing something, every week.

GamesBeat: Did you get much feedback from the confessional talk?

Molyneux: Yes, I did. The feedback was — people realize that what I was saying was true. You can see very tangibly in Godus the things we’ve played around with. I think people were worried I was going to walk away from Godus and call it a day. I had to placate a lot of that stuff.

Some of the other free-to-play people I know agreed with some of the points I made. Talking to other developers and smaller publishers, I think there’s a nervousness about free-to-play now that hasn’t been there before. Just a year ago, everyone said, “You should go free-to-play! You’ll make a fortune!” Now it’s, “Well, we’re not sure about free-to-play.” The problem is, if we all stick to the same model – having an abstract currency with consumers buying that and consuming it, or relying on things like events that are time-limited and only 10 percent of the players get the big reward, or some very simple barrier – if we rely on those main three segments of free-to-play, consumers are already very much picking up something and saying, “I know how that works. I’m not playing that anymore.”

We need to be a lot more sophisticated. Bizarrely, a lot of the innovations in free-to-play are coming out of the PC space rather than the mobile space. The PC space doesn’t have the worrying amount of data we get on mobile. The reason I say this, if you look at the charts, there’s top-grossing. That doesn’t appear to move. That makes people who are thinking about free-to-play very nervous. Two years ago you would have said that top 10 would be completely different now, but it’s not.

When I spoke to other developers and they referenced my talk, there was a lot of, “Yes, we saw that. We’re not making as much money as we thought we would.”

GamesBeat: Lots of winners and losers out there.

Molyneux: Lots of winners and losers, yes. If you spoke to VCs especially, I would be surprised if they were too excited about free-to-play compared to a couple of years ago.

GamesBeat: Some very well-funded companies have announced and not gone anywhere. They’ve launched and fallen apart. Even the venture-backed guys can’t guarantee results.

Molyneux: The problem is this middle ground. The concept of consumers enjoying something before they pay money for it is a great concept. That does get it in front of a lot more people. But that has to evolve to a new level. I don’t think, if I look at what’s happened in the most popular games, there’s that innovation coming through. It’s all different shades of the same color. What it needs is a new approach.

That was my thinking about this new title. If I’m going to do free-to-play, I can’t rely on any of the foundation stones other people rely upon, even though that’s hugely risky, if I’m going to have a breakthrough success. There are these big things I started writing on the wall. If I was going to pay any money, these would be the things that would help me do it.

GamesBeat: How do you feel about the English gaming industry? It has a very interesting concentration here.

Molyneux: It does. I’m a mentor to quite a few little businesses. In Guildford there’s an enormous — there must be about 20 little development teams. In fact, I’m trying to — no one has ever brought all those people together, even though Guildford is probably two or three miles across. We’ve never met. That would be a fascinating thing to push. There’s myself and Hello Games and Media Molecule and Lionhead and Sony and Electronic Arts, and we’ve never come together.

As far as Britain is concerned, Britain is and always has been a nation of shopkeepers. The equivalent now is indie developers. These shopkeepers spring up and fall down and spring up again. In a bizarre way, because VC investment isn’t as mature or as easy to get as it is in San Francisco, it means that these companies aren’t burning through millions. A lot of these smaller innovational companies are in tiny bedrooms, like Hello Games.

My feeling at the moment is that the days of the true indie spirit that Microsoft and Sony got worried about, it’s fading now. A few of those indies will be bought out by publishers. A lot of them will wither and die as small companies do. Some of them, very few, will go on to build successful companies.

GamesBeat: Have you felt any interest in some of these new things that are starting to emerge, like virtual reality or augmented reality?

Molyneux: I saw a very early prototype of Microsoft’s project three years ago. It’s a magical experience, putting this thing on your head. When I tried it, it was huge and had loads of wires, so it was great to see it in a small form factor.

There is something I always get pissed off about with those things. It’s when hardware manufacturers say this absolutely rubbish line – “We can’t wait to see what developers do with it.” That’s like saying, “Right, we’ve done it now, over to you.” I don’t think that works. Any new piece of tech, whether it be Oculus Rift or something like Kinect, needs almost twice the investment in a real defining application than it has had in the hardware. Maybe the development community will be thrown this stuff and we’ll spend a few hours playing around with it, but I’d love to see a defining experience.

The defining experience for augmented reality is a challenge. I spent six months trying to get my head around what a defining experience for AR would be like. I found it quite challenging to think of a game, per se. It was easier to think of AR in terms of assisting in things like hobbies. You saw in their concept video, repairing the sink. It’s easy to think of that. Actual games are quite challenging, because it’s so completely different than standing in front of a screen. There are more reasons than just the fact that it’s projected into the world. It’s going to be very challenging to come up with a signature application that defines that experience.

