New RPS article is brilliant

Every time we had an interview released last year, he would say the same garbage.  He would claim to be bad at PR.  He would bemoan his horrid reputation.  Then, he would use both as a shield while he made stuff up about what was going on with the project.  I repeatedly called this crap out in the Steam forums because he didn't have to be 22Cans' spokesman.  If he's so bad, have someone else do it.  Heck, I said as much and speculated he prefers videos because he is such a manipulative person in video.  That's where I was given the "he's severely dyslexic" excuse.  A few weeks later, we were having an AMA with him.  The man uses whatever excuse to sidestep criticism and deflect attention to the important facts.

If he was making a character of himself in an rpg, he'd be the the type that took the dyslexic disadvantage and then turned around and tried to convince the GM to let him have illiterate as well.  He might even couple it with a "Hates books" disadvantage as well.  You know, the sort of player that exploits things like "blind" and "afraid of the dark" by negating it with having sonar hearing.

Its fair to say though we do know Fabs has moved over and wasn't on that list. Its therefore possible there are others Peter missed who are working on GODUS.

Yeah, it's a pretty classic dodge.  In testing, we look at the boundary issues of a situation.  It brings up simple questions like this:

Do we know the minimum value for this number?
Do we know the maximum value for this number?
How does the minimum value and the expected amount mesh?
If the minimum isn't met, how is this handled?

PM claims that they couldn't know the minimum.  They put out an expected value but claim that they knew it was below the minimum from past experience.  This is a logical flaw.  In order to make the second judgement, they had to know a general amount for minimum.  Even if it was off, they had a ballpark figure.  Peter tried to play both sides of this in the RPS interview and was called on it, but many didn't pick up on that.

Assuming they didn't know the minimum but they knew the expected amount wasn't going to be sufficient (let's not run in circles trying to figure out how they could come to that possiblity), let's look at their plan for handling the inevitable funding issues.  According to their Kickstarter they had no plan for handling it when it went green.   Kickstarter rules state that a project must have a reasonable expectation of being completed with the funding asked for.  The specific statement (as of the KS site right now) is that "every project needs a plan for creating something and sharing it with the world." According to PM's own statements in the RPS article, he provided backers with, at best, only a small portion of a plan.  He didn't just think he might not have enough funding but knew it.  He didn't tell his backers this problem.  And, most importantly, he knew he was misleading people with both his funding needs and timeline before his Kickstarter went green.  IT IS IRRELEVANT HOW HE HANDLED FUNDING POST KICKSTARTER GREEN DATE.  He was in breach long before that.

Just knowing his history, Konrad brings up another problem with this whole narrative.  When did he start getting paid on Godus?  What was his official status on this project before then?  Was it legal?  Discussing financial concerns gets murky when we start hearing about unpaid, volunteer work being made on the project.  Last I recall hearing, he worked a year on Godus as a volunteer.  How do any of the numbers track when a portion of the people working on it aren't actually draining funds?

So many questions...

Edit:  Oh, and were there any other "volunteer" people working on the project as well?

SamVT lists two interns; Konrad and Pavle. Were both student interns?

Regardless, there were at least two in as much time, so chances are fair that there were potentially a few more in duration.

I think DeNa was already going to be involved from the very beginning. My impression from what PM has said about the Kickstarter in his recent interviews is that they deliberately didn't as for enough to fund the development of Godus, because they knew that they'd never reach their goal that way (and this is probably correct, because 22Cans has chosen to operate like a AAA studio). The Kickstarter will have been supplemented by Peter's own money, probably funding from the other shareholders too and whatever they got from DeNa.

DeNa provides technology for the mobile version. The user accounts system and servers are provided by DeNa, as well as microtransaction processing. We know 22Cans operates without almost any foresight whatsoever, but these are all key technological elements that needed to be in place in order to realise the mobile version, and since we now know mobile F2P was the objective from the beginning, there's no way 22Cans hadn't already planned for this.

Nope, it was always a number of people:

"Peter’s dream was to hand-craft a team of the 22 most talented, passionate and creative individuals with which to make the defining games of his career.

22 Cans create games for the world, and the journey has only just begun."

As for the funding, remember that we aren't talking about a 1 year time frame.  The numbers make more sense when you change it to a 7-9 month period for 22Cans.  All of which drives home just how elaborate the design of this Kickstarter was.  He knew it wouldn't fund the project but reported all evidence to reflect it would at the time.  His whole narrative assumes he had no idea how much it would cost to keep 22Cans running for this project but falls flat because 22Cans wasn't put together for this Kickstarter.  They knew funding challenges from Curiosity.  This is a series of half-truths being used to dodge the reality that he knew what he was doing, chose to warp the truth, and omitted key information to sucker in backers from the start.

"... people have accused him of being a pathological liar given his propensity to make predictions that quite often don't come true he ignores." #fixedit

It's not that they just "don't come true, because reasons", he says things he doesn't really mean - although supposedly he "believes" he means them in the moment, and assumes we'll believe he means it, it's not a stretch to assume that subconsciously he probably knows it's complete bollocks, and doesn't really mean what he's saying; his actions show this is a high probability of being the truth.