Legendary game designer Peter Molyneux isn’t returning to mobile anytime soon, it seems.
Speaking on The Fourth Curtain podcast, cohosted by Bungie and Industrial Toys cofounder Alexander Seropian, Molyneux talked in glowing terms about the potential of mobile games, and how the iPhone opened up new ways to play games.
But he also said that the need to follow the free to play ‘playbook’ means he’s unable to create and release the games he’d like to, and is unlikely to return to mobile game design, having launched The Trail, Godus and experimental app Curiosity through his studio 22cans.
“I love the idea of mobile games…I love the idea of designing something that can touch millions of lives,” he said. “And you know, I’m proud that we created some games for mobile but it is a very, very difficult design proposition.”
Molyneux continues: “The reason is that you’ve only got little tiny slices of people’s time. And you may want to as a designer, immerse people in incredible narrative or deep and meaningful, moralistic gameplay. But if you’ve only got 10 minutes of people’s time, once a day, it’s very hard to have a consistency about what people play.”
“For me, and again, this is purely personal and I’ll probably get in enormous trouble for saying this, but for me, I think the whole free to play genre has become very…I’m gonna say stale. Because I think there is a playbook of how a free to play game is done and people follow the playbook and that playbook is very, very destructive of innovational gameplay. Because the free to play mechanic is you’ve got to ask people for money and there are certain psychological ways of doing that. I found that very, very challenging.”
Molyneux went on to add that the extra time and attention players tend to give PC and console games makes those formats a more suitable home for the games he wants to create. He and his team at 22cans is currently working on a title codenamed Moat.
Fourth Curtain cohost (and Bungie and Industrial Toys cofounder) Alexander Seropian agreed with Molyneux that mobile is tough, and has become “even more challenging” lately.
“The constraints, or at least the perceived constraints, for how to make a successful game on mobile and free to play, start with the business and almost have to end with the business,” said Seropian. “And it leaves much less room for doing new creative stuff.”
There’s more from Seropian on his time at Bungie and why EA axed Battlefield Mobile and closed his studio Industrial Toys here.
