Current Status of Godus and 22cans

Unfortunately I doubt you'd get much more of an official response here than you did from Dave on the Steam forums. All they've really given community to go off of recently is speculation and vague non-statements... which, for a crowd-funded, Kickstarted, and SEA game is just.... /sigh so unabashedly silly. Even their own ex-employees have called their statements spinny, thus I doubt we'll get any straight answers until they actually have something concretely positive to say. Or they Spacebase it... which I'm sure will come with it's own spinny spintacular spinnerific spinnery.

I think Gmr and others have tried to piece together an unofficial history, not sure if it entails recent events yet.

Basically it's pretty much like this. At the end of 2014 Matthew Allen and Monkeythumbz left 22Cans. Since then mrdrpink has taken over as community manager. Around the same time most of the staff at 22cans was put on some fancy new project of Peter Molyneux presumably called The Trail. A handful of developers were left to work on godus. Raspofabs was put on The Trail but fought to be put back on godus, which he was. But then he left for better pastures. @jackat22cans has left 22cans to form his own business. FuriousMoo (Konrad) has taken over as lead designer on godus since about 6 months ago. He has been working on combat features. Community relations are pretty much down the drain from what they were when George and Matthew were around and even at that time we didn't get all that much information really but at least we felt like we were somewhat involved. There is currently no indication of if and when an update to godus will be released featuring the new combat aspects.

Did I forget anything guys?

Here is GMR's overview.

godus.boards.net/thread/770/overview-development-far

Basically they are working on combat now and probably for the next 2-4 months. Once that's done they say they'll look at multiplayer.

The trick is they haven't committed to anything and that includes peters promises so do expect Jupiter from multiplayer.

They have two programmers on the team who are both very junior. The rest is production, Q&A, community management and production (I read project management and support). That's a small team and its moving slowly.

We don't know what will happen but Moo basically said when the godus income stream stops the game development stops.

It's worth searching all of furious moo's posts and reading them as they give you the best understanding of what is actually happening even though they all are from pre February.

That's not quite correct. They (Kyreal) say that the combat and eventual multiplayer implementation will break new ground first on the PC and that there is no commitment to rolling these out on mobile. However many of the community are suspicious of these statements since development has been heavily mobile focused since early 2014. The proof will be in the pudding I guess.

The development team does need to maintain mobile while developing the new PC version so it's not accurate to say the two coders they have are working exclusively on PC. They also have to work on mobile bugs, new voyages, seasonal events and any other mobile bollocks that production prioritises.

It is very very difficult to know when combat will hit PC as a main branch release because 22cans have not to my knowledges estimated a date.

Many of us are also concerned about how combat will be integrated into everything else. We asked moo about this extensively back when he first suggested it and he always avoided those points.

I wonder if when PM release the trail if he'll drop Godus like a hot potato. All he is doing with additional IP is spreading the company thinner. What happen when the Trail goes into support mode, they'll all move to another IP and leave another 4 interns to run that?

From how it looks and sounds, and from Peter's own actions, he's already dropped Godus like a hot potato and ran from it.

He now has what are nearly 4 interns on Godus for its post-release support phase (except for Martin, he seems experienced), possibly adding some more fluff in a cursory manner (such as the Eggquinauseous pastel puke land), but for all practical purposes nothing is evidently being done upon Godus anymore except for some token activity that has yet to see the light of actual release - Combat still has yet to be merged into a publish build and may linger indefinitely in an opt-in dev build.

So that might just mean that the Godus dev team has been there looking pretty for publicity's sake, kind of like them giving Fabs some time to work on Godus to dangle "Fabs' Secret Project" but it might not ever see the light of day - a tease, but nothing substantial really offered. Remember, according to the excuses they can only do Combat during Combat Sprint.

Yet Peter daren't call Godus finished because then it would definitely be his ass in the fire and Extra Fun Time in the media, with even more fun than before with all the articles about its Spacebasing.

Anyone remember Annah? The supposed new artist for Godus? Either still a contractor or a non-entity there at 22cans, as she's not even listed in the main roster, despite again having a portrait that appears to only be used for her Twitter account.

Fun thing, that.  Usually after the media steps in, some actually try to do a little bit better.

22cans has apparently, and naively, thought that the worst was over.

Just wait until the timeframe Peter gave The Guardian runs out and 22cans has almost nothing to show for it, at least nowhere near his claims.  You would have thought that Peter would have put MORE effort onto trying to get Godus done instead of putting LESS developers to have even LESS happen than the great change of the Steam Early Access version turning into a mobile port.  You would also be sane if you thought that such a time, when the media and everyone's eyes were upon you, to not look like you're intentionally fucking up as further insult towards everybody.

But that's okay, the more they do this kind of thing over time, the more it really adds up.  22cans had ample opportunity to try to redeem themselves, and have instead been doing the opposite spectacularly.  It will do little for them but disillusion even those who were still faithful, until only those posting stories about "Don't be mean to Peter!" trolling for their own clicks will have anything remotely nice to say.

It is almost the anniversary of their human publicity cardboard cutout receiving his non-prize of Peter bouncing off to another game while leaving "God of Gods" in perpetual limbo like the asinine teasing 22cans does on a routine basis upon their Steam forums but doesn't give a damn to really interact with their community except to abuse and defame them.

So I figure that anyone looking for any reason to investigate 22cans - any reason at all - I might as well be nice enough to hand all that info to them on a silver platter.

Just wait until something happens.  Patience, though you don't have to really do anything as 22cans does it to themselves upon the Steam forums and elsewhere.  It is also being done by the absurdly-small development team that was shown, the state of the game really going nowhere fast, and by Peter's own words that Godus was fully released. 

Guess what happens when 22cans decides to say anything about their next game.  Who are they going to go to to hype that, hmm?

Something to think about - and watch for.  Then it will be time to watch from the bunkers as the mushroom cloud of what used to be 22cans unfurls.  

So there are many possibilities for the media wildfire to resume, and I'm almost to the point of taking bets on what sparks it all off.  

www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/peter-molyneux-game-designer-interview-godus

“My hope is that in six to nine months time, people start to finally see the game they really did pledge for. That will be two to three years into development but that’s kind of what it takes when you do an original game. I wish it didn’t. Up until mid January, every single moment of this company was dedicated to Godus.”

Roughly July-October.

When people see that 22cans didn't care to do that, and instead went counter by putting Godus into spin-cycle of going nowhere while they claimed that it was in full development and most of 22cans went to another title (and Fabs had to plead his way back onto the Godus team before he left), what do you think the reaction will be?

I'm of two minds on that. I hope (but doubt) it will actually flesh out to a great game. However, after Fabs' latest musings... i doubt it will happen.

If they simply slap a "finished, Ultra Omega Release" tag on some really lame combat/multiplayer and shove it out the door... I will definitely be pursuing a refund on both KS and Steam (I backed it on KS, my husband picked it up on SEA, in hopes of playing multiplayer together, ironically enough).