Peter Molyneux, former idolized developer turned crybaby

So Peter Molyneux managed to create this miniature contraversy when he stated that the "PC gaming industry was in tatters" or more specifically:

"If you look at the gamer market on PC, I'll be quite honest with you, it's in tatters. There aren't that many releases on PC. There are some high points like Crysis and what Blizzard is doing, but other than that you are restricted to The Sims and World of Warcraft, they seem to be dominating the PC side."

To which the president of the PC gaming alliance responded:

"We respect Peter Molyneux as one of the legends in the industry, but we think he is way off-base with his assessment of the PC gaming industry.

In fact, the PC Gaming Alliance just released the findings of our Horizons research report in August and it shows that the industry is stronger than ever. An industry with 10.7 billion in revenue during 2007 is hardly in tatters.

Beyond the financial aspect of this, the PC is still the world's leading platform for gaming. There are plenty of AAA titles like Conan, Warhammer Online and Spore, as well as smaller games that appeal to people beyond the console audience. And even though there are many AAA titles in the pipeline for PC, the success of an industry can't be measured in AAA titles alone."

My take on this? Sales of Peter Molyneux's games are not low because of the Sims or WOW, they are low because his games quite honestly suck.

For those of you who have never heard of him, Peter made his career off of 3 very innovative titles. Those would be populous, dungeon keeper, and syndicate. However after he sold off Bullfrog to create Lionhead studious, his games went sharply downhill. First was Black and White, what was to be a next generation Populous that featured intelligent "pets" that could be trained to carry out your will, along with a gesture recognition technology that was designed to eliminate icons. Unfortunately, this game basically turned into a semi functioning group of features that did not work to well together. Following this was Fable, a 3rd person rpg which was released without many of the features Peter had promised in interviews. It received a 4/10 on gamespot, with similar reviews from other sites. I'm not even going to get into Black and White 2, suffice to say that if I was on that project, I would ask to have my name removed from the credits due to embarrassment.

So why were so many of his games so bad lately? In my opinion it can be summed up in one statement.

" Being Immersed in a living world"

Peter Molyneux is obsessed with being immersed in a living world. In fact, he wont shut up about it. Hes so convinced that everyone wants to be immersed in his living world that that's all he focuses on. In his mind this is the most important thing, and so impressive is this idea to him that he is convinced that players will abandon gameplay, which is secondary, just to wander around his living world doing things most games would never let you do.

Now lets look at this approach. hmm...gameplay secondary...probably not a good idea. And in my opinion, this leaves players wandering around finishing random quests with no real sense of accomplishment, after all, the designer didn't really care about the quest, so why should you. Playing Fable was like being stuck in a J.R.R. Tolkien novel after the ring was destroyed, your basically wandering around the woods staring at proverbial hobbits, and nobody cares.