10 Most Shocking Video Game Scandals Of All Time

5. Godus' Kickstarter Disaster

It was all going to be so beautiful. The Peter Molyneux - of Populous, Theme Hospital and Fable fame - reached out to the gaming public with a Kickstarter campaign to fund a god game called Godus, the 'spiritual successor to Populous'. After smashing its funding goal and raising around £530,000, Godus went into development in 2012. A malfunctioning beta version of the game came to Steam launched in 2013 (for £14.99), and it remains in that raw buggy state up to this very day. Gamers who helped fund the game have been left with nothing but this, and a shoddy freemium version of the game on iOS and Android in 2014. To make things worse, the much-touted multiplayer aspect of Godus was to involve a real person playing God. This person was to be the winner of the 'Curiosity' mobile game that came out in 2012, and they'd also get royalties from Godus' profits. The winner was an 18-year-old Scottish teenager called Bryan Henderson, but he still hasn't heard anything about his promised prize. This scandal has since been used as a cautionary tale about the dangers of Kickstarter. For all the great games that have been created thanks to the crowd-funding platform, people looking to help fund games will now always have it in the backs of their minds that the game's development might fall apart and 'do a Godus' - essentially throwing their money down the drain.