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[Cray]

I for one would be quite interested in Miley Cyrus' DinoWars.

Yes, something like that could be a good, quick spinoff edition! Might work if you're seriously in it for cash aeiowu, just don't get sued

[Lurk]

In the 'commercial' game industry, this is quite normal. You spend a lot of time and effort on something, that ultimately, you get to understand only matters to you: producers don't care, company presidents don't care, they only want the product released, quality and fun are an afterthought. But once you realize this, you can concentrate on the quality of your individual work and organize it efficiently, to have energy to do other things at the end of the day, meaningful things. There comes a time in every creative endeavor when it's time to say 'it's finished, not perfect, just done', and start working on something else, keeping with you the lessons learned on the preceeding project. My chinese calligraphy teacher told me that for a traditional painting to be good, it needs to have 80% perfection. There will always be mistakes, and they become part of the piece's character .

[lordmetroid]

Mistakes are unacceptable!  :D

[Paul Eres]

wabi sabi is more perfect than perfect

[mirosurabu]

I would say making your game something that you can make money off of is NOT SELLING OUT!

Business common-sense will constrain their ideas, that's no-brainer. If they were ignoring business common-sense at first and then decided to make the game business-friendly (which usually means shaping the design significantly), they are selling out. Although the term sounds like something really bad, selling out has its good points besides bad.

Personally, if I was in great need of money I'd never try to earn it from game-making.

[Paul Eres]

I don't think there's all that many constrictions. I mean, any game can sell if it's good, no matter what is in it. Some games will sell more than others, but you can make basically any game you want, and if it's good, and your marketing's good, people will buy it. You could make a living making text adventure art-games if they're good enough and you're good enough at marketing.

[mirosurabu]

That's probably true. However, when I said "business common-sense" and "business-friendly" I thought about people who take no risks with game design and instead just choose the safest route. This may apply to many casual game developers. The graphics have to follow certain, verified trend, the gameplay should be simple-to-learn, everything should be obvious, etc. Not much different than mainstream scene. Cactus wouldn't be Cactus if he worked with this kind of constraints in mind.

Also, they (OP's team), as far as I could understand, blamed everything on game design, not on their marketing efforts.

[Dacke]

I personally can't enjoy games where I constantly have a gnawing feeling that other players - who can afford to spend more money - always will have an advantage over me. Consequently, I don't play such games. Is it wrong for you to sell out? Not really. You should do what you need to do. But for me, it will ruin the game

[aeiowu]

I think the biggest problem is spending that long on a flash game.

Yea I agree with you. Although we'll have to see how it all pans out after we release (soon). Though from a little experimentation with prototypey flash games and selling those off on FGL compared to the time drain (and emotional drain) of spending so long on a single game it's hard to make a case for that kind of commitment. At least for now.

[Snakey]

As I was reading that, it almost sounded like a Death March project.