Curiosity monetisation in the pipeline, awaiting approval

By: Moses Abaortae

  |   November 19th, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

Peter Molyneux, the founder of 22cans, explains that the much touted DLC of the game will be released soon, pending approval and concedes that the Curiosity experiment has been unable to live up to its objectives.

After resigning from the Microsoft owned studio, Lionhead, Molyneux started up 22cans and his first order of business was to announce that the studio were going to run a number of real-time experiments the first of which was revealed to be Curiosity.

The game revolves around a cube made of layers of cublets. Players hack away at the cublets to reveal what is in the underlying layer. As players pick away at the cubes they receive in-game coins. The object is to get to the centre of the cube where everyone is promised something special will be revealed.

Molyneux admitted that the experiment was intended for a hundred thousand people at most and the coders had designed the infrastructure and server accordingly. However, the app became so popular that over a million users have registered so far.

To cope with the increased load the servers were upgraded and Molyneux had to appeal for donations in order to keep up with the new maintenance costs.

Many users are wondering where the promised monetisation feature of the game has gone. 22cans revealed that players would be given access to priced DLC which would allow them to chip away a great number of cublets. However, that feature including a GBP 50,000 piece, is nowhere to be seen.

Molyneux addressed these concerns by explaining that the DLC feature was pending approval and once it was cleared it would be added to the game for those who want to increase their coin count. He also conceded that before the approval would be granted they needed to work on fixing the issues with the hardware and software.

He said, “The monetisation stuff is there, it’s part of the experiment and part of the plan, we can turn it on but the way it works, on iOS especially, is that you need to get approval before you turn it on. We’ll submit that for approval soon once we’re satisfied the tech’s right.”

The founder of 22cans also conceded that the issues with the tech were also affecting the objective of the experiment. He elaborated, “What I want to try and get towards is the true reality of what we’re trying to do in Curiosity, and that is to give you a real sense that you’re doing something with other people. Yesterday it was awful. It took half an hour to see any taps on the cube.”

22cans was meant to have announced another experiment by now but the on-going issues with Curiosity have prevented that from happening.