Yeah, this is why I roll my eyes whenever I see extremely harsh or smarmy critiques of indie games. People that worked on a game almost always know what the issues are, and nobody who puts up with the typical development cycle of a full game would ever want to make a bad game at the end of all their efforts involving preproduction, development, spending money to hire people to fill in the aspects they can't do themselves (like music), etc. People who make games these days make them because they want to make them. Unless you're looking at a cheap gag game or some of the shovelware quick buck phone apps on Switch's eShop, remember that you're experiencing someone's passion project that they're sharing with you. I'm working on more than one project myself right now but honestly even looking back at some of the silly freeware fangames I made as a teen, I would always be relieved seeing good feedback after months of agonizing over reception despite the amount of work I put in.
As someone who has had contact with a a handfull of indie devs...no, not everybody of them knows why their game is bad, or why something does not work. Its their child, they worked with a limited perspectiv for a long time on the game, and lack ....perspective in a lot of cases. And some are just on an egotrip.
Then you have those that are painfully aware of the shortcomings, but need to get them out to eat something. No problem with them, i get the problem.But i want play games just so that people can eat if they are not good enough to be fun to play.
And then you have the teams that have the funds/ambition to push it farther than most, and they bring the great indies. But people often have no idea how long and expensive some of those can be to make.
(also there is a nix between 2 and 3, where they need to push it out, but investt a lot of time afterwards to finish the game... i think blasphemeus was one of those where the team fixed most of the criticisms...or No Mans Sky)
And if we are not talking about indie devs:
There is a kompletly different dynamic in traditionallyproduced games. Developers and publishers/producers/suits. Ofthen the developers know what works and what not, but have people in charge that are aiming for some metrics, buzzwords, etc, or are working under someone that just has a bad taste (Other Ms Story...).
So while in most teams most of the stuff he said is true, there are still bad actors, people with lack of perspective, just bad gamedesign etc to be found, that is not contributed to "lack of time or money".
But most "game criticism" is just plain stupid, shure.
(But if im criticising Pokemon Shiled for its unfinished game, its not that im specifically criticising the developers, i know that they probably had way more ideas and bigger ambitions. No, its the higher ups that wanted this project to be released in a too short period, and pushed the team to cut everything that wasnt done and could be cut. They needed to do for the multimedia push? yeah...no. Looking at other RPGs, it was even without setbacks a to short period of development, when you also have to move to HD development like all other developers have done years ago)
