Molyneux accepts responsibility for Curiosity issues

By: Musa Afridi

  |   November 15th, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

Claims coders, architects are not to blame and assures users that their coins are safe and the studio, 22cans, is working to get everything back in order.

Curiosity is the experiment of the experiment savvy developer, Peter Molyneux, who quit his lucrative post at LionHead Studios, the developers of the Fable games, in order to start up his own venture.

The studio he founded is known to many as 22cans and is set to run a number of gaming experiments, the feedback from which will determine what course the studio will take in terms of releasing their first full-blown title.

22cans launched their first experiment, Curiosity, recently and was met with an overwhelming response, literally. The studio’s servers were struggling to keep up with the load at first and many users had to be turned away and receive an error code.

Molyneux then made the move to upgrade the servers to increase their capacity before admitting that the increase in maintenance costs would require them to ask for donations, which both Molyneux and 22cans did.

However, the developer has come forward and accepted all responsibility for the issues plaguing Curiosity and in a recent interview he admitted:

“This is my fault and I’ve got to take that – it’s not the coders’ fault, it’s not the architects’ fault, it’s my fault.” Before explaining that the game was an experiment to see what causes gamers to come and play together, what motivates them, the psychology as well as connecting people through multi- device play.

The studio head went on to concede that he did not expect such an overwhelming response expecting more than a hundred thousand people to participate.

“I honestly, truly thought that a few tens of thousands, at most, a hundred thousand people would be interested in this experiment. I said to all the coders here when they asked me how many I was expecting, I said probably over the course of a month, we’ll have 100,000 downloads and that’ll be it.”

The reality was something else as the app reached that many downloads in a matter of 24 hours with the number of players rising by the day before the server issues began to take their toll. The object of the app was to chip away at the cube destroying cubelets and revealing what each layer had underneath.

Players were rewarded with coins for tapping away and complaints began emerging of players’ coins disappearing. Molyneux admitted that he expect users to make a maximum of two to three hundred taps rather than thousands, which resulted in the issue. However, he assured fans that their coins were still there.

“Everyone’s coins are there, it’s to do with a registration issue on Facebook.”

Some good news then.