At the moment, without that, it’s like having an iPhone and Apple saying, “Well, it’s got touch, now we can’t wait to see what developers do with it.” They didn’t do that. They gave us a wonderful experience out of the box, and that’s what this thing has to have, a wonderful experience.

GamesBeat: It’s easier for you to wrap your head around mobile as your platform?

Molyneux: I still think touch has a long way to go. I love the fact that everybody’s got one of these things in their pocket. I still feel that the defining game for this platform has yet to be created. At the moment you could say it’s Clash of Clans or Candy Crush, but I’d be disappointed if that was the end of the journey for entertainment on these devices. You need to think out of the box.

There’s a lot of money to be made in taking existing genres and adapting them for this device, but to me I find it fascinating to think about what new genres are sympathetic with this device. It’s not just the device that excites me. It’s the fact that it’s with you all the time. For a game designer that’s the thing. It’s part of your DNA now, almost. The sorrowful look on your face when you said, “My phone’s not working,” that proves the point.

I love the idea that an experience should be able to adapt itself. If you’re waiting for a meeting or you have a five-hour flight, you should have an experience that allows you to play on one of these things.

GamesBeat: It’s good to hear that Godus earned you another shot at something bigger.

Molyneux: It was a fantastic bridge. It was a hell of a roller-coaster ride. I’ve never published a game before. Although we had help from DeNA, it was us that did the submissions. We did all the donkey work. Previously, someone like me used to send the code off and go on holiday. That’s completely different now, and it’s been a really energizing experience to go through that.

What I have now — and I haven’t done anything with it yet because I was waiting for the final territory release in Godus – we’ve filmed the entirety of the making of Godus. One of the people claims he can edit these hundreds of hours down into 15 minutes. I don’t know what he’s going to do, but there were some wonderful moments. If I had that playing along with the graphs and charts, I could say, “This game feature did this at this point to this curve and it meant that we were earning this and then we were earning that.”

I’ve always tried to be open about these kinds of things because I don’t see any point in not being open. Anyone can go on App Annie and see how successful you are.

GamesBeat: I don’t see enough people doing these kinds of things that benefit the whole industry. Everyone has the mindset where they say, “I’m a private company. This is my hard-earned data. I’m not going to share it.”

Molyneux: Those days are gone. If you have a business account on App Annie, you can see everyone’s data. My problem is, it’s just part of the picture. That means you can quite often get the wrong end of the stick completely. You can make assumptions about — this is my worry about free-to-play. “Oh, the top 10 is always the same and nobody’s making any money. Those paid-advert games just made a million pounds in a week, so we ought to do advertising games.” It’s incomplete knowledge.

If more people did a bit more in-depth honest post-mortem work on their approach from the start — a talk I’d love to give is, “Okay, here were my assumptions at the start. This is what I implemented. These are the ones that were wrong. Here’s why they were wrong. These are the ones that were right and this is the sort of thing I’m going to build.”

The big issue that faces us all is user acquisition. The fact is that paid user acquisition just doesn’t work. There’s this gulf, this hole developing, where only a very few people can pour money into it because it’s so expensive. With everything in business there is a vacuum. It’s always going to be filled by something. There’s an opportunity for this new breed of publishers. I don’t know what it looks like, but I can feel it about to happen.

GamesBeat: One company, I found it very odd that they said paid user acquisition costs had become so high, and the results were so bad, that they had decided to do TV ads instead. They were at the point where they had some decent traction, so they could afford it.

Molyneux: There’s a hill that, if you get high enough up, you can make it work. User acquisition by television is comparatively competitive. I’ll give you an example. I was talking to one developer. This was unbelievable. He was absolutely serious about this strategy, which was that he had a game with virtual currency, and he was going to add a new tier of virtual currency for the maximum amount you can spend, which I think is $499 or something. He was going to employ people to go on the app store and buy stuff every day. That would push him up the top-grossing charts. He said, “Well, I get 70 percent of the money back, and compared to the cost of user acquisition, if it gets me in the top 10 grossing, it’s worth doing it.” That’s insane. It has to change.

There is a solution to user acquisition already. It’s very easy and very simple. It’s the kings of the internet, the YouTubers. They’re completely unregulated at the moment. You just know that if some of these YouTubers feature your app, it’ll be a success. Many developers I know are specifically making apps so they’ll be featured by YouTubers. The only way you do that is to make an app that makes that YouTuber laugh, or makes him scared. Someone has to turn that into a business.