[slg]

>In the latter case, any professional shaming—which is the only shaming of Murray I’ve seen—is justified.

Why? The guy obviously wasn't trying to make a bad game. He was just inexperienced, got in over his head, and failed to deliver the product he wanted to build on the timeline he promised. I would have assumed if any community understands that failure isn't an unusual result in the face of ambitious goals it would be the HN crowd. Meanwhile since the game's release he has continued to work on that product to get it closer to everyone's initial expectations. I understand being disappointed by the whole thing, but the vitriol directed his way was somewhat disturbing.

[LeoNatan25]

Please. He was lying up until the last weeks to release, where no practical development on the game was taking place. I’d see your point if promises were made years before release and the company was unable to deliver. But there was clear malice here.

[slg]

Like the original article suggests, if he was truly malicious in intent then why would he continue to work on this game after release? Hanlon's razor suggests he just failed on the biggest stage he was ever on and he didn't know how to handle that.

To quote the article:

>When people ask you, “Will we be able to do X?” it’s easy to say “yes” because you already wanted to have X and you’ve already thought about how you’d go about making it happen. People love you, your work is valuable, and you don’t want to say no. People smile with delight when you say “yes” and when you say “no” they look disappointed and ask annoying technical questions that would – if you took the time to answer them accurately – being incredibly boring and hard to follow. In the short term, saying “yes” is always the path of least resistance.

>I know exactly how that feels and I know I’ve trapped myself in situations where I needed to crunch in order to meet my promises. Not because I wanted to work overtime, but because saying yes just feels so much better than saying no. I’m really thankful I made those mistakes in private meetings as part of a small company on not in front of international media. If Stephen Colbert had me on his show in March of 2016 and asked with delight if Good Robot was going to have different character classes, it would have been very tempting to say yes. After all, it was something I’d wanted to put in the game and maybe I’d be able to find time to squeeze it in before release. And if that interview happened to me when I was a young man and more easily dazzled by the limelight? Shit. I’m sure I’d make the exact same mistake.

I really can't imagine a developer who has lead a project of any size not relating to that on some level.

[sushid]

Why wouldn't he work on the game? It's not like after ONE over-promise he's never going to ever in the game dev business. His life a repeated game theory interaction.

Whether he intended to deceive or not, it makes sense to do some damage control for the future.

[ghurtado]

> But there was clear malice here.

Do not attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

[LeoNatan25]

I don't believe this was the case here. Maybe the stupidity was underestimating the reaction of people who would be disappointed, but that's different.

[hawkice]

Professionalism entails keeping promises. If he didn't do that, people saying he isn't good at his job isn't totally absurd.

[spike021]

To be fair, did he have a previous track record? I honestly don't know, but if he didn't have prior experience working on projects at this level then it's not hard to give him some benefit of the doubt.

Maybe he should've been more open and honest about the development process, but otherwise I just don't know how much blame he deserves. Professionalism is much easier when you have the perspective, time, and experience.