The framing of "a professional game developer.. job is to ship a product" is very indie. Places like ID, Bethesda, Volition (RIP) etc.: like a hundred people worked on the product and many did not own shipping the product. When you have tech team of 10 - 30 people whether you should make your own engine was more of a question. Lots of very popular games are made on their own tech.

Also, like what do you mean by engine? Minecraft was made with LWJGL.

And Minecraft physics are limited to AABBs and rendering was flat unlit quads until quite recently. But they definitely couldn't have done the infinite cube world easily on Unity or Unreal, so in that sense it was necessary to build their own.

Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells, so in the long run it is not a bad investment.

If your goal is to sell a game in 3 months, sure, but not even Unreal Engine will magically turn a rushed game into a good product.

90% of the development time is making a fun game in the first place, and you’re on your own there.

>> Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells,

That is exactly how I perceived the game industry to be before I worked in it. Now I know that there are many objectively excellent or even innovative or influential games that do not sell, or also do not sell well enough to support their development costs.

Could you give an example of something excellent and either innovative or influential that did not sell well? It’s a question I have sought to answer myself. Especially if you can find one that doesn’t take development costs into account.

So I’m looking for an “objectively” (figuratively) excellent game, that has not sold many copies at all. A game on steam that should be popular but isn’t. Do you have any examples?

I’ve worked on a bunch of games that have been canned despite being crafted with love and innovative in their own ways. It’s not enough to just be well crafted, especially if you need to pay the salaries of 10 people for 1-2 years to make the game.

To cite one, Okami, innovative gameplay, striking art very poor sales, they made most of their sales after the fact after the studio closed and the game got ported to other systems than the PS2.

Commenting just so I can check later what he comes back with.

Wildgate

Sorry I did not reply with an example earlier, but InvaildorTaken just provide a perfect one. I was talking to some of the creators of this game last week. They are the people who made some of the biggest hits at Blizzard. They are super proud of that game and IMO it's really good. You can nitpick it, but you can nitpick hit games too.

Did not sell enough to justify the cost.

> Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells, so in the long run it is not a bad investment.

This entire saga of XBOX fka Microsoft Gaming is proof to the contrary

the entire failure of AAA game development in recent years has been years and years of craftsmenship wasted on games that arent fun.

I mean there's a point when you can go "why bother selling a game when i can learn to algo trade and maybe get hired by a major investment bank" if you really want to push the logic of all money no creativity to its inevitable end point. There would be no gaming industry. There would be no art. There would be no music. There would be no sports. There would be no movies. All of that is wasted profit potential against simply being involved directly in finance and in trading assets, preferably rooted in underlying material commodities.