Don't believe his lies

Have you read that interview Rock Paper Shotgun did with Peter Molyneux? If not, you should go read it now. And not just because it’s relevant to what I’m about to talk about, but because it’s an absolutely fascinating interview. It’s an interview that starts off with John Walker asking Peter Molyneux “Do you think that you’re a pathological liar?”

I mean, holy shit, that’s something, right?

It’s a tough interview. It was sharp around the edges. But that’s a good thing. Most developer interviews are polite affairs. Even developers that really deserve to have the boot laid in get the soft treatment. Microsoft released the Halo: Master Chief Collection, whose multiplayer (arguably the main draw of the collection) was unplayably broken and the hardest question most games press ask is “when will it be fixed?” It’s press-as-PR bullshit.

Remember back when Dan Hsu laid into Peter Moore about all the issues that plagued the Xbox 360 at launch? Remember how that was greeted? Everyone cheered and welcomed this as a new frontier: the moment when the games press seemed like they could actually be (whisper it) games journalists.

Which brings us to the Molyneux interview. Rather than being heralded as another great moment in games journalism – when a developer who has lied to consumers for years was finally held accountable – the reaction from most of the games industry has been pretty disappointing. The latest episodes of DLC, Idle Thumbs, Gamers With Jobs and Isometric all include some variation on the theme of “poor Peter Molyneux, he didn’t deserve that”¹ (Isometric_ even went so far as to say that the whole thing just demonstrated gamers’ ‘sense of entitlement’). A common thread across all four podcasts is that they described the interview as “unprofessional” for starting by asking Molyneux if he’s a pathological liar.

This has driven me absolutely fucking potty over the last couple of days. I feel like I’m living in bizzaro-world, where up is down and down is up. Peter Molyneux is such a notorious liar that he’s spawned a goddamn internet meme:

(that image was stolen from the Idle Thumbs forum, by the way)

… yet actually saying this to his face, actually confronting him about it is “unprofessional”? I just don’t get it.

Personally, I think that, if anything, the interview didn’t go far enough. I want to know if Molyneux feels any guilt about taking people’s money for Curiosity over the promise over a ’life-changing prize’ (for the record, Eurogamer ran an article about how much the winner’s life has changed. Short answer: not at all). I want to know if he feels any remorse over putting out Curiosity in the first place, since it was nothing more than a shameless cash-grab helping in the race to the bottom of free-to-play games. I want to know if he feels bad about potentially having taken money and press from other potential God games that were on Kickstarter. Games that could potentially have been driven with more passion than he’s shown Godus. And while we’re at it, I want to know if he ever gives a second’s thought to the people for whom Godus was the first game they’ve backed on Kickstarter and they’re now so wary of the process that they’ll probably never back another project on there.

These are just some of the questions I wished John Walker had asked Molyneux.