Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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> how could you not know that this would have a major impact?

Anybody starting a major project will be ignorant about some important things. It's impossible to do anything interesting and know everything up front; if you could know everything, then that would mean it had been done a zillion times before and therefore not be interesting.

There's also a strong selection bias. The kinds of people who don't take chances? They don't become entrepreneurs. They don't bet years of their lives on projects in hit-driven industries. Those who do take chances already know that so many of the things that previously seemed impossible or dangerous to them worked out to be fine.

So nobody should ever, ever, ever not start something because they don't know everything. The trick to successful entrepreneurship is to test your big risks early, so that your failures are small and recoverable, rather than late and fatal. Here their mistake wasn't underestimating the impact of 3D. It was in not testing their assumption before the public launch of the Kickstarter.

All you have to do is look at the budget, schedule, and people count of any game ever. This is not secret information (big picture numbers, anyway). Okay, so maybe EA is non-optimal due to corporate hoo haa, and a lean team can do more. That doesn't begin to account for a budget of 50K replacing a 100+ person, 1+ year death march effort.

I get the sense that the author considered AAA games to be largely overwrought and needlessly complicated, which for his purposes was probably true. I suspect that the team mistook "can be simpler" for "can be simple". In that light, I think the error in judgement is understandable. Humans have multitudinous ways of tricking themselves into believing the things they would like to believe.

One has to be very careful about conclusions based on the assumption of someone else's ignorance.

There are a lot of people who spend lots of money doing something in a stupid way (look at big software companies), but even they have an underlying reason: it's difficult to pick good programmers and value them accordingly unless all your managers are also programmers (and who picked them?).

When you say, "The normal approach to X is stupid; we're going to do things differently," you have to understand how the normal approach came about so that you can avoid ending up there yourself regardless, and also so that you can avoid whatever problems it adapted to avoid.

There are situations when assuming by default that other people are reasonably intelligent is a bad or dangerous idea--while driving, for instance, or during basically anything involving casinos or Black Friday. But when a market governs a motivation as powerful as money and is sufficiently discerning, you'd better start really questioning whether those people are actually stupid or you just don't understand what they're doing.

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