6. Godus
What you were promised: A glorious return to the 'God game' genre by creator Peter Molyneux, alongside a mode where one lucky person would actually lord over everyone else's worlds.
What you got: A broken, featureless 'product' that only deserves to be labelled as such because people are paying for it. Two years later it's still being worked on post-release, and is still barely playable. Remember Peter Molyneux? I'd stick Fable in here as one of his most prominent porkers, but more recently is the absolutely ridiculous state Godus is in. Initially funded through Kickstarter, it was then released in 2013 with a tie-in mobile app. The plan was to create a Populous-style God game that would be controlled in various ways by whoever managed to complete the mobile app - however the problem was every feature got planned and announced before developers 22 Cans actually made sure they could be done. Two years (and counting) later, the fallout from these broken promises has snowballed into getting Molyneux labelled as something close to the gaming antichrist. You always have to love someone who dreams big, but when those visions and descriptions hook in backers who fund your work through shear blind faith, failing to deliver and actively continuing to lie about what's in your game is pretty unforgivable. Molyneux got grilled to a crisp by Rock, Paper, Shotgun's John Walker (a rare
brutal interview in which the opening question was "Do you think that you're a pathological liar?"), but the fact remains that right now, Molyneux is already working on another project, with only a handful of coders attempting to deliver on his original pitch - the reality being that such a thing looks more and more unattainable.