We had a long chat with 22Cans' designer Peter Molyneux, creator of such classic God games as Black & White and Populous, about his new game Godus and a bunch of other things. A topic that came up a lot was free-to-play ("as a consumer and gamer I love free-to-play when it's balanced right"):
"As a gamer in my heart and as a designer the brilliant thing about free-to-play is you can experience the game before you even think about paying any money. Why wouldn't that be a brilliant mechanic? Why shouldn't that be loved by the gaming industry, and it's only because a lot of those, I mean I could talk about this for hours, because it's a real design sort of thing, a lot of the early experiences just like anything early on tends to go in wrong directions before it find the right direction. The other great thing about free-to-play that it does do, which is amazing, is it does start to modify the amount of time you spend on a game. And one of the saddest things for me as a designer is to make years making a game like Fable in the full knowledge that someone will play through the entire game in a weekend."
"If you get those wait timers right what you can do with the game is you can say 'right, don't focus on that anymore, focus on this' and sometimes 'focus on this' is stop playing the game for a while."
This line of discussion took us in a slightly disturbing direction as Molyneux iterated he doesn't want free-to-play "to be greedy, I want people to have other things to do."
However, being an advocate for free-to-play, especially if you're a high profile developer like Molyneux is seemingly not without risk.
"But it just gets us into a lot of trouble. I'm fully expecting to be probably knifed while here... There's going to be a red dot that appears on my face. Someone's at least going to egg me I think."
We should perhaps add that there has been any reports of knifings, sniper shots fired or eggings from Cologne.