Peter Molyneux may have just monetized trolling

After decades of trying to mke better and better videogames, always more realistic, Molyneux shows that the average human is, in fact satisfied by a Skinner box and will gladly pay for it.

Kronopath• 13 years ago

Do you honestly think the average human being is busy playing Curiosity?

thret• 13 years ago

Overwhelmingly average human beings, yes.

GuiA3• 13 years ago

Re-read my post. I didn't say the average human being is busy playing Curiosity; I said that the average human is fully satisfied interacting with a Skinner box.

mjn• 13 years ago

Cow Clicker is a somewhat similar example: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_cowclicker/all/ It was created as a critique of FarmVille-style Facebook games. You could click a cow every 6 hours for free, or pay money to click more often. And people did!

The Cow Clicker creator also implemented a Cube Clicker to beat Molyneux's game to market: http://www.bogost.com/blog/cube_clicker.shtml

youngerdryas• 13 years ago

A sucker and his money were lucky to get together in the first place.

bochoh• 13 years ago

I wouldn't exactly say that this is monetizing 'trolling'

kevinpet• 13 years ago

I'm also appalled that a gaming site would confuse "trolling" and "griefing".

kcbanner• 13 years ago

Hm?

lmm• 13 years ago

The people paying to add may be simply griefing, but what Peter himself has done certainly qualifies as trolling.

infrec• 13 years ago

This exemplifies that making money and making a good product are two quite distinct things.

vinkelhake• 13 years ago

I'm amazed that people are still buying into his games. If you were to go by Peter's history, it's quite likely that the "life-changingly amazing" thing in the middle of the cube is a message like "Sorry Mario, but the princess is in another cube".

I personally got burned somewhere around Fable and I'm never[0] going to get one of his games again..

[0] except for maybe Godus.. maybe.

yen223• 13 years ago

I don't care what people say, Black and White was an excellent game which was much too far ahead of its time.

Zecc• 13 years ago

[Disclaimer: I don't know B&W 2, I'm basing myself only on the first B&W]

Black and White was a good game which unfortunately was far behind what its originating concept promised to deliver.

ido• 13 years ago

I liked B&W as well.

It also came out 12 years ago.

goldfeld• 13 years ago

Exactly. I got burned by Fable moreso than any other game in my life, so hyped that I was by how he talked about it. In the end it was a very limited and lackluster linear RPG with some The Sims thrown in. Fun for a weekend. But no let down in my life will ever surpass B.C. To this day prehistory is the theme of the dream game I want to make.

kayoone2• 13 years ago

As someone who had paid money to remove cubelets before this was introduced id feel somewhat ripped off.

I also wonder how this game would be doing with similar marketing but without Molyneux' name to it. Imo the golden days of the guy are long gone.

Xcelerate2• 13 years ago

> As someone who had paid money to remove cubelets

As someone who never pays for in-app purchases, I am quite curious why you did this. Did you feel the purchase was worth it?

kencausey• 13 years ago

To quote more fully:

"As someone who had paid money to remove cubelets before this was introduced ID feel somewhat ripped off." Note the emphasized (by me) "ID" or "I'd", aka "I would". This one word changes the entire case of the verb and implies empathizing with a hypothetical victim versus actually being one.

kayoone2• 13 years ago

i am not a native english speaker so i might have made a mistake there, but the other reply explains my point.

mst• 13 years ago

The thing being, you didn't.

The interesting question is whether the people who -did- pay movey to remove cubelets feel ripped off or not.

I have no idea who such people are, though, and suspect I wouldn't understand their motivation even if I did, so I venture no suggestions as to the answer to that question.

aresant• 13 years ago

"players have so far paid to remove nearly 14 million cubelets, while adding an extra 4.7 million."

Wow I almost spit out my tea when reading that while wrongly assuming each block was $0.99

Then I followed the link in page and discovered that the $6.99 point is for 100,000 units.

So figure ~200 of those sold or about $1000 after App Store fees.

