Yeah. This is how you get company like Blizzard make a super expensive complete flops like Diablo IV. By having stupid beliefs about what your users want. Or ever better, by having your own wants, and projecting those wants at your understanding what the users want. You lie to yourself for long enough and you start believing it.
Recently the way I approach choosing software has changed. I found I spend too much time dealing with problems and issues because whoever produced the software does not really care to ship working product or features that would make my life better. So now I prioritise choosing reliable software and companies that care for me, the user (at least more than their competitors).
You can imagine things like basically every Micro$oft product got dumped immediately. I now refuse my family requests to support their MS-powered machines and tell them if they want Windows they will have to support it themselves, I don't have time to deal with this crap.
I found by sweeping the stuff that gives me headaches I have improved my life and productivity even if I have to use some more expensive or sometimes functionally inferior products (and sometimes do it manually).
A summary search appears to show that the game was riddled with bugs and that killed some momentum. Given the amount of copies sold, it was still probably a success.
> Users don't care about technical debt.
>
> > Falsehoods Project Managers Believe About Technical Debt
If users care about something, then it's either a missing feature or a bug (/ UX flaw), _by definition_.
Sure, we could argue definitions, but over the years I've concluded that "technical debt" is only a useful label if it means "things that make development harder but don't impact the user interface."
Latency optimization? That's a UX improvement, not tech debt.
Supporting characters in existing customer names? Bugfix, not tech debt.
But technical debt slows everything down. I’ve seen first hand whole modules of a system ignored because nobody wanted to touch them. All the bugs in them can’t be fixed in 5 minutes.
Recently the way I approach choosing software has changed. I found I spend too much time dealing with problems and issues because whoever produced the software does not really care to ship working product or features that would make my life better. So now I prioritise choosing reliable software and companies that care for me, the user (at least more than their competitors).
You can imagine things like basically every Micro$oft product got dumped immediately. I now refuse my family requests to support their MS-powered machines and tell them if they want Windows they will have to support it themselves, I don't have time to deal with this crap.
I found by sweeping the stuff that gives me headaches I have improved my life and productivity even if I have to use some more expensive or sometimes functionally inferior products (and sometimes do it manually).