Peter Molyneux may have just monetized trolling | Hacker News Reader

Peter Molyneux may have just monetized trolling

gamasutra.com

104 pointslaurent12345671 comments

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"players have so far paid to remove nearly 14 million cubelets, while adding an extra 4.7 million."

Wow I almost spit out my tea when reading that while wrongly assuming each block was $0.99

Then I followed the link in page and discovered that the $6.99 point is for 100,000 units.

So figure ~200 of those sold or about $1000 after App Store fees.

I can now sleep tonight.

After decades of trying to mke better and better videogames, always more realistic, Molyneux shows that the average human is, in fact satisfied by a Skinner box and will gladly pay for it.

Do you honestly think the average human being is busy playing Curiosity?

Overwhelmingly average human beings, yes.

Re-read my post. I didn't say the average human being is busy playing Curiosity; I said that the average human is fully satisfied interacting with a Skinner box.

Re-write your post. You said Molyneux showed something about the average human. You can't backpedal that into a statement not involving Molyneux.

> you said Molyneux showed something about the average human.

Yes.

> You can't backpedal that into a statement not involving Molyneux.

I didn't backpedal; you can change "I said that the average human is fully satisfied interacting with a Skinner box" to "I said that the average human is fully satisfied interacting with a Skinner box, as shown by Molyneux's Curiosity", if it makes you happy, but it doesn't really change anything.

Kronopath challenged the idea that the people playing Curiosity are in fact average. I don't know if you read his comment as a silly statement regarding billions of people playing the game or something, but there is legitimate argument to be made that the average Curiosity player is far away from the average western citizen.

If the average Curiosity player is not even close to an average person (such as what if 80% of them had OCD), then your statement that Molyneux has showed anything about the average person is incorrect.

So please, either disagree with Kronopath or point out a flaw in my logic, let's not mess around with semantics and restatements.

Cow Clicker is a somewhat similar example: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_cowclicker/all/ It was created as a critique of FarmVille-style Facebook games. You could click a cow every 6 hours for free, or pay money to click more often. And people did!

The Cow Clicker creator also implemented a Cube Clicker to beat Molyneux's game to market: http://www.bogost.com/blog/cube_clicker.shtml

"...players have so far paid to remove nearly 14 million cubelets, while adding an extra 4.7 million"

Adding 500,000 cubelets costs $10.99, which implies that people have paid ~$103 to add cubelets over the course of 166 days, or around 62 cents per day. Gross revenue from all cubelet sales in either direction is ~$405 or ~$2.43/day. He may have monetized trolling, but it doesn't seem very profitable.

> Adding 500,000 cubelets costs $10.99, which implies that people have paid ~$103 to add cubelets over the course of 166 days, or around 62 cents per day. Gross revenue from all cubelet sales in either direction is ~$308 or ~$1.85/day.

Your numbers are way off, as is the timescale. The ability to add or remove cubelets is a new feature, released on April 17th. At ~$405.75 to change the cubelet levels using the most economical price ($10.99 for 500k, or $21.98 for 1 million, over 18.46 million cubelets[1]), that's ~$101.44/day.

[1]: "...users have paid to remove 13,780,000 cublets and add another 4,680,000" from http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-19-molyneux-adds-o...

Actually, they are not. The article indicated that the experiment had been going for 166 days (164 days, but it was written two days ago). $10.99/500K=$0.00002198 per cubelet. 0.00002198 X 18.46M total cubelets sold = $405. $405/166 = $2.43/day.

The experiment has been running for a few months yes, but like I said, the feature to add or remove cubelets is new for version 3.0, released on April 17th. Check the Eurogamer article I linked to (also linked in the original article).

Originally you could only remove cubelets. Adding them back is a new thing.

He needs to add anonymous payments and a method of placing non-destructable (or hard to destroy) blocks.

Some people would pay money to place a giant swastika or similar 4chan style trolling. Others would work hard (or pay) to remove that.

This is insane. This is literally just incrementing and removing a counter, and 22cans has become the middlemen for this.

Most games are just incrementing and decrementing variables. You can still derive pleasure from that.

Though in the case of Curiosity, I'd say you'd need a lot of imagination.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD69PAIqiYo

PROGRESS QUEST.

Caps lock because it's that cool.

Sadly, Curiosity is not quite as good a game as PROGRESS QUEST; it still requires too much player input.

I'm amazed that people are still buying into his games. If you were to go by Peter's history, it's quite likely that the "life-changingly amazing" thing in the middle of the cube is a message like "Sorry Mario, but the princess is in another cube".

I personally got burned somewhere around Fable and I'm never[0] going to get one of his games again..

[0] except for maybe Godus.. maybe.

I don't care what people say, Black and White was an excellent game which was much too far ahead of its time.

[Disclaimer: I don't know B&W 2, I'm basing myself only on the first B&W]

Black and White was a good game which unfortunately was far behind what its originating concept promised to deliver.

I liked B&W as well.

It also came out 12 years ago.

