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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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

Caps lock because it's that cool.

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.

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

It also came out 12 years ago.

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

"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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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!...

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.

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.