Yeah I don't understand peoples obsession with continuous development. I understand there's more competition now, but counter-strike 1.6 stood on it's own legs for a decade without meaningful updates. If you find a new game that appeals to you more, then go play that. Same with Early Access, if you don't want to buy an incomplete game, don't buy early access titles. Of course it would be nice if developers communicated any development breaks or pauses, but they don't really owe you anything.

Factorio too.

The DLC was... Good...

Yep. The whole story to me was a textbook example of "this isn't how this works, at all". And the only way to prevent it is to spread stories like this far and wide so that everyone who gets a decent shot at success doesn't do the same stuff.

What stuck out to me was:

Mochi went on to explain that momentum for Rise of Industry dropped off, so he tried to "hold it together with duct tape and 80 hours a week." While the studio hoped patches would help, "it never stabilised," and Mochi’s health and personal life were heavily impacted – he even faced losing his home.

There was a similar story about... I think the big asian market crash in the 90s or something, where one of the traders thought he could just buy enough stock that his action alone, the demand he "created" would stop the market from crashing and lessen the loss. But of course all he did was take all his company's funds and threw them into a black hole.

It's understandable as a panic reaction. But... yeah.

Back to the story, at that point, what was even the expectation of what the publisher would do? Also throw more money in? More advertising for the game that had a big moment, captured the audience that it can capture, but is not working well enough to keep that attention?

Go above and beyond the contract? Nobody will do that, that's why the contract exists.

Anyway, I hope the dev is doing ok, I don't mean to hate on the person and truly wish him happiness and success.

Another viable path is early access for 'free' testing and a dripfeed of a few sale, and then effectively a second release. Have your cake, and eat it, if you can live off a small slice initially.

It frontloads a lot of 'post release' development devs might want to do. Not that its easy by any means, but it is kind of a 'hack' since storefronts will treat your existing game as a new release.

Sorry! for reasons I can't explain, be that ad blocking or old incompatible browser or because I accidentally agreed to them already, I'm not seeing the wall.