22cans CEO to Molyneux: "you f****d up"

It all kicked off in February for Peter Molyneux and 22cans (you can read more about that here), and since that explosion of bad press, the former Lionhead boss promised to never speak to the press again.

On that front he's stayed true to his word, which has meant its been quite quiet in recent months when it comes to 22cans and the ongoing development of their troubled game, Godus. That was until recently, when new 22cans boss Simon Phillips spoke to Eurogamer at Develop.

In a rather frank interview, Phillips explains how he has taken charge of the business, freeing up Molyneux so he can get creative once again. Interestingly, and as eluded to in the headline, he also revealed what he said to Molyneux back when he came onboard.

"All that stuff you've done wrong is quite easy stuff to fix and should have been done, and yes, you fucked up and should have done all this stuff, but we can sort that out," Phillips told Molyneux earlier this year and recalled in the interview.

"You need to get back into designing games. Don't try and do everything. Don't try and glue it all back together because it's just going to crumble down. You need to make games. That's what you enjoy. I quite like business. I'll do the business."

The company's new CEO confirmed that he has been in touch with Curiosity winner Bryan Henderson, the player who was promised a life-changing prize for winning the studio's previous mobile game/experiment.

As Phillips explained, the studio still wants to make good on their promises with Godus, including the God of Gods mode set to provide Henderson with his prize, although there's no time scale offered as to when we might see it finished, with him saying it could take "f*****g years of development" before the missing features are added.

"There's nothing to calculate [the prize] on. You can't say, let's put a pound a day away for Bryan, or ten pounds. There's no financial concept of what this God of Gods thing is, and that's what we need to sort out," he explained.

"That's not to say there isn't an idea of what maybe it should be. But I categorically don't want to just buy Bryan off. I don't want to go, 'we're really sorry, here you go, and we really mean it.' No actually, let's try do the right thing."

It's not just the God of Gods mode though, there's plenty of features missing, many of which fans have all but given up on seeing added to the game. Phillips still wants to deliver on the studio's promises, but acknowledges that it may take time.

"If we released combat now: one star, it's shit. It could be the best thing in the world, but it's going to be shit because everyone's ready to call it shit. So we want to make sure it's good. And when we think it's good we can go, look, we think this is good now and by the way, we've been talking to you about what we're doing so you're aware of what's going to come out and it's good.

"After that we'll do something else. After that we'll do something else. And we'll try and revisit all the things we wanted to do in Godus. But let's just get one thing right. That's the goal, rather than go, we're going to do a billion things, and then not do them."

The whole interview makes for an interesting read, and if you've an interest in Godus and its troubled development then you should definitely give it a read. It certainly sounds like with the restructuring the studio is better positioned to deliver on their vision. Let's hope that next time we're talking about them it's for good reasons and not bad. Perhaps, with the appointment of Phillips in this new role, the tide has turned for 22cans.