I have my fair share of crazy takes too

I can’t make professional looking cakes. I can make a regular cake. But I can sure tell you how wrong you are if you think cakes are just water, flour and eggs and shouldn’t cost $50.

Wait, you add flour and eggs to your cake water?

and yet, if that same chef is an award winning baker with decades of experience producing not only elite cakes, but also the machinery to bake elite cakes, who's more likely to be correct? the amateur? nah.

Yes, because the professional is saying something wrong and the amateur is saying something right.

If there is some uncertainty in the answer, maybe you have a point. But people can just be wrong.

and yet it's the amateur claiming there is no uncertainty. no offence but i don't see why your opinion would hold any water here.

I'm sure award-winning bakers produce a somewhat steady output of elite cakes, not only 2 cakes that each took a team to make, and one machine that's still just a prototype. Doesn't feel like an apt comparison here.

that's an absurd take. Rockstar has only produced a handful of elite cakes with a massive team, are they not an elite game studio? volume isn't in question here. 3 elite cakes produced by a tiny studio is elite. braid, the witness, and ootss is an elite catalog of indie games. don't let your hate of the man blind you.

I don't know the man, let alone hate him. But after reading the comments here and looking up his career, it certainly sounds like the teams he was part of built elite things, while he speaks as though he single-handledly built elite things - there's quite some difference there.

Probably bad example. Producing machinery to bake elite cakes would be getting as deep into artisanal crafting as you can get.

Professional cooking is not any less art (as opposed to a quality process) than amateur. I'd instead listen to the chemical process engineers in food space, who - guess what - may just say the cakes shouldn't cost anywhere near to $50 :).

It's hard to argue with analogies, but I'll give you mine.

It is more like the guy who can paint very good landscapes would start criticising every oscar category from producing to sound design, telling that they have 0 idea what they are doing, and he would do it better. "Why the credits of Transformers are 5 minutes long with hundreds of people, you don't need more than 50 people to make such movie"... This is how Blow often sounds to me.

But they basically are, and in this household we bake a lot. It's not really on topic, but why TH should a cake cost 50 bucks? In an industrial environment they should take maybe 10 minutes of manual labor, if that much.

I think the idea is: He has not made anything comparable to the stuff he talks about. But he thinks he has. And he makes others believe he has.

All of Braid, The Witness, and Order of the Sinking Star are excellent video games. Granted, that's 3 pieces of software over about 20 years (as well as his programming language, which is perhaps interesting but still unfinished and unproven), but it's still the case that Blow has actually produced valuable software artifacts I am happy to have paid money for. This isn't to say that his opinions about software are necessarily correct, especially software that isn't similar to video games; but I don't think it's fair to say that he's accomplished nothing comparable to what he talks about.

His games don't do anything revolutionary. Writing game engines the way he does is mostly refining existing ideas. I learned a lot from the RAD Game Tools people, but shipping 3 relatively small games in 20 years is the opposite of credibility here. Software moves at a much greater pace.

which are... what? 2 indie games and an obscure language? why do we care exactly?

Three. Three indie games. "Braid" in 2008, "The Witness" in 2016 and "Order of the Sinking Star" in 2027.

It appears to be taking Jon longer to make each game three years to make Braid, seven years to make The Witness, more than a decade to make OOTSS, though doubtless he will say that Jai (or whatever he decides that language should be called) held up OOTSS and somehow it would simultaneously have taken longer in C++ and yet it took so long because he didn't want to use C++.