@DatonKallandor That's a profound amount of false equivalence you have there. "Lots of people who produced enduring works of art did not have happy or successful lives." Perhaps, but many did and do live happy and successful lives. The idea that creativity requires profound and unending suffering is misguided at best, damaging at worst. "That’s sad, but turns out we still prefer their tragically produced work to not having it and them being happy. " Speak for yourself. The fact that you believe it's right for people to suffer so that a piece of entertainment media fits your narrow definition of what's good is the most profoundly entitled twaddle I have ever read. You also seem to be conflating your own personal preferences with absolute objective worth in artworks. Again, you may not like Apex (A fact clear by your presence up and down this comments section compulsively pushing the idea that this game is a piece of shit) You have every right to dislike it, but many people really like it and see a lot of merit in its execution. It being "souless shovelware" exists in your eyes. "Would you rather there were more, commercially successful but irredeemably garbage, Transformers movies because those hard-working CGI artists got paid or more ,commercial flop but cinematic masterpiece, Blade Runners?" I'll take my cake and eat it thanks. The fact that one exists does not preclude the other. The abstract, developmental, orthodox model of creative works very much relies on this. This is also, again, false equivalence. It's true sometimes classics are not appreciated in their time or challenge norms so much they don't perform well mass market. But this is not a hard rule for any and all art. It's possible to make mass market masterpieces that perform well in that context, (die-hard, Half-life, Much of the MCU) it's also possible to produce smaller avant-garde pieces that have a smaller audience but introduce new ideas, it's possible to have any number of pieces that sit somewhere in between. Your views suggest a profound lack of empathy replaced instead with entitlement and cloying attempts to justify your misanthropic view of creativity. That's quite sad.

@DatonKallandor Valve were not struggling for income from their games before they hit on DoTa2, their internal problems and lack of development aren't the same thing we're discussing here. I too am disappointed that Unreal Tournament didn't get the support I would have liked to see go into it and yet I don't feel personally maligned by Epic for their choices. Unknown Worlds released a sudoku game so they could fund NS2, a game they still support today even though it has a tiny remaining player base and never sold (massively) well. They then used what money they had to take a gamble on a well crafted single player experience. Fortunately for them it did fantastically well. Lots of companies take on work you don't see a lot of publicity about to fund games. I used to work for a well known small(ish) studio in the UK. We did a ton of educational games most of which you will never have heard of, in order to fund work on a popular game you will definitely have heard of. It doesn't always happen you are right, but it's absurd to claim "Doesn’t mean it’s ever happened or will ever happen."

@Kolbex Got him. Nice "no u"

@KindredPhantom it took me to search for it to find it. Maybe it depends of your account profile.