[diggan]

> Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere

Of course everybody sees that, and many can't stop thinking about those things when working on their own project, trying to fight the demons that say "This is a huge waste of time" and so on.

But what is the point of bringing that up when someone explicitly asks for examples of small teams with big success?

[stale2002]

> But what is the point of bringing that up when someone explicitly asks for examples of small teams with big success?

The point here is to explain how much of a risk these small teams are making.

So that is the relevance of the example. It shows how much more difficult and risky these successes are, by pointing out that even if someone puts in a lot of work, it is actually more impressive because of the large risk.

This is relevant because the sub thread/topic was this:

"Now that's hard. I have beyond massive respect for anyone that's even attempted it, let alone been successful doing it."

Therefore, bringing up failures or the fact that there is large risk, supports this point that someone else brought up, which is that it is both hard and deserving of "massive respect".

So that is why someone would bring it up and why it is definitely relevant and correct to bring it up, in response to this point.

[nightski]

There are countless AAA teams that fail at game dev as well. It's just a really hard industry to garner success in. I'm not sure team size is the most relevant factor.

[bee_rider]

Hmm. I think we’d have to define what we’re measuring to think about what’s a relevant factor. AAA games with massive budgets seem to usually have to come up with some really annoying live service business models nowadays, so I’d tend to guess increasing the team size is a negative factor.

OTOH there are lots of little indie games… I mean, how are we going to count attempts, right? As an obviously not to be included extreme case, lots of games come out with a map editor, in some sense playing around with a map editor is “making a game.” But we wouldn’t want to include all the custom Warcraft 3 maps that were made as failed businesses, haha.