| I got your point. Lets say you develop a hobby for making furniture. You start developing Tables. You read a DIY book and start making stuff. In the meanwhile, you make mistakes, you don't put as many nails where there are necessary. You put more gum than what is necessary. Your finished product is definitely a table, but you've made is so badly it could hardly last for a couple of years. A carpenter down the street comes down to you shop and gives a detailed critique of what he thinks is wrong with your table. Now you both go and try to sell your story, You have a table and he just has a critique. The user comes and sees your table and listens to his critique. He decides something that exists is better that just talk. Remember the user is seeing the table only, he didn't see you making it. He decides to go with your table despite the carpenters critique. He orders 50 more tables from you to be made based on what you showed it to him. Now the professional carpenter can argue about how bad and how many technical deficiencies exist in your tables. But you know what, the user won't even understand that language. Because, Shipping is a feature. And the one's who ship almost always win. Sometimes even if they ship crap.
That is what is happening here. |
But to use your analogy, the man has ordered 50 tables, not knowing they're likely to fall apart. The seller never revealed his lack of experience. At the end of it, we're just going to say caveat emptor?
That just doesn't sit well with me.
And I definitely agree with you that shipping stuff is #1, but I'm not sitting around idly by criticizing the work of makers. Every dollar I've made in the last 8 years has been from games, and only 2% of it or so from contract work. My own attempt at building a community around preorders has been more successful:
http://www.underthegarden.com/
And I'd made 12 commercial games, some that set me up financially for years, before I felt comfortable being in a position to take peoples money before they've played the product.