How to NOT PR:

No worries, the discussion had pretty much it's course.

So...whose job* was it to change the store pages? They probably forgot to tell their replacements what to do, or the replacements just didn't care:

(As noted by Praesmeodymium here: steamcommunity.com/app/232810/discussions/0/618460171329953956/ -archiving in case 22cans' "damage control" tries for demolition instead of stopping their ship from taking on even more water...)

www.gamestop.com/pc/games/godus/113571



* - 22cans cares enough for the money to arrange a sale...but doesn't give a damn about being honest about their products to obtain that money (so repeat business is questionable at best for what is considered word-of-mouth suicide).  I'm wondering if this is a policy that goes up all the way up to the management, or if Peter really is out of touch with how his team is now "Molyneuxing" him like he often did to his own team in the past.

This is the internet equivalent of having cobwebs covering the interior of your store's windows while cracked paint peels off onto the walk, and it's shameful.

When the matter is brought to the company's attention, they have ample opportunity to change it, and it is shown that they just don't care. So if that thread goes missing from the Steam forums, while the GameStop store remains unchanged for a time afterward, then it is clearly false advertising.

It's not like Copy+Paste is strenuous or time-consuming work compared to actual game development.



Along with the store contents that are an outright fabrication of history, especially the load of lies in the Early Access box.

“GODUS is a unique game that we hope will grow to be truly special. We've thoroughly enjoyed developing our dream game alongside the community and are continuing to refine the game based on the feedback of the players. We warn you that there are still bugs and incomplete features - this is the nature of the journey we are on. You may wish to wait for the finished game, but we have much content still to discover and improve as the game continues development. We do hope you’ll help with this. If you do, you are part of our development team. We look forward to receiving your feedback.”

They're selling this as a Beta while it remains largely feature-incomplete. That's an alpha, or at best where the game still is at now, a tech demo - which Steam poo-poo'd upon the releasing of such as "Early Access".

So...either they don't know what "Beta" means in terms of software development, something that DigitalJam also noted directly to them ( steamcommunity.com/app/232810/discussions/0/618459405723860235/#c618459931319730512 ), or just don't care as they lie to their paying customers about the state of the game, something that is echoed through the GameStop page they haven't updated in a long time (and I don't recall the game having multiplayer as of last August when this was archived): web.archive.org/web/20140823064339/http://www.gamestop.com/pc/games/godus/113571



Keep in mind that they wouldn't say what actually made this a "PC title" (with a dangled carrot) until AFTER the sale ended. Two days after, though others and I have asked this previously, gets the response: steamcommunity.com/app/232810/discussions/0/618458030685440308/#c618459405707248580

Only after the two week Steam sale dump did the question get answered, along with all those who just got the game receiving bad news and questionable direction of the game.

Then Aynen in another thread, who says there are promising things because of what he's seen at 22cans, and probably knows about the whole "God of Gods" thing by now, somehow comes up with this:

steamcommunity.com/app/232810/discussions/0/618459405723860235/#c618459931321565925

"Mandrake, keep in mind that it's simply not possible to copy everything you do on PC onto mobile, since mobile runs out of memory a lot quicker. Also, the mobile audience may simply not be that interested in combat. It can even ruin what they hope to get out of the game. Also, realtime combat and the relative slowness of touch controls may not mix well. Plenty of reason to make the two versions different."

So much for the Steam store:

"Our development proceeds through sprints that may have differing platform focuses. As such, much of the gameplay available to you in v2.2 is the result of a recent mobile-focused sprint and we intend to progress to a PC-focused sprint within the coming months. Please take this into consideration, as while adjustments will continue to be made to the PC platform to account for the game's differing payment model (buy-to-play on PC & free-to-play on mobile), some areas of balance and design may retain certain elements of the mobile version for the time being."

So much for that whole "God of Gods" thing and routinely trying to forget Bryan Henderson as the ultimate personal devtroll...

22cans' PR theme song is obviously Yakety Sax as they run a Benny Hill routine. (Peter's Apology Mode's is Sad Trombone.)

So, according to the dates, that meant that 22cans INTENTIONALLY PUT A FALSE DESCRIPTION INTO THE GAMESTOP STORE.
(Either that or GameStop is blinkered and displaying the info for a completely different game, or is likely using a description provided from elsewhere and nobody has bothered to issue a correction wherever this game is sold to prevent poor customer reception.  Anyhow, in any case 22cans really is responsible for minding how the product they publish is being sold, especially for PR reasons.)

This page was archived on 23 Aug 14, well after multiplayer had been removed - but there's more!

www.macgamestore.com/product/3067/GODUS/  Same description and a sale price.

Oh, and here's the epic sale advert on Steam (which was also copied around) right before the dick punch of having multiplayer removed:
store.steampowered.com/news/12188/






I loved the old road map...which proceeded to go nowhere, fast.

The lack of a design document was even more obvious, with that roadmap possibly serving as the entirety of their documentation.



I really doubt there was any design document or plan other than "make shit up as we go along, the press is eating this up" because it looked to be a promising venture at the start, with Clickbait being excusable because it WAS what a new small developer should do - a small project that helps establish and refine the development process of the studio, puts proof of work out there for their audience to see, and could be used as promotion for their next game(s).

