jaredforks
Member
- Mar 14, 2017
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That's a completely fair take and also rather insightful. I can completely empathize with flagging motivation after working on a project for too long, and I think Breadman and his team have done a better job managing burnout than most other developers on this site.I think this doesn't take into account the difficulty of game development. Having made a few in my day, both smaller and larger, I can tell you that the easiest part of development of a solo-dev or small team is the beginning. Ideas and story are quick and easy and don't need to be compared with anything else that's already in the game, technical debt is near zero, quality doesn't have a bar since none has been set.
Once a game gets going into proper development, things actually get more difficult. New problems start to arise with bugs and systems that refuse to function together, ideas start to become more difficult to generate for fear of becoming repetitive, and art has a minimum bar, which often actually increases as artists' skills increase.
That's not to mention the difference in motivation that people have during the difficult parts of development vs. the early stages. When you're making something for yourself, you can always just drop it and move on to your next new thing. When you're trying to take something all the way to the end, it can really start to become difficult. This is why so many games (and books and comics and web series) end up abandoned.
It makes me wonder what the future of this currently niche genre of games looks like. The problems you're describing are the reason that project managers exist, but it hasn't yet made financial sense for teams to hire for that position. I feel it's inevitable that the genre will eventually garner more mainstream attention - publishers aren't just going to ignore potential profits, obviously. Once the MBA's get involved and start putting pressure on the creative side, I imagine that's when we'll see the financial model shift.
Although all of this assumes that the credit card processing companies eventually give up on their puritanical bullshit, of course.