I've gradually got to thinking that gaming is a field that is extremely poorly understood(even by enthusiastic practitioners like myself), and that it is why it

I've gradually got to thinking that gaming is a field that is extremely poorly understood(even by enthusiastic practitioners like myself), and that it is why it can so easily turn into an destructive tarpit. The problems start at some extremely base assumptions of concept and focus - stakeholders will often treat a game as a branding exercise akin to a toy, just on a larger scale. Or they might conceive of it like a movie, with a Hollywood-style marketing push. Or it might be treated as "entertainment software," with a focus on having the best technology and the most features. All of these are not really correct, but we can fool ourselves into thinking they're correct because entities outside of the industry(namely, IP owners and other hardware/software manufacturers) will bring their money and their world-view/assumptions to the table, and through sheer trial and error game devs have found a few ways to satisfy these stakeholders and make something that can potentially turn a profit, even though the historical record indicates that the "value" the stakeholders brought to the table usually wasn't a contributing factor in the biggest hits. But once you start down that path, the top-down directive forces the development team to start doing unnatural things that work against product viability and realistic ship dates. Soon, everyone's dissatisfied and it just becomes a hellhole where the team works as individuals, takes their paychecks, and "looks out for number one." But a lot of people want to work in the industry, and they'll take bad money over no money. It's the same problem as in startups as a whole - find an original, scalable game concept. Work on making it marketable. Then you can start spending big to make a refined, feature-heavy implementation.