I didn’t follow everything he’s been doing but I don’t understand the negative sentiment. Populous and Black & White were fantastic games IMO. But these games are old so maybe this view of him as a liar is more recent development.
Also many decades ago now. He went on to make massive promises for the Fable series - and while I enjoyed them, they absolutely did not meet what he had described. Hence his reputation these days of over promising and under delivering
He definitely got worse over time. It’s sad, really. Despite always exaggerating and overpromising he still used to reliably put out good, fun games. I remember Bullfrog used to be a venerable company, the first Fable was a solid game (despite not being what he promised it would be) and Dungeon Keeper was a classic. And yeah, Black & White were great.
One of his first gigs was when a software company mistakenly contacted his business to make a program of sorts, and rather than explaining the situation, he was like “Who? Oh yeah, sure, we are definitely that company you were looking for, we totally know the thing you’re talking about, we’ll do it!”. He was a liar from the very start, it just took some time, and a handful of overhyped (by him) games for people to catch on. If I had to point to an specific event for the decline in his public image, it’d be the Project Milo presentation for the Kinect (just revealed as Project Natal).
Since nobody has mentioned it yet, the other game that ruined his reputation for me is Godus. He funded it with a kickstarter with the promise it would be a successor to the God-Sim genre like Populous. It turned out to have all of the dark patterns of mobile games (time-gating with micro-transactions), but in a PC game.
NGL I was quite sold on the daytime building the town up, nighttime prevent it from being destroyed,
But then it went into customising clothes, food, houses, etc and it just lost me. I don't care about that. I don't want to micro-manage each aspect of my citizens down to the individual clothes/ingredient/brick etc.
I never understood why Molyneux is so big on the idea of customisation - it seems to get in the way of the games grander vision...
The fact I can’t play civ6 without accepting changed terms means I won’t pay for civ 7 or buy any dlc. for a game I play by myself, that I’ve owned since launch, and 2k have removed my ability to play any more is just the fucked thing about modern games
The launch option menu similar to below fulfilled the purpose of the 2k launcher and more. The launcher only served to waste our time. I hope rockstar games will get rid of their launcher too for GTAV.
Idk if this is “a reason” but leaving the launcher running without actually playing the game does count as playtime for steam, which may result in folks not being able to refund it if they don’t like it, and increases overall hours played.
Whether that’s part of why these games have useless launchers, or whether those things actually pan out that way, who knows.
I don’t think that’s part of why they do it. I’m an avid civ 6 fan, and I can say that the launcher is pretty unobstructive. Between launching from steam and launching from the 2k launcher, it takes about a minute. It’s likely to collect data, but honestly the only useful data they’d get is the pc hardware, the length of play, and common mods. 2k probably saw that they weren’t getting sellable data and decided to scrap the idea, honestly it’s probably the only decent thing the company has done in years.
Maybe, but for Civ 6 specifically the launcher came out a few years into the game’s lifespan, so I’m not sure they were doing it for whatever marginal revenue benefit that would be. I’d imagine selling DLC without Steam or whatever storefront getting a cut might be a motivating factor.
That’s just a by-product of how Steam works. Playtime is counted as long as the Play button says “Stop”.
For games without DRM (e.g. KSP), you can launch it from the Steam install folder without Steam running. Everything works perfectly but your playtime won’t be counted for the same reason.
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