Hmm, you do come across as callous, although I realize that may not have been your intent. I'd like to point out a few things.
More than that though, he kept stringing people along with saying the reason he hadn't done anything for months/a year was due to mental problems
This is false. Just going to get that out of the way first. His "time off" for mental health equated to about three months of those six years - or about 4.2%, and he tried to work through that time as well, albeit without making much progress.
Most of the time was spent trying to get the engine to be capable of doing what he needed it to do - which is a good deal more than any commercially-available engine is capable of. Little surprise there. Josh is a single programmer and games can (and have) been delayed for years due to having to switch engines. Par time for an engine switch is 2-4 years, and more if you're trying to port content you already have. Team Fortress 2 is a good example here - a game that took around eight years to release due to engine changes and redesigns.
Moving on:
$190,000 divided by 6 years of development is about $31,500 a year, which is pretty close to minimum wage. He also spent up some of his personal savings, including at least one loan from family members that I know of. Not mentioned: he had at least two different "employees" he hired to help with the code - and their fees would've been taken out of that. If we assume he paid them... say... $20000 a year (for a total time of roughly one year each, that's down to only $150,000, which brings his yearly "wage" down to $25,000.
In short, he didn't "walk away with everyone's money". He spent it very carefully and there simply isn't anything left. He spent it all trying to finish the game.
The difference between him and your "smash and grab" Kickstarters is that he actually tried. I can attest to this personally; I had access to his Assembla and could see the pages of commits he did. This isn't like he spent three months working and then said "Meh, it's too hard, I'm just going to keep the rest of the money and refund a couple people if I have to, sorry guys!" He spent six years working on this project full-time to the best of his ability.
He quit college to chase his Ultimate Dream, and he's come away with nothing except the knowledge that he gave it everything he had, essentially wasted six years of his life, and he
still failed, disappointing thousands of people in the process. That's got to feel pretty miserable, don't you think? That's why people are reacting with empathy. Anyone that would kick someone while they're down is a dick, and there are many more good people in this world than assholes.
As a developer, he needs management and direction if he's going to produce anything. He's an exceptionally "good" person, and a brilliant programmer, but he's a poor solo developer. He would do much better working under someone else to produce part of a project, I think. The engine rewrites are understandable - he lacked the experience to know "how powerful" of an engine he would need - but he often got distracted with rabbitholes, which is what I'm referring to here. (He was also
very overambitious, but that's also about lacking experience - which he has hopefully gained a good deal of from this.)
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Topic: Limit Theory (Read 18705 times)