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Comment by zzalpha | Hacker News Reader

So, basically like every other artform.

Be it indie music, indie movies, or various physical artforms, unless you win the lottery by hitting it big (of which a significant factor is pure luck), you ain't gettin' rich.

Is this surprising to anyone?

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Game development is likely much more meritocratic than painting. Quality is objective, and varies greatly from game to game.

Quality is objective? I don't think so, not unless you mean something different by "quality" than most people.

Quality in video games is certainly more objective than in painting. There are a lot of aspects of a video game that are not fully subjective: does it have a control scheme that feels good and generally works, does it run well, does it have a reasonable difficulty level or on-ramp for learning to play it, etc.

In judging painting, you don't end up with a lot of complaints about things like "I like the way it looked but it kept falling off of my wall", whereas if you have an unstable game...

"Reasonable difficulty level" is not something objective. It depends greatly on who plays the game. Whether the game looks good is as subjective add judging painting, whether it sounds good as judging music. One can dislike game look and it can spoil his experience the same way painting style can.

There is objective quality in painting as well, such as the proper application of technique. And those things you mention about games seem fully subjective to me. A more objective property would be "fails to run" or "crashes often", which cannot happen to a painting.

If you find your self using the words "feels good" in a sentence you are very much on the subjective side of things. Likewise terms like "generally works", "runs well" and "reasonable difficulty" will all mean different things to different people. Objective items might be things like uses 4xMSAA, is presented in the first person and uses 'X' to jump. Even still once you consider how these choices effect the game quality you are straight back to subjectivity.

Painting can equally be criticised on technical merit, and as with games that can still be very subjective even though many would like to pretend otherwise.

Uh, no. Preferences spread is higher among games then among paintings.

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