This NeoGAF thread about the iOS port of Godus, Peter Molyneux’s Kickstarted “god game”, is quite the rich font of entertainment and schadenfreude. Specifically, it concerns the monetization model used in the mobile port:

I’m really trying to get through the tutorial, but I am finding out that this is one of those games where the first houses take 15 seconds to build, then the next houses take about a minute to build, and oh god I know where this is going.

Another forum user added this observation:

Friend of mine said he quickly hit a “Wheat Wall” and was couldn’t really progress without buying gems or waiting quite awhile.

Why is this so ripe with schadenfreude, you might ask? Well, because this is a Peter Molyneux game…the same Peter Molyneux who said this about the monetization in Mythic’s for-mobile re-imagining of Dungeon Keeper:

Peter Molyneux, who designed the original 1997 Dungeon Keeper game, said he too was shocked when he saw the time it would take to dig out some sections of the map.

“I felt myself turning round saying, ‘What? This is ridiculous. I just want to make a dungeon. I don’t want to schedule it on my alarm clock for six days to come back for a block to be chipped,'” he told the BBC.

Of course, he also said this:

I actually like shops in games. This whole thing about micro-transactions and free-to-play has got out of all proportion. Consumers want developers to give extra content, and these shops are a way of doing that.

If you pay £14.95 for Godus, that should give you the complete experience, but like almost every game I’ve worked on, it doesn’t mean we’re not going to give you more stuff in addition. Every Fable had an add-on disc. If in Fable we could allow you to download the add-on disc as soon as you’d finished you would take us up on that. And that’s the way I think of this shop.

It allows us to proliferate out to people extra content. Some of that may be silly content, like everyone gets a hat or something. Some of it may be big content, like a whole new level. And in Early Access we wanted to test that system. But the actual core of the PC game, you shouldn’t need to spend any more money on it. At all. We’re not trying to make the PC game into a free-to-play game, for sure not.

The actual truth of it is, on mobile, free games outsell paid games by twenty to one. It’s a ridiculous number. So we’ve got to think about, maybe there’s a way of not charging. We haven’t decided this yet. Maybe we won’t charge to download Godus on mobile, but we’ll use some sort of shop mechanic.

But we’ve got no plan at all of making the shop an integral, necessary part of the game on PC.

The above was in response to criticism that Molyneux received about an in-game gem shop that appeared in the Godus alpha, and one notes that the final remark is very specific. The shop won’t be integral to the PC version of the game…but evidently, the same is manifestly untrue about versions of the game release on other platforms.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve been a proponent of the freemium model (or, at least, of some freemium models, with certain reservations) in the past, and it’s entirely possible that the monetization in Godus for iOS will be non-intrusive. It’s possible that the folks at GAF are blowing the issue way out of proportion, because Internet and because forums.

But equally, it’s possible that, on cracking into Godus, I might quickly find myself saying “What? This is ridiculous. I just want to make a civilization. I don’t want to schedule it on my alarm clock for six days to come back for a house to be built!”