> In my experience, if people want what you are making, 9/10 times you can survive the "bad" production process, due to the fact that even if project 2x-3x over

> In my experience, if people want what you are making, 9/10 times you can survive the "bad" production process, due to the fact that even if project 2x-3x over budget, the market will easily 10x-100x initial investment lifetime. (Emphasis mine.) But this is the point, isn't it? If people want what you are making. But how do you know they want it? If you already have a successful franchise, it's easier, but many games don't, and with a well known franchise there's often an incentive not to be _too_ innovative (I'm looking at you COD, FIFA, Assassin's Creed, etc.). For most games, if you're building something that simply isn't fun then you should stop, and ideally you want to stop early in the process so you can spend your time and money on something else. The issue I have with your conclusion is that in a very specific set of circumstances it's true, but not a useful observation. Look at it like this: the PS2 has over 2500 titles and you know full well that a lot of them were costly to produce, yet are still absolute bilge. You also know that there are a lot of great games in there that didn't succeed commercially. So you need to hit sweet spots on multiple axes, and you need to de-risk on all of those as early as possible to succeed. You _might_ get lucky even with a bad and overly expensive production process for something that people really want[1], but it's a very high risk to take, even if you don't end up at the extreme of a Daikatana or a Duke Nukem Forever. [1] I wonder if something like Half Life 2, which was quite heavily delayed, might fit this category.