Vykos, would you buy some crappy shoes that dont fit your daughter's feet just because you need to leave the shop earlier? I guess you just cant understand game design or design in general, because it's a very personal and emotional thing. Most mistakes are done in the heads and mouths, not on the hard drive or desk.
Once you are unhappy with something, you can't work effectively as you lose the fun and thus the work flow. Also psycholgical and interpersonal conflicts might make things difficult at some point. "communication" and "management" are the keywords baisically.
Nowadays game design has changed a lot because of the enourmous time and money pressure - I have asked a couple of big names in the business (Tom Putzki, Piranha Bytes founder, Phenomedia - Gothic1-3; Andreas Siuka, Ubisoft Lead designer - Siedler (the settlers)) that I met here in my uni, and none of them said he is really happy with his job. I mean, you are working all day long and in the end your game sucks because it full of bugs (Gothic 3 eh...)
No decent game dev can be happy if he has worked many years on a game that won't even get a 80% rating in the end.
Simply because you are doing the whole thing in order to reach people. Game design is about 2 things:
- the smiles and tears on the player's face
- the smiles and tears on the dev's face
Everyone forgets the 2nd...
Maybe Scawen is the happiest game dev in the world
He can do exactly the thing he wants to do, and like he wants to, without having to worry about any external people telling you what to do.
AND he is successful with that.
Of course you can come and say LFS cant be successful if it's never going to be released. Well, it isn't even released yet and they can already live from that
LFS is really like an adventure and Im quite sure even EA will learn from that way in a couple of years. Outsourcing and buying online are the future.
Anyway, do you really think someone leaves a company such as Lionhead, with a genious like Peter Molyneux in it, if he isn't 100% sure what he's doing?
Or rather, why he is doing what he is doing.
Now I said "Scawen" all the time, but actually I wanted to write "they" or "LFS"... but now Im too lazy to change that all over again