PATIENCE: █░░░░░░░░░ DEPLETED
A modern game costs two hundred million dollars and crashes on the title screen.
Games are slower than they have ever been. Not the frame rate (well, maybe the frame rate). Everything else. The launcher that updates before the game that updates before the shaders compile before the logo you cannot skip before the menu that takes four seconds to notice you pressed a button.
I am running a machine a thousand times faster than the ones that ran Quake and it takes longer to get into a match than it did in 1996.
Budgets went vertical and quality went sideways. Two hundred million. Three hundred? More? And the thing ships broken. Not "some rough edges" broken. Broken like the saves don't load, broken like the quest never fires, broken like an eleven gigabyte patch on day one that they have the nerve to call a launch.
I don't think developers want this. But I think there's a reason for all of it.
As teams got bigger, the cost of deciding anything grew faster than the cost of building. So the industry did what every large organisation does when deciding gets expensive. Process. Tickets. Sprints. Stand-ups about the stand-ups. Meetings about meetings.
I don't think process is wrong. In my experience, process gets inserted when something went wrong and everyone swore "that will never happen again!" The problem is nobody ever takes process out. So it accumulates, layer on layer, until shipping a one line fix takes three weeks and four approvals.
Process can be a black hole of productivity. Process can be draining. Process hurts folks trying to fix things or get shit done today. My friends at big studios are completely exhausted. They're not lazy. They're not stupid. They're stuck in a system that converts their talent, passion and creativity into meetings.
The other thing bigness does is dissolve responsibility and care.
When forty people have touched a feature, a bug belongs to nobody. It gets filed, triaged, deprioritised, assigned to a team who says it belongs to the other team, bounced back, closed as cannot reproduce, reopened by a player on a forum eight months later and goes unfixed. Nobody lied. Nobody slacked off. It is simply that at no point in that entire chain was it anyone's problem. This happens internally amongst development teams as well. Developers screaming into the void for help. Told to create a support ticket. Black hole. No communication. We'll get to it when we have a chance.
"Not my problem" is the most expensive sentence in this industry. It has cost more than any engine licence, any failed storefront, any cancelled project. And it is completely free to say. I've heard it and seen it time and time again.
But the thing that genuinely makes me want to chew glass is that somewhere along the way, we started caring more about the development experience than the players.
Choosing custom editor workflows that are constantly broken over fixing actual development issues. Esoteric analytics that were tirelessly developed that no one actually checks. Tools and pipelines that are used one time and abandoned forever. Don't get me started on the mythical beast that is "test driven development."
Every one of those is a small, reasonable and defensible decision. However, you do this four hundred times on a project and you wonder why it takes eight years and costs three hundred million dollars.
I am not going to pretend that being one goblin in a basement means I have all the answers. It is mostly just slower. I have no QA. No art department. No producer keeping me honest. I have a mountain of my own questionable code and a finite supply of evenings and weekends.
BUT.
Every bug in my game has exactly one suspect. Every slow load is my slow load. When something is bad there is no triage meeting. There is only me. Basement goblin. I'm the reason it sucks. It turns out to be the most productive thing about this whole deal.
Not my problem is a thing I cannot say. The engine is my problem. The crash is my problem. Those four seconds you spend staring at a menu are my problem, and they will keep being my problem until they are gone.
This might be an insane way to go about making games. But it works for me. I like it. I like the blame. I like the control. I like knowing how everything works. I understand this isn't scalable and that works for me.
Make it fast. Make it work. Fix the bug even when it isn't yours. Make something your problem and give a shit about what your players need. That shouldn't cost three hundred million dollars.
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GOBLINTEK is a two-goblin game studio. We own our shit.