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Comment by furyofantares | Hacker News Reader

What I think happens in situations like these (from experience) is that the team is trying as hard as they can to prevent shutting down. And they either believe they'll succeed, or believe they can't succeed without boosting the expectation that they'll succeed by explicitly claiming they aren't shutting down.

If you say, both to the public and to the team, that you might shut down but you're not sure yet, that's as good as shutting down. And if there are rumors about shutting down, because it's close to happening, then you may have to address it. And you may believe that the only chance you have of not shutting down is to tell everyone that you aren't shutting down.

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I like this statement. It doesn't imply ill-will such as intentional lying or selfish intent as most other posts do. This statement simply shows that people are trying to make their projects succeed in a complicated environment.

From my experiences, most people are doing what they think is right. We should take more time understanding why people think what they are doing is right, even when we may perceive the action as immoral or wrong.

If management isn't committed, it's still a lie to say they are.

Morals matter even when they are inconvenient.

> Morals matter especially when they are inconvenient.

Yes. There's a Japanese podcast (rebuild.fm) where one of the recurring guest (Hak) is from a game dev background and was probably assigned to Stadia. He never said it explicitely but from the conversation you would guess.

One of their discussion was on how much commitment was crucial in the game dev world. Devs on all sides (platform, libraries, actual game) would put their skin in the game and gamble time and money but also personal energy to make something successful, and there was an expectation that all participant would stick together even as the future gets bleaker (what comes to my mind is Nintendo supporting and pushing the Wii U for a while, even as it was a clear failure, or Sony keeping the Vita alive as much as they could)

Your reputation as a platform maker gets a serious hit if you're ready to quit the minute your forecast gets dark, and game devs never really forget this kind of things, unlike other more opportunistic ecosystems.

I kinda hope the Stadia team could move on outside of Google to a more fitting company..

Games really take 1-2 years to develop, minimum. And the expertise in game mechanics is hard to come by - a really good developer/designer who can deliver consistently fun games is likely to stay in the industry for a long time.

So this does make a lot of sense. Huge time commitment for deliverables + ultra specialist roles and expertise = the important industry people have long memories.

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