alt Hacker NewsRight, if you look at say, Blue Prince, one of the most important "out of nowhere" type video game releases of 2025, the actual software engineering is trash. I'd fail code reviews for a lot of what was done, and there are cracks in the façade where a player will hurt themselves as a result - e.g. there's a bug where animations overwrite so you get short changed on the resources you were gathering when you go "too fast". Some of the intended features, especially in the 1.0 release, just don't work for reasons like somebody typo'd a variable name, or they forgot how a function worked.
But the game is amazing and that's what matters. Nobody wants to play six hours of carefully engineering tasteless crap, let alone (as many did with Blue Prince) six weeks. The 1.0 Blue Prince game was already excellent, unless you run into a nasty save corruption bug on PlayStation, whereas a game made Jon's way might be a soulless waste of your life even though perhaps the engineering is "better" in some sense.
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That's true, a game like Blue Prince doesn't suffer from bad engineering because of the type of game it is. There are plenty of other games, like Cyberpunk 2077, where the lack of engineering made an otherwise good game unplayable and unenjoyable.
The fact remains that Blue Prince would have been more enjoyable for those people who did see those bugs had some time been spent on better engineering.
I think this is one of the first lessons independent developers quickly learn. I think we're initially geared to want to make beautiful, elegant, and technically pleasant code because it's our thing - it's like how e.g. a guitarist is going to want to play a song other guitarists would be impressed by. You spend a million hours perfecting Classical Gas, while Smoke On The Water goes down as one of the most iconic tracks and riffs in history.
I'm not endorsing slop, but rather advising against the equal but opposite.
I'd add Dispatch as a more recent example of this. It's a buggy mess for such a simple game (I encountered multiple game breaking bugs in one play-through) but its reviews are overwhelmingly positive.
The idea you have to pick between reasonable engineering and fun is a false dichotomy. Of course not every game will have the time budget to fix every unintended feature but your example game would have been more enjoyable (especially for the mentioned Playstation users) if the code had been written a bit better.