Same here, acknowledgement is a huge thing that needs to be done.
Are you claiming that Fatshark doesnât communicate, at all? Or only that they should communicate more?
This type of stuff is indeed unacceptable â but also ubiquitous and essentially unavoidable in almost every line of work. Time and cost overruns in construction! Those never happen. Predicting the future is a dicey business.
Fatshark probably thought they were adding extra time to their timelines. They may have been wildly optimistic. They may have incompetently overlooked something that another dev team would have spotted as something that would hold them up. They may have been tripped up by bugs they hadnât discovered yet. They may have been blindsided by something completely beyond their control. I donât know. If I did, weâd be in a better position to decide between being disappointed by timeline delays or disappointed and pissed off.
One more salient difference between game dev and tiling bathrooms, though, is that in your case you probably have one phone number and one e-mail for your client. Youâre dealing, essentially, with one person. You can have a relationship with that person and work to establish smooth communication and a mutual understanding. Itâs easy to manage.
Compare that to being a game dev on the internet. Itâs the equivalent of having a crowd of people having a rally at the mall downtown about some guyâs bathroom tiles, chanting âWE NEED ANSWERSâ. Except there are 20 rallies happening at any given time, all over the internet, at all hours. As soon as you give one group an answer another one is popping up to ask the same question but even more angrily. Itâs worlds more difficult to manage than your construction client.
Ideally, you point these groups to one person and one place, or close to it. You send stuff in newsletters. You have ultra-organized Twitch streams and you have uber-professional PR people working nonstop to manage spin, etc. Are Fatshark doing that? I think theyâre trying, but theyâre not there yet.
Are you sure thatâs what I was doing? I think itâs fair to criticize Fatshark for their missed deadlines and the quality/quantity of their communication. If you ask Fatshark whether they think their streams are top 5% in game dev, for example, Iâm sure theyâll agree they arenât.
The two points I wrote were both to illuminate for the OP why âdo more communicationâ might simply not be in the cards: 1) because Fatshark arenât built for it and 2) because itâs not as clear a âwin-winâ as it might seem.
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