This week I've been doing something weird: I played the same game in parallel on two platforms. The game is Godus, and while the Steam Early Access version has been available for months, the iOS version came out a week ago. That promptly caused some controversy, because PC gamers who had gotten the game as Kickstarter backers or by paying for it on Steam were apoplectic that the iOS version was Free2Play. They feared they had gotten a raw deal, a Free2Play game by design which isn't free. Facts rarely stop a good rant, so the fact that the PC version does not in fact have any possibility to spend money on it after the initial purchase went largely unnoticed.

Which made me wonder how this all works. Is the assumption that the business model determines game design wrong? How can the same game exist with two very different business models? And how does it work under the two models? Are there differences between the versions? Which version is better? So I decided to try it out by testing both.

While I will say much about the differences between the two versions of Godus, the two versions of the game are fundamentally identical. Nearly all features of the game are shared by the two versions, and thus the two version play mostly the same. There are differences in controls (obviously), and a few minor differences related to the business models. But if you played one of the two versions, the other will appear extremely familiar to you. Claims that one version is less finished than the other are bogus, the "beta" label of the PC version is just a label and has zero consequence in a difference of polish or anything like that. I expect both versions to be developed further in parallel, and both to be frequently patched/updated in the future.

Technically Godus is a resource-hungry game. That doesn't matter much on a gaming PC used to 3D graphics. But on the iPad, even the latest iPad Air, Godus is pushing the limits. Sometimes part of the screen lacks graphics because the iPad just can't manage the graphics any longer. Stutters and freezes happen. The PC version isn't completely immune to that, but on my computer mainly crashed when I was trying to quit the game, at which point it didn't matter much. The main technical difference between the two versions is that the PC version allows you to rotate the view (using "Q" and "E" on the keyboard), while the iOS version doesn't. That makes the PC version overall more enjoyable to play: Sculpting the landscape is the major activity you do in Godus; the PC version with the ability to rotate and the much more precise mouse control plays a lot better than the iOS version where control by touch is less precise, and you have to sculpt basically blind if you want to modify the back of a mountain. I only played on the iPad, but I've read that the game is basically unplayable on the iPhone due to your fingers remaining the same size, but the screen being a lot smaller. Even on the PC sculpting is not very precise, apparently there is some guessing going on by the software what you were trying to achieve with a stroke. And sometimes the guess is the opposite of what you were actually trying to do.

Differences in gameplay are mostly in time scales: Things happen faster on the PC. For example a field of wheat ripens in 90 minutes on the PC, but takes 6 hours on the iPad. Which sounds like a huge difference, but ends up not mattering that much: You don't usually start Godus on your PC every 90 minutes. More likely you come back from work, or play in the morning after sleeping at night, and your wheat is ripe on either platform. Curiously I found that the slower time scale worked to my advantage on the iPad in one case: The enemy tribe, the Astari, hold a festival every hour on the PC, but only every day on the iPad. As they hold the festival even if you are offline, gain a lot of happiness from that festival, and steal your followers if they are happier than you are, coming back after several hours of absence on the PC usually meant that I had lost lots of followers, a problem I didn't have on the iPad. The problem went away when I unleashed my divine wrath on the Astari and killed them all with strategically placed swamps on their festival ground and a few lightning bolts. Overall my iPad game is more advanced, because I can take my iPad with me during the day and play during lunch break, while my PC sits at home.

Unkind reviewers have compared Godus on the iOS to the many Free2Play village builder games available on that platform. But those other games all have a fixed landscape which you usually unlock block by block. Godus with its terraforming land sculpting results in a lot more flexibility of how to build your civilization. There are paths of least resistance, but if you set your mind to it, you can flatten mountains or raise the ocean floor to create new areas to populate. But the comparison also makes clear why Godus isn't your typical Free2Play game: Village/city building Free2Play games often make you buy resources for real money. While that is possible in Godus, the game is designed to let you produce exponentially more resources with time, and that design doesn't work at all with the item shop. Why should I buy 1,000 belief in the item shop if I have a single building producing 15,000 every few hours?

Which means that the Free2Play business model in Godus boils down to buying boosters full of stickers. Godus has a system in which you open up new technologies by growing, so you get more technology cards by getting more population, more wheat fields, more mines, etc.. But many of those cards need stickers to unlock. You get stickers from unearthing treasure chests and from playing a Lemmings-like mini-game (which I don't like very much). But generally stickers are in short supply. So you can buy them for gems, and on the iPad you can buy gems for money. On the PC you can't buy gems for money, but you can get them more easily from playing: Unlike the iPad version you have a temple where you can sacrifice your followers in exchange for gems. That absolutely kills your happiness, but after the Astari are dead that doesn't appear to matter at all any more. And you can always perform some more miracles to make your followers happy again. For a completely fair comparison I spent exactly the same amount of money on both games, buying gems on the iPad for the same amount that the Steam Early Access game had cost me. Up to now I'm ahead in technology and stickers on the iPad, but presumably in the long term the PC will catch up, while I will run out of bought gems on the iPad.

Overall the two versions of Godus have a lot more similarities than differences. I had fun on both platforms. The controls and camera are better on the PC, but the iPad is easier to carry around with me and play on the go. If you have both, I would recommend trying the iPad version first, because it is free. If you hate the game there, you probably won't like it on the PC either. If you like it on the iPad but the controls annoy you, you can still consider paying for the PC version.