I can now sleep tonight.

downandout2• 13 years ago

"...players have so far paid to remove nearly 14 million cubelets, while adding an extra 4.7 million"

Adding 500,000 cubelets costs $10.99, which implies that people have paid ~$103 to add cubelets over the course of 166 days, or around 62 cents per day. Gross revenue from all cubelet sales in either direction is ~$405 or ~$2.43/day. He may have monetized trolling, but it doesn't seem very profitable.

itafroma4• 13 years ago

> Adding 500,000 cubelets costs $10.99, which implies that people have paid ~$103 to add cubelets over the course of 166 days, or around 62 cents per day. Gross revenue from all cubelet sales in either direction is ~$308 or ~$1.85/day.

Your numbers are way off, as is the timescale. The ability to add or remove cubelets is a new feature, released on April 17th. At ~$405.75 to change the cubelet levels using the most economical price ($10.99 for 500k, or $21.98 for 1 million, over 18.46 million cubelets[1]), that's ~$101.44/day.

[1]: "...users have paid to remove 13,780,000 cublets and add another 4,680,000" from http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-19-molyneux-adds-o...

downandout2• 13 years ago

Actually, they are not. The article indicated that the experiment had been going for 166 days (164 days, but it was written two days ago). $10.99/500K=$0.00002198 per cubelet. 0.00002198 X 18.46M total cubelets sold = $405. $405/166 = $2.43/day.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

He needs to add anonymous payments and a method of placing non-destructable (or hard to destroy) blocks.

Some people would pay money to place a giant swastika or similar 4chan style trolling. Others would work hard (or pay) to remove that.

Snoptic• 13 years ago

Title doesn't really make sense. This is just a lottery, with a bit of a PvP angle. Spending more increases odds of winning.

geon• 13 years ago

> Spending more increases odds of winning.

Does it? I was under the impression the winner would be whoever removed the last cube, which would be un-affected by how many cubes users removed earlier.

drivebyacct2• 13 years ago

Can someone reference the post here (or possibly on reddit) that described how technically infeasible this project is to be accurate?

lost-theory• 13 years ago

http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2012/11/12/death-by-million-cubes/

benihana• 13 years ago

I think that in by this point in time, it's a pretty safe rule of thumb to take everything Peter Molyneux says with a very large grain of salt.

cpeterso• 13 years ago

What is the estimated number of cubelets or layers remaining?

Pwnguinz• 13 years ago

It is unknown. However, if you download the game, you can see how many cublets are still remaining on the current layer, as well as how many layers have been removed.

itafroma4• 13 years ago

There were 4,096 total layers; currently 262 layers have been removed with 17,758,801 cubelets left on the current layer. So 3,834 layers and 112,689,867,042 cubelets remain.

The cube age is 166 days, so at the current rate of progress (~148,787,753 cubelets per day), it should take another 758 days to complete. However, the rate has been slowing from over 2 layers/day at the start to just over 1.5 layers/day. Combined with user attrition and this new ability to add/remove layers, it's hard to say when exactly it'll be completed.

danbruc3• 13 years ago

There are only 2048 layers. I used the statistics from [1] at 5:20 from day one.

Layer 1, 66,631,501 cubelets remaining on the current layer and 33,982,651 cubelets destroyed in total. Because it is the first layer it is made up out of 66,631,501 + 66,631,501 = 100,614,152 cubelets. An estimate of the edge length is obtained by dividing by 6 faces and taking the square root and this yields 4,095.0000407. It is a bit counterintuitive - at least for me - but the actual edge length is 4,096. I would have expected that counting the edges twice and the corners trice becomes insignificant for large edge lengths but if you do the math you will see that this approximation has the limit n - 1 as n goes to infinity.

So because every layer adds 2 to the edge length there are 2048 layers. That is bad - there is no central cubelet because the edge length is not odd. Maybe this is the hidden secret. I guess they used 4096 because it simplifies texturing the thing, implementing level of detail or stuff like that, does it? Or they have 8 secrets in there to make it a tiny bit more fair.

One more thing, the number of cubelets on the surface of a cube with edge length n is n^3 - (n - 2)^3 - the whole cube minus the smaller cube under the surface. Plugging in 4096 yields the number obtained from the statistics so we probably made no mistake.

Okay, let's fix the other numbers, too. The cube started with 68,719,476,736 cubelets. I assume the current layer was 263 - the statistics gives the number of layers removed and layer 263 seems to be more consistent with the time of the comment - and there are 23,220,183,736 cubelets in those layers. Subtracting the 17,758,801 cubelets remaining yields 23,202,424,935 cubelets destroyed in 166 days or roughly 139.8 million cubelets per day. There are 45,517,051,801 cubelets remaining and assuming the same rate of destruction this yields roughly 326 days to go.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giEykqDoUCQ

TazeTSchnitzel• 13 years ago

Did he? I'm fairly sure I saw that on the PetetMolydeux parody Twitter account.

corin_• 13 years ago

According to Eurogamer [1] it is announced in the app itself, but yes it was also tweeted by @PeterMolydeux [2] - I guess it's never been easier to parody someone...

[1] http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-19-molyneux-adds-o...

[2] https://twitter.com/PeterMolydeux/status/325281598444556288

bagosm• 13 years ago

I'm very surprised at the gullibility towards the whole project. Who's to say they don't add more cubelets by themselves for free?

tekromancr3• 13 years ago

Holy motherfucking shit. This is not a game, this is something else. This is sick. This is abusive... This feels akin to exploiting a mental vulnerability that exists in a portion of the population to earn money. Its a strange situation where it is legal to do something to a human that is illegal to do to a computer.

JackWebbHeller• 13 years ago

> "Its a strange situation where it is legal to do something to a human that is illegal to do to a computer"

What is illegal to do to a computer, in this case...?

wnight• 13 years ago

I think he means that if you discovered and exploited a bug in a common OS the way farmville manipulated actual minds, you'd be thrown in jail.

mikecane2• 13 years ago

>>>This feels akin to exploiting a mental vulnerability that exists in a portion of the population to earn money

Ermmmm, that is what some advertising and marketing are all about, creating insecurities in people and then selling them the "cure."

gordaco• 13 years ago

That's why I think those are pure evil. I know I'm not alone...

tekromancr3• 13 years ago

At least when you are being advertised you actually get something out of the deal. If I convince someone to voluntarily empty their bank account and give me everything in exchange for nothing, that would make me a shitbag. Or a televangelist, I guess.

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

You should hear him talk about it, grinning from ear to ear. I loved his games as a kid, but now I'll forever regard him as a self-absorbed scumbag.

michaelochurch• 13 years ago

It's hilarious when someone finds two actions that are opposites of each other and collect on both sides from people who want to take part in each.

I had a similar thought. I worked for a truly evil (management-wise; the engineers and PMs are fine) startup in the winter of 2011-12 and I've been debating whether to name-and-shame. The ethical problem I have with it is that, while I could easily kill the company (publicity-wise, but that would be enough) it would be low-level engineers who get fucked and the shitbag managers would probably bounce along fine. That's why I haven't done it. (After embarrassing a less-deserving company whose name starts with G, I'm more hesitant about public whistleblowing.)

However, if I ever end up in financial hardship I can't get out of, I'm going to start a Yes and a No project (maybe on Kickstarter, if they don't mind?) If "Yes" raises more money, then I name the evil startup that inspired my hatred of VC-istan, and out its scumbag executives in excruciating detail (including stuff about their families that I found later on). If "No" wins, then I keep it a secret. (Obviously, the losing side gets back their money.) I'd probably have to preclude the company itself, and its managers, from funding the "No", lest I get an extortion rap.

This could be a brilliant or fucked-up-evil startup idea. People who are cash-strapped and need to raise money take issues in their lives from the mundane ("should I sell my furniture?") to the important ("should I go back to school?") to the extreme ("should I out my scumbag ex-manager?") into the public and set up Yes/No races. On one hand, it would help a lot of people. On the other hand, it'd be hard to set it up so it doesn't become a vehicle for extortion.

jcc80• 13 years ago

Maybe save it for an example in your book? Your blog already has enough great material to establish your place at the forefront of modern philosophy. Now it's just a question of marketing. Kickstarter campaign for your book sounds good. And to those who have down voted Mr. Church I can only say, how dare you.

MostAwesomeDude• 13 years ago

Well played; I read your post while taking a sip and now I can't stop coughing/laughing.

mikecane2• 13 years ago

Now I can't help wondering how many other things this "Get them coming and going" idea could be applied to in games. Is this as unprecedented as they make it out to be in the article?

danbruc3• 13 years ago

I find it odd that the edge length is even.

Peter Molyneux may have just monetized trolling

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