Now, I’m going to take an educated guess here and say that Peter Molyneux is probably the developer in question that suggested these things [that Notch should add pets to Minecraft]. It’s right up his ally [SIC - alley].
A couple of things to keep in mind with Molyneux: he has great ideas, but his ideas are often way overly ambitious. This is why his games are constantly very late and way over budget. While he’s brilliant, he also has a tendency to go way off on design tangents that keep his development teams spinning in circles.
This is from 2011. Fifteen years ago, at least professional game designers (like the OP from that quote, FlowerChild) were already aware Molyneux is an “ideas guy”. He pictures huuuuuge, world-changing games that are unfeasible. Couple this with anything related to RL money and guess what, you’ll get people losing money.
Lemme quote a Minecraft forums post:
This is from 2011. Fifteen years ago, at least professional game designers (like the OP from that quote, FlowerChild) were already aware Molyneux is an “ideas guy”. He pictures huuuuuge, world-changing games that are unfeasible. Couple this with anything related to RL money and guess what, you’ll get people losing money.