Exactly. I got burned by Fable moreso than any other game in my life, so hyped that I was by how he talked about it. In the end it was a very limited and lackluster linear RPG with some The Sims thrown in. Fun for a weekend. But no let down in my life will ever surpass B.C. To this day prehistory is the theme of the dream game I want to make.

As someone who had paid money to remove cubelets before this was introduced id feel somewhat ripped off.

I also wonder how this game would be doing with similar marketing but without Molyneux' name to it. Imo the golden days of the guy are long gone.

> As someone who had paid money to remove cubelets

As someone who never pays for in-app purchases, I am quite curious why you did this. Did you feel the purchase was worth it?

To quote more fully:

"As someone who had paid money to remove cubelets before this was introduced ID feel somewhat ripped off." Note the emphasized (by me) "ID" or "I'd", aka "I would". This one word changes the entire case of the verb and implies empathizing with a hypothetical victim versus actually being one.

Ah... good catch. Still, my question remains for someone.

Except... can you use "id" instead of "I'd"? My language parser also rejected this as invalid token and I ended up interpreting that sentence the same way Xcelerate did.

I interpret your sentence as follows: in the "hypothetical" case that this comes to pass, then you, as someone who had paid money, would feel ripped off. When you say "would" here, I don't think that it makes your "as someone who..." clause hypothetical. The way that I'd say this is:

If I were someone who paid, then I'd feel ripped off.

i am not a native english speaker so i might have made a mistake there, but the other reply explains my point.

The thing being, you didn't.

The interesting question is whether the people who -did- pay movey to remove cubelets feel ripped off or not.

I have no idea who such people are, though, and suspect I wouldn't understand their motivation even if I did, so I venture no suggestions as to the answer to that question.

Holy motherfucking shit. This is not a game, this is something else. This is sick. This is abusive... This feels akin to exploiting a mental vulnerability that exists in a portion of the population to earn money. Its a strange situation where it is legal to do something to a human that is illegal to do to a computer.

> "Its a strange situation where it is legal to do something to a human that is illegal to do to a computer"

What is illegal to do to a computer, in this case...?

I think he means that if you discovered and exploited a bug in a common OS the way farmville manipulated actual minds, you'd be thrown in jail.

That's what I was getting at. You said it better. Thank you.

>>>This feels akin to exploiting a mental vulnerability that exists in a portion of the population to earn money

Ermmmm, that is what some advertising and marketing are all about, creating insecurities in people and then selling them the "cure."

That's why I think those are pure evil. I know I'm not alone...

At least when you are being advertised you actually get something out of the deal. If I convince someone to voluntarily empty their bank account and give me everything in exchange for nothing, that would make me a shitbag. Or a televangelist, I guess.

You should hear him talk about it, grinning from ear to ear. I loved his games as a kid, but now I'll forever regard him as a self-absorbed scumbag.

This exemplifies that making money and making a good product are two quite distinct things.

I wouldn't exactly say that this is monetizing 'trolling'

I'm also appalled that a gaming site would confuse "trolling" and "griefing".

Hm?

Griefing is just being annoying, while trolling is both a art and an science.

a science

I see what you did there.

The people paying to add may be simply griefing, but what Peter himself has done certainly qualifies as trolling.

Did he? I'm fairly sure I saw that on the PetetMolydeux parody Twitter account.

According to Eurogamer [1] it is announced in the app itself, but yes it was also tweeted by @PeterMolydeux [2] - I guess it's never been easier to parody someone...

[1] http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-19-molyneux-adds-o...

[2] https://twitter.com/PeterMolydeux/status/325281598444556288

Now I can't help wondering how many other things this "Get them coming and going" idea could be applied to in games. Is this as unprecedented as they make it out to be in the article?

I'm very surprised at the gullibility towards the whole project. Who's to say they don't add more cubelets by themselves for free?

well, I have to give Molyneux some credit where credit is due.

This is incredibly clever and a great way to use IAP-type stuff.

What is the estimated number of cubelets or layers remaining?

It is unknown. However, if you download the game, you can see how many cublets are still remaining on the current layer, as well as how many layers have been removed.

There were 4,096 total layers; currently 262 layers have been removed with 17,758,801 cubelets left on the current layer. So 3,834 layers and 112,689,867,042 cubelets remain.

The cube age is 166 days, so at the current rate of progress (~148,787,753 cubelets per day), it should take another 758 days to complete. However, the rate has been slowing from over 2 layers/day at the start to just over 1.5 layers/day. Combined with user attrition and this new ability to add/remove layers, it's hard to say when exactly it'll be completed.

There are only 2048 layers. I used the statistics from [1] at 5:20 from day one.

Layer 1, 66,631,501 cubelets remaining on the current layer and 33,982,651 cubelets destroyed in total. Because it is the first layer it is made up out of 66,631,501 + 66,631,501 = 100,614,152 cubelets. An estimate of the edge length is obtained by dividing by 6 faces and taking the square root and this yields 4,095.0000407. It is a bit counterintuitive - at least for me - but the actual edge length is 4,096. I would have expected that counting the edges twice and the corners trice becomes insignificant for large edge lengths but if you do the math you will see that this approximation has the limit n - 1 as n goes to infinity.

