GDC 2014 - Godus to Launch in Select Territories Soon, Supports Cross-Platform Play

It's not exactly a secret that Peter Molyneux/22cans deity simulator, Godus is coming to iOS. However, we were able to learn about a few more specifics here at GDC.

Godus was really designed with mobile in mind from the beginning, and it shows when watching the game in motion. "My passion has been to reinvent a genre of games I stumbled upon back in the early 90s called Populous," said Peter Molyneux, "I wanted to reinvent the genre around this beautiful, wonderful, incredible device. What you've got here is a god game reinvented for this touch device, and reinvented for the audience."

What's more, the game will feature a sort of continuous form of multiplayer - kind of like an MMO. When you play, you're playing with however many other players/gods are on at that moment (possibly into the tens of millions), all at the same time. And all of their lands are connected as a part of one extremely large and continuous world filled with other islands and other gods.

This even carries over into the game's cross-platform functionality as changes made to your land on the iPad, iPhone, or PC will display in real time on any of the other platforms. "You're connected to thousands, even millions, of people," explained Molyneux, "We tried this out on this crazy app called Curiosity, and we connected together hundreds of thousands of people who simultaneously touched on the cube. Well now we're connecting millions of people together. We did a cube, and now we're doing this vast planet."

It's also been confirmed that Godus will be free to download for iOS, but no specifics have been given on its approach to monetization. The plan is to encourage players to want to spend money, but not force or require them to. "I love free to download. I never want to go back to having to pay money before having an idea if I'll like something," stated Molyneux. "What we have to do is get people to want to spend money, rather than need to spend money," he continued, "I'm inspired by the way that the supermarket, especially American supermarkets, tempt you to spend money. We call it 'Invest-to-Play'." Personally I'm rather curious to see how all of this will work in practice.

Godus will be soft-launching in select territories (New Zealand, The Philippines, Sweden, Ireland, and Denmark) within the next few weeks.