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PotentHerbs said:

Rooting for these games to fail is rooting for developers to lose their jobs. That's the business side of things.

That shouldn't be the case. As an engineer I know failure is the best learning experience. And it works often enough:

I've played a game named Craftopia a few years back. It had some crafting mechanics and a world, but overall not much in a way of a goal or coherent idea about it. But the developer PocketPair did go on to make another game, Palworld. I can clearly see how similar it is to Craftopia, major gameplay mechanics are similar or outright the same. But all the stuff that blows about Craftopia is fixed and the added mechanics and goals add so much to it - and it was a hit.

We all celebrated Larian Studios and Baldur's Gate 3. But lets not forget the path Larian took. They made a lot of games, and most of them met an unethusiastic audience. Even outright cancelled games that never saw the light of day. Larian had often to resort to working on games of other studios as support. Yet they learned along the way and all that experience did end up in Baldur's Gate 3.

No Man's Sky was a mess on release. Incomplete and the main game was mostly boring. But instead of giving up they sat down and fixed it. And the game is now a pretty good game, dare I say the best space game I played.

The common thing here is: all these devs had the room to continue after failure, to learn from it, to form that experience into a better game next time (or improve the same game in case of NMS). Yet Firewalk is denied this learning experience. And that is not on gamers, that is on Sony. They don't allow Firewalk to learn and turn into a better studio with a better game next time. And my guess the failure is mostly due to Sony decisions like price and live service model.

I guess a lot of that is down to budget. You don't easily walk away from a 200 million failure (or possibly more). But again: that is on Sony. Why not start with a smaller budget and smaller game with an unproven and new studio. Sony did that once upon a time: they had games like Flower, Parappa, Gravity Rush and so on. Small experiences. How many similar games were cancelled or uncussessful? With such small budget it is easy to forget a failure. And these games still allow the studio to learn and grow.

So no, wishing a game to fail because we dislike the direction it takes should not mean that the devs lose their job. That is a corporate decision, and it is bad as it prevents studios to build up experience and good workflow.



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