12 Most Disastrously Disappointing Video Game Launches In History

Jul 9, 2016 July 9th, 2016

1. Godus

The most royal balls up of all time, Peter Molyneux's return to self-popularised 'God simulators' like Populous and Black & White was Godus, a Kickstarter game twinned with a mobile app.

Said app challenged all to slowly erode an onscreen cube, with the reward for the person who hit the core being a role in the game - God himself - alongside a share of the profits. Another "Yes, really", as Molyneux talked only in vagaries, discussing words like "power" and "responsibility", whilst not following through on any of them.

Godus launched in Early Access only for Molyneux to move onto other projects, leaving the community around the game to step in and attempt to get it running. One Konrad Naszynski actually landed a job on staff thanks to the dev team being so tiny, and after months of trying to do right by the fans (the opposite of what studio 22cans had done), eventually left in June, 2016.

As for the person who won the 'Godus app challenge', Bryan Henderson, you can read the disheartening account of his interaction with 22cans on Eurogamer, but it amounted to playing Godus "for three hours straight", before the developers tried to get him drunk at a local pub.

If you're looking for some semblance of justice for all that squandered cash and all those broken promises, there's an absolutely scathing Rock, Paper, Shotgun interview, where the opening question immediately calls Molyneux a "pathological liar", but sufficed to say, Godus was a hot mess even before the heat got turned up.