So because every layer adds 2 to the edge length there are 2048 layers. That is bad - there is no central cubelet because the edge length is not odd. Maybe this is the hidden secret. I guess they used 4096 because it simplifies texturing the thing, implementing level of detail or stuff like that, does it? Or they have 8 secrets in there to make it a tiny bit more fair.

One more thing, the number of cubelets on the surface of a cube with edge length n is n^3 - (n - 2)^3 - the whole cube minus the smaller cube under the surface. Plugging in 4096 yields the number obtained from the statistics so we probably made no mistake.

Okay, let's fix the other numbers, too. The cube started with 68,719,476,736 cubelets. I assume the current layer was 263 - the statistics gives the number of layers removed and layer 263 seems to be more consistent with the time of the comment - and there are 23,220,183,736 cubelets in those layers. Subtracting the 17,758,801 cubelets remaining yields 23,202,424,935 cubelets destroyed in 166 days or roughly 139.8 million cubelets per day. There are 45,517,051,801 cubelets remaining and assuming the same rate of destruction this yields roughly 326 days to go.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giEykqDoUCQ

I can help your intuition with the n - 1, I hope. It's true that it's negligible when you're handling cube roots. But when you're cutting down to faces you end up ignoring the entire inside of the cube, so edges can cause problems. Looking at a single face, you have four edges that must be shared, so give away two edges a keep two edges, and you very easily result in a square of n-1 on every face.

I like the idea of embedding n - 1 squares in each face, it is quite intuitive...but not fully satisfying. It would be nice if exactly six n - 1 squares would fit into the surface...but no, there are two additional uncovered cubelets. Two is again unintuitive to me - 6, 8 or 12 and I would be happy. On the other hand unintuitve results make me redo the work to find the mistake and so unintuitve results are less likely wrong and that in the end is a good thing.

After spending some more time thinking about my initial reasoning it became a bit more intuitive. I thought there are O(n^2) cubelets on each face and the error with the edges is only O(n) so the error should become negligible and it does - the linear error becomes a constant error of less than 1. I just expected it would approach 0 and this is not true.

And now I will stop bothering - my intuition is not the best in this area and I will just have to calculate everything. I just realize that I can not even easily say if the approximation over- or underestimates...we use some cubelets twice, so we under...over...underestimate the area of a face...no, over?...under!...

You're right, it's 2,048 layers. The sad part for me is that I knew that number, but when I did the math, I couldn't get it to work with the current layer's numbers, because I forgot that the cube length goes down by two, not one. Oh well, shows I shouldn't do math late at night!

I find it odd that the edge length is even.

It's hilarious when someone finds two actions that are opposites of each other and collect on both sides from people who want to take part in each.

I had a similar thought. I worked for a truly evil (management-wise; the engineers and PMs are fine) startup in the winter of 2011-12 and I've been debating whether to name-and-shame. The ethical problem I have with it is that, while I could easily kill the company (publicity-wise, but that would be enough) it would be low-level engineers who get fucked and the shitbag managers would probably bounce along fine. That's why I haven't done it. (After embarrassing a less-deserving company whose name starts with G, I'm more hesitant about public whistleblowing.)

However, if I ever end up in financial hardship I can't get out of, I'm going to start a Yes and a No project (maybe on Kickstarter, if they don't mind?) If "Yes" raises more money, then I name the evil startup that inspired my hatred of VC-istan, and out its scumbag executives in excruciating detail (including stuff about their families that I found later on). If "No" wins, then I keep it a secret. (Obviously, the losing side gets back their money.) I'd probably have to preclude the company itself, and its managers, from funding the "No", lest I get an extortion rap.

This could be a brilliant or fucked-up-evil startup idea. People who are cash-strapped and need to raise money take issues in their lives from the mundane ("should I sell my furniture?") to the important ("should I go back to school?") to the extreme ("should I out my scumbag ex-manager?") into the public and set up Yes/No races. On one hand, it would help a lot of people. On the other hand, it'd be hard to set it up so it doesn't become a vehicle for extortion.

Maybe save it for an example in your book? Your blog already has enough great material to establish your place at the forefront of modern philosophy. Now it's just a question of marketing. Kickstarter campaign for your book sounds good. And to those who have down voted Mr. Church I can only say, how dare you.

Well played; I read your post while taking a sip and now I can't stop coughing/laughing.

A sucker and his money were lucky to get together in the first place.

I think that in by this point in time, it's a pretty safe rule of thumb to take everything Peter Molyneux says with a very large grain of salt.

Title doesn't really make sense. This is just a lottery, with a bit of a PvP angle. Spending more increases odds of winning.

> Spending more increases odds of winning.

Does it? I was under the impression the winner would be whoever removed the last cube, which would be un-affected by how many cubes users removed earlier.

Can someone reference the post here (or possibly on reddit) that described how technically infeasible this project is to be accurate?

http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2012/11/12/death-by-million-cubes/

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