If done properly.

• 22cans went into a token bit of effort, so that they supposedly even had multiplayer "working" for the Kickstarter campaign:
  
  www.22cans.com/first-godus-multiplayer-game/
  
  (Copied from the original Kickstarter post here.)
• This was then used as a pitch to be picked up by a mobile publisher, DeNA.
• After that, they progressively turned the original pantomime snake-oil sales show they offered earlier into a "god game" Clone of Clans, proving that the money from the publisher was having a heavier influence upon the design of the game.
• Then failed spectacularly to "hate that design" while practically cloning the same design themselves. Pay out a few quid to mine out those rocks sculpt that land or wait...in a single-player game. Pardon me as I fail to be hooked. If it weren't for addictive personalities on the mobile (which Peter strangely crows about), I'm sure this game would have seen 22cans even further into the red.
• As such, it's now a bad mobile port with some editing abilities on PC, but otherwise has no hope through a development team so understaffed that even the newbies Peter Molyneux hopes to hire exploit could see the writing on the wall.
• But 22cans' excuse is that they can't really do that is because after their The Trail "sprint" of some developers running clean from the title, they are now on a "combat sprint" and after that will be the "multiplayer sprint" to be followed up by the "no fecking clue sprint".

Gee, with planning like that...hold on while I open up my wallet for your game. (Cue laugh track.)

Sounds like it was just simply more of that "iterative design" to make Clickbait 2: Sculptic Bog-a-loo (God of Gods not included.)



VALVe themselves might soon be held liable for this as the publisher selling these products with a very questionable customer service policy.

Especially when it appears that core features just aren't there, regardless of whatever caveats they want to hide behind - doing so looks even more assholish to the customers and regulating authorities (along with those who are there to specifically investigate fraud).

There is also an ironic (re)intro thread of some interest: steamcommunity.com/app/232810/discussions/0/617328329158084673/ (Archived.)



Which 22cans are now piddling around on just combat when they have a f***-it list detailed in this thread that begs the question of which decade Goad Us will ever be finished or a proper game, and why this game is a questionable piece of Early Access: steamcommunity.com/app/232810/discussions/0/620712364019378827/ (Again, archived.)

Lol that too.

What he said. First of all I might be wrong but I'm pretty sure they haven't had tens of millions of dollars, a 22+ member team and industry legend leading them. They are a genuine indie who made a very off beat game that shouldn't have been a success.

As you say mandrake the game has been good to play for years. I started playing it a couple of years ago I think and even trying to get to orbit was incredibly challenging fun and I learned stuff. It is offensive to compare the two games as KSP represents all that is good with early access and GODUS represents all that's wrong with it.

Where GODUS has no interesting challenge, KSP has insane interesting challenges.

If you want to shut them up then you need to provide proof. I'm not saying you're mistaken but you know

I didn't follow the development of Kerbel Space Program, but i don't think they took 3/4 of the whole team and started developing another game whilst in the middle of development of KSP. I think that's the most obvious difference between those two games. Most of us are aware of the time it takes to develop a pc game (except Peter Molyneux and his Guildford Gang - as he mentioned more than once). So it's absolutly bullshit to compare Godus with KSP (or most, if not all, successful SEA games - and many of the not so successful games. And i am not talking about financial success).

Well...I gave a bit of time for retraction, so here goes.

While speaking on behalf of the company, Muir has done several things completely wrong.

First of all was trying to take a shot at their publisher right on the publisher's hosting.  Brilliant as ever.

Second was having very little hesitation about making stupid comments in regards to everyone who reported about this.  As you could probably guess, there's a lot of them, just Google "Early Access rule changes" and count the sites that remarkably don't have any corrections upon them - which would in itself have been an article for any of the competition.

The matter was fairly obvious, as VALVe didn't say anything counter or really have to explain anything, and it was widely reported to the point it would have been impossible for them to miss.  They initially tried to keep those rules under wraps, because some Early Access developers have been an embarrassment enough that they have forced VALVe to make corrections to their own programs (see:  Bethesda and VALVe having fun now for a hint of the fun that usually goes around some questionable Early Access games), and it was obviously leaked out by a developer.  Not exactly something you would want out in public or regularly posted because it is meant to correct your problem children.

Muir uses "evidence" that shows that he hasn't really looked into this at all to be this unaware of a major change to the program they are supposedly participating, instead trying to pit two article quotes at odds while obviously not having read the articles to understand the least bit of context - one of those quotes was a paraphrasing.






STAHP.

For reference, here is a pastebin of the rules, along with where 22cans may find them.  Since they are taking part of the Early Access program while trying to proclaim the...above...they might want to go have a look (along with all of the store pages that still mention multiplayer).

Yes, Muir, make excuses all you want about the price - the description is just yet another part, considering Godus has been misrepresented around where it is sold (which would be "off-topic" to discuss in a topic about the price and how else the game is sold, by the questionable whitewashing forum sorting of theirs that is quite obvious if someone were to look and see company discussion topics being hidden under "off-topic").

Since 22cans doesn't seem concerned about that...maybe VALVe will.
(You would have thought that they would have had a think after people started to collect up evidence threads before, but they apparently took the Feb media explosion as a good thing and want more.)