I love running around like a headless chicken. It's my best joke at work and lightens up the dull meetings.

On that note, let's have a quiet remembrance in honor of Mike the Headless Chicken.

Allegedly told and allegator.

It's a virus! Anyone who's been in the same building as Obama is tarnished and forever afterwords will attempt to do evil whenever possible. Or worse, become liberal.

Shouldn't they then take these problems and present them to the funders of the game? Tell the paying customers of the problems and find out if changes are acceptable or not. Maybe find other solutions (ie, some games delay themselves and the customers are actually happy about it, see Project Eternity for example).

So many gamers hate online-only games, the devs can not be ignorant of that, they must know this would go over badly. To remain in the dark seems strange, as if the devs are caught up in their own small world where they've never played any non-PvP games in their lives, don't know any of their close friends who play offline games, or think that those players aren't worth keeping as customers ("care bears" or "not real gamers" or other idiotic stuff).

Where is the layer of management that is supposed to remain objective, keep the dev team on track, keep the investors happy, etc?

Passion for the games is great. But you also need at least some management with reality in mind, who keeps the customer and profits as priorities.

I say this as a developer, because when I develop something I get caught up in my own world and can lose sight of the bigger picture. I may deliver the best product ever but if it is a product that the customer does not want then what's the point?

They promised product X, got a lot of money for it, and are delivering product Y instead. Bait and switch. Somewhere along they line they got caught up in their own world and forgot about the customers who gave them the money. I'm only guessing, but I just have this feeling that some devs are thinking about making the game that they want even if it's not the game that the customers want.

If a product's direction needs to make a major change then it needs to be brought up before the board, and for kickstarter games the board are the funders.

Agreed. However if you lose the money that you can afford to lose, you still have the right to complain about it. And that's what people are doing. Telling them to stop complaining is kind of dumb. At the very least there's some moral obligation to warn potential customers to stay away from Frontier and its games.

Beware of gamers developing games. Too often you find them preferring their own game play style, ramping up difficulty, no bones thrown to casual players, and so forth. Then it gets defended as "by real games for real gamers" or something like that.

I get a sneaky suspicion this might fall into that category. They've got a "vision" of what they want, and damn the paying customers who say differently.

I mean isn't this part of the whole reason kickstarter games are popular, because they're supposed to listen to customers which is the opposite of what the big name game publishers do?

5 year olds are expensive. They have much higher medical expenses, as their parents are taking them too the doctor every few weeks for vaccinations, ear infections, sniffles. A twenty year old who never goes to the doctor and who is satisfied sharing a studio with three roommates and eating every night at Taco Bell is the best bargain.

An MS cert does not trump a good attendance star from grammar school.

I worry that this poor kid is being funneled into a bleak and dreary career path too soon in life.

I remember back in the 90s I asked the only IT guy at our small company who was Novell certified a very basic question about netware protocol as I had never used PCs before, and his response was "sorry, we didn't cover that in class."

It's a certificate. Does any employer actually treat these as important for anything other than grunt jobs?

Yes, the government could save a huge amount of money here on buying labels by only marking those few games which are not sexist.

I don't even have twitter or follow it. The hashtag only got the mainstream crowd to notice, whereas these issues had been building for a long time before the hashtag.

So, it's like movies that want opening weekend numbers but don't care at all if they collapse after that?