De facto, You were a mecenate, who gave up money on an art project, which could or couldn’t take. It did take, sold millions of copies. It is an ongoing project, which will remain for at least a decade in construction (like Notre Dame). Or a passer by, who threw pocket change to a musician in the tube. Imagine how it looks when passer by turns around and says the song is “way worse than pink floyd of old, I want my money back”. That’s about how it looks from my angle. Forget it, the smartest man in the universe and his 10 quid/hour lawyer won’t squeeze a penny out of this one, judging from the quality of thinking on dispay.
As for the second part, it seems I am not the only one who could use education. Software got big. It isn’t whopping 1 megabyte of bug-free code any longer. Coding teams got huge. Ambitions lead to industrial zone, where modern works of gaming art have to cool off for years in development, because developers deal with feedback, change in industry trends, change of flow. It’s not a masonic conspiracy, which stemmed from popularization of broadband internet, it’s a necessity dictated by the mature market. Your hyperbolic example of a plane is weak analogy, because mechanics can’t attach a third wing on a plane mid-flight, while game developers constantly have to.
OK here goes.
If the busker was David Gilmour, and was playing with 8 broken fingers and cotton wool in his mouth, you still think he's get money? I doubt it - more likely there would be comments like "why the hell is David busking? He must be broke and he's clearly lost his edge".
DB has written some very good games, and sold them mostly bug free - he KNOWS HOW, but for reasons I privately suspect, he didn't.
If you think lawyers (or to be precise "Solicitors" if you are going to use GPB currency) are £10 an hour you've pretty much proven how out of touch you are. You're missing at least one zero, and the smartest guy in the world would naturally hire the smartest Solicitor, in which case you're going to need another one of these - *Hands Moriate another zero*.
Umm hate to break it to you but the official reports on the development lifetime of ED is SEVEN YEARS not 10 - as published by Frontier in thier own annual report, and we are already past year 4.
"isn't a whopping 1 mb of bug free code any longer" are you really actually kidding me? Games haven't been 1mb of code for 35 years and more - and as I said for the first 15 of those, they were, by and large bug free - and when I say bug free I mean the big ones - ones like... oh let's see - like launching from the Gnosis, during an event that was more than ONE MONTH in planning, and then HAVING IT FIRE UPON YOU, because some ....... person ...... didn't pay enough attention to the "no fire zone" while another person somewhere else forgot to add a prison colony nearby, so when you got destroyed by the Gnosis, you got shipped OVER ONE THOUSAND LIGHT YEARS AWAY, or here's another you can try on for size: Powerplay efforts GOING TO THE OTHER FACTION.
Both of those happened in the last 6 months. SIX MONTHS; three and a half years after the game was launched and you'd assume by now FDEv had managed to work out what they were doing.
MAJOR - GAME CHANGING / BREAKING BUGS.
That PowerPlay doozy should never have even made it out of the door - it should have been spotted and decapitated on sight, rather than being able to grab the keys, jump into the car and be halfway to Venezuela before someone noticed it had escaped and the car was missing. There should have been someone standing by the door, waiting and watching for any such problems.
No-one was, because the only other possible explanations are that they saw it and didn't care, or are so incompetant, they didn't recognise it for what it was, while it ran past them out the door.
IN. EX. CUSABLE.
Sheesh.
Oh and one last thing - game software isn't art at all - hasn't been for at least 25 years, pretty much ever since it became more about the money than the game.
The visionaries of yesteryear who were "all about the game and the journey, man" got handcuffed to thier chairs by the publishers who just wanted the money.
That happened not long before games started getting released with less and less QA.
Ask Chris Roberts, he'll tell you all about it, or Peter Molyneaux. He gets a bad rap for some poor decisions sure, but more than a few of those were pushed by the publishers, not his design vision.
I still play Black and White even now. Everyone should it's an excellent example of "just how far can we go with this?" in game design.
Here's a question for you: why is it that some of the most successful dev houses, having released games that are considered quintissential of thier time and regarded as "the games that took it to the next level" all gone? id Software: Bankrupt, Black Isle Studios: gone, Looking Glass Studio's: bankrupt.. The battlefield of game software development is littered with the corpses of giants, ground up by the machine that is publisher greed.
Shall I continue?
Oh, Lionhead Studios. Bankrupt.
"You know nuffin' Jon Snow".
Edit - oh and you completely missed my point about the plane - because the AUTOPILOT SOFTWARE (I did say so, and spelled it right as well) has NOTHING, to do with the fabric of the plane, but can still make it crash if it decides to do something other than that it was designed for, even if the input is correct.
The Powerplay bug is like inputting "cruise at 3,000 feet" into the autopilot, only for it to lock the controls and go into a vertical dive, and all you can do is watch while you crash.
Nothing at all to do with "adding a 3rd wing mid-flight".
I'm going for breakfast at Ikea - do try and give me a reply worth reading please.
Edit: and here's some more education for you: Vincent Van Gogh died penniless (so did most of the rest of them), and famously swapped a painting now worth millions "Sunflowers" for the cost of a meal and a bed for the night. THAT is the TRUE monetary value of art, nothing. REAL Art is about "the expression" - which is subjective to the artist, nothing more. An artist that creates a piece solely for the money, not including a commission, is NEVER happy about it (Unless he's Andy Warhol but that's another story), it's a means to an end that allows them to pursue thier REAL art, whatever that may be.
But don't take my word for it, ask any artist.
Oh and I didn't get my breakfast either, I forgot they don't do breakfast on Sundays.. dammit.
