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by anthonypasq1 days ago |
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upvoteby georgeecollins1 days ago|
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The framing of "a professional game developer.. job is to ship a product" is very indie. Places like ID, Bethesda, Volition (RIP) etc.: like a hundred people worked on the product and many did not own shipping the product. When you have tech team of 10 - 30 people whether you should make your own engine was more of a question. Lots of very popular games are made on their own tech.

Also, like what do you mean by engine? Minecraft was made with LWJGL.

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upvoteby inigyou23 hours ago|
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And Minecraft physics are limited to AABBs and rendering was flat unlit quads until quite recently. But they definitely couldn't have done the infinite cube world easily on Unity or Unreal, so in that sense it was necessary to build their own.
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upvoteby sph1 days ago|
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Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells, so in the long run it is not a bad investment.

If your goal is to sell a game in 3 months, sure, but not even Unreal Engine will magically turn a rushed game into a good product.

90% of the development time is making a fun game in the first place, and you’re on your own there.

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upvoteby georgeecollins1 days ago|
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>> Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells,

That is exactly how I perceived the game industry to be before I worked in it. Now I know that there are many objectively excellent or even innovative or influential games that do not sell, or also do not sell well enough to support their development costs.

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upvoteby tranceylc1 days ago|
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Could you give an example of something excellent and either innovative or influential that did not sell well? It’s a question I have sought to answer myself. Especially if you can find one that doesn’t take development costs into account.

So I’m looking for an “objectively” (figuratively) excellent game, that has not sold many copies at all. A game on steam that should be popular but isn’t. Do you have any examples?

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upvoteby Wololooo11 hours ago|
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To cite one, Okami, innovative gameplay, striking art very poor sales, they made most of their sales after the fact after the studio closed and the game got ported to other systems than the PS2.
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upvoteby maccard1 days ago|
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I’ve worked on a bunch of games that have been canned despite being crafted with love and innovative in their own ways. It’s not enough to just be well crafted, especially if you need to pay the salaries of 10 people for 1-2 years to make the game.
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upvoteby j_w1 days ago|
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Commenting just so I can check later what he comes back with.
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upvoteby anthonypasq1 days ago|
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the entire failure of AAA game development in recent years has been years and years of craftsmenship wasted on games that arent fun.
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upvoteby duped1 days ago|
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> Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells, so in the long run it is not a bad investment.

This entire saga of XBOX fka Microsoft Gaming is proof to the contrary

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upvoteby asdff1 days ago|
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I mean there's a point when you can go "why bother selling a game when i can learn to algo trade and maybe get hired by a major investment bank" if you really want to push the logic of all money no creativity to its inevitable end point. There would be no gaming industry. There would be no art. There would be no music. There would be no sports. There would be no movies. All of that is wasted profit potential against simply being involved directly in finance and in trading assets, preferably rooted in underlying material commodities.
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