| > The music indsutry is well aware of a phenomenon of a "one-hit wonder". He made two hit games, Witness was released 7.5 years later. > Within a week of release, Blow stated that sales of The Witness had nearly outpaced what Braid had done during its first year of release. > The Witness is widely regarded as one of the best games of the 2010s. The game appeared on 'Best of the decade' features from IGN,[103] Polygon,[104] NME,[105] CNET,[106] and National Post.[107] Edge considered the game the 22nd-best game of all time in 2017 Calling him "one-hit wonder" simply has no basis in reality.
He's at minimum a two-hit wonder. > it was most likely not as groundbreaking as Braid, considering that he chose Braid instead of The Witness for a remaster. Now you're making shit up on the spot to make an argument.
Think for a second will you, how exactly would he remaster Witness? Braid Anniversary Edition was announced on 2020,
at which point Witness would merely have been ~4 year old game. Braid was also made for a 720p console, the Xbox360 Xbox Live Arcade service, so remake atleast makes some sense. > The question I'm interested in is: why would anyone listen to what the man _says_ if his own preaching makes him lose money? What exactly is he _preaching_? Not what you have cooked up in your mind, but actually _preaching_? Why would anyone pay attention to the man who has made TWO hit games in a row, and a third one in his own programming language (that has inspired countless other programming languages like Zig and Odin), yes, why indeed people would listen to an exceptional guy who has repeatedly demonstrated competency and delivered results, whilst always putting it all on the line? Can you make atleast one hit, not two, just one? Or anything of note? No you can't, you can do nothing, that's why you don't have the "luxuries" and people don't listen to you, but pay attention to him. You might not like it, but it is what it is. And you like to comfort yourself with the thought that you don't have some sort of unearned "luxuries", because otherwise you would do great things. But the reality is that he's exceptional and you're not. Paul Graham has this wonderful article on this topic:
https://paulgraham.com/fh.html |
That the game development industry requires a new programming language. So far, the evidence for that is slim. (I mean, metaprogramming with #run is cool, I'm also fed up with cmake. But surely we don't need to throw away all of our C++ tooling for that? Nah, we probably need something more incremental.)
> Calling him "one-hit wonder" simply has no basis in reality. He's at minimum a two-hit wonder.
Okay, I've been corrected. The Witness also sold really well. So he's a two-hit wonder, he clearly had developed a process to make great-selling indie games. I admit that, I admire that. (I only said good things about the guy anyway, why you would call me a "hater" is beyond me.) But now, he deviated from this process. His primary goal now is clearly not to create a good game, but to promote Jai.
> why indeed people would listen to an exceptional guy who has repeatedly demonstrated competency and delivered results, whilst always putting it all on the line?
Because there are limits to everyone's competence. It's like a generalized Peter's principle - being successful in one area doesn't mean you'll succeed in all others that you put your hand in. Even John Carmack didn't really succeed in rockets.
After all, the game dev industry is showbiz. Its ultimate goal is entertainment. JBlow is an entertainer, first and foremost. There are a lot of musicians and actors more influential than JBlow, does that mean I won't be a fool if I listen to their opinions on anything more important than what to eat for breakfast? No, not really. And in the same way, not a lot of people will choose Jai for programming, not in the next 20 years for sure.
> Can you make atleast one hit, not two, just one? Or anything of note?
No, absolutely not. I'm actually the most useless creature of all, good for nothing (other than keeping you engaged, apparently). You got me. And I'm not even trying. I'm not trying to preach for anything, develop new industry approaches or whatever. I'm just humbly making a point: but even if I weren't the most useless, I wouldn't be able to reach the JBlow's heights. Even if I had the same set of skills that JBlow had in 2008. For example, a notable part of the success of Braid was thanks to a contract with Xbox Live Arcade, and where is XLA now? The world has changed. The market has changed. The audience's needs have changed. Becoming an indie dev of such caliber now requires a different set of skills, one that a single person might not even physically have.
At some point, you'll have to admit that (1) it's not only the qualities and the hard work that brought JBlow to where he is, but also sheer luck, and therefore (2) yes, it's a luxury. If you don't believe in (1), well, okay then. But if you agree with (1), from that (2) trivially follows. If it doesn't for you, then it's purely semantics, I guess.