Peter Molyneux Wants to See if You'll Purchase a $78,000 DLC Diamond Chisel

[Shawn Zipay]

Peter Molyneux is at it again. As part of some of his first projects at 22Cans, the eccentric developer is slated to release Curiosity, a PC/iOS/etc experimental title. The game has players tapping and picking away at a cube in a simple white room.

The cube breaks and you keep on tapping away to try and shrink the cube down to size. The only goal of the game is to be the first person to get to the very center of the cube. The experiment part of this is to see whether or not people are going to be gullible enough to fork over money for various levels of chisels to help in their quest.

The game will sell, for real money mind you, chisels of increasing strength. The first one is an iron chisel at just $1 (USD) and is 10 times more powerful than simply tapping. The highest level chisel is a diamon chisel that costs £50,000 or about $78,000 (USD).

Molyneux stated that "this is not a money-making exercise; it is a test about the psychology of monetization." For as dumb of an idea as this is, it's almost guaranteed that someone out there is going to buy that insanely expensive chisel.

Curiosity is slated for release in a few weeks.

(via)

[K-16]

Didn't VALVe already test this with TF2's in-game diamond? The difference I see here is that players can cheat and ruin the entire test as they either won't have to pay for the chisel, or they don't need one with turbo auto-tapping, etc. With TF2, there's uh... No point in cheating to circumvent the need for the diamond. I don't know. I don't know the details of this game so I probably ignored all the security measures in place. And then there are those who want to be on news headlines by buying one (with way too much damn money that could have gone to charity).