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Step by step:

>There is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person) to push the boundaries of the technology in a meaningful way.

This is what he said. The post is about succeeding in the market as an indie developer, so pushing the boundaries of technology is not very relevant, as that's not the only way to succeed with making indie games.

>You cannot make a game as radical and captivating as DOOM was.

OK, maybe true, maybe false, still irrelevant as succeeding in the market today doesn't require DOOM-level success.

>You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer by getting it to run at 60Hz.

Again, irrelevant, because the post is about succeeding in the market, and there are multiple ways to succeed in the market, most of which do not involve technological boundary pushing.

Do you now see my point or not? The issue in contention is that he is fixating on the example of id in the past to make factual statements about reality today ("There is very little opportunity today for any team") without looking at the current market and the evidence that exists in it to the contrary. He makes multiple such wrong statements, which I quoted in the post you replied to.

>But marketing effectiveness. Which is closely related to marketing spend.

Marketing effectiveness is not closely related to marketing spend on the Steam market for indie games. You can't buy your way to the front page of Steam. Either your game is good and people buy it, play it and share it, or it isn't and then the algorithm will not promote it. There are many things you can and should do to try to nudge the algorithm your way, but by far the best is having a genuinely good game. If the game's quality isn't good you'll mostly be wasting money if you try to approach it with the marketing mindset you have.

>Even for an exceptional game, getting traction in the market is far harder than it used to be.

It's actually easier than ever because very few games are exceptional, as has always been the case. The offering of exceptional released games doesn't increase just because the total number of released games does. If there suddenly was an AI tool that let anyone finish a game very easily, you still wouldn't get a significant increase in exceptional released games because there aren't that many exceptionally creative people in the world.

>There is very little opportunity today for any team (let alone individual person)

>You will not attract players to your (now generic) platformer

>but the people you want to buy them (let alone play them) aren't going [...] to buy and try your weird little games.

>The market is saturated. The market being saturated pushes it to be (even more) hit-oriented.

These are the things you said. I'm simply saying they're all wrong and there's plenty of evidence, in the present, right now, as to why they're wrong, as I mentioned in my previous reply. Consider the last one, "the market is satured and it pushes it to be more hit-oriented". I posted an example of a small indie team consistently releasing games and succeeding without having had any super huge hits. You don't have to reply anymore if you don't want to, it's just that you posted things that are wrong, and I felt the need to correct them.

>I'd probably agree, but I'm not sure who is calling all of them exceptions or what doing so would be an excuse for.

The excuse is basically most replies in this thread, yours included. They all take the shape of "yea, but this idea is wrong because [the market is saturated/the issue is discoverability/no one wants to buy your little games/you're better off at a normal job] and so on. All of these are defeatist mindsets that people use as an excuse to not try, and they also happen to be wrong, as the examples shown in the article as well as the ones I posted show.

>It also was framed heavily around John Romero