Peter Molyneux and his team at indie developer 22Cans have not been having a good week. It started on Monday, when Rock Paper Shotgun published a report highlighting the fact that Kickstarter backers are still waiting for a promised PC version of god-game Godus, nearly two years after the game exceeded £500,000 in funding. Though the Kickstarter pitch promised development would take "seven to nine months," backers are still stuck with a buggy "early access" PC version that is missing key features like combat, a "hubworld," and multiplayer support (a mobile version of Godus launched last year with the help of a third-party publisher).
Despite this, recent reports suggest that 22Cans was planning to shrink the Godus development team in favor of a newly announced mobile project, The Trial. As one frustrated new 22Cans developer put it on the game's message boards, "to be brutally candid and realistic I simply can't see us delivering all the features promised on the Kickstarter page, a lot of the multiplayer stuff is looking seriously shaky right now especially the persistent stuff like hubworld." Molyneux and his team took to YouTube to reassure backers, and the public at large, of the game's continued development.
The bad news continued on Wednesday, when Eurogamer published a fascinating piece about Bryan Henderson, who had won the opportunity to share in the revenues from Godus in exchange for serving as the game's first "God of Gods." After some initial enthusiasm on both sides, contact between Henderson and 22Cans fell away, and the promised revenue share and "God of Gods" functionality are still pending more than 18 months later. In response to Eurogamer's article, Molyneux said he "totally and absolutely and categorically apologize[s]" to Henderson for not living up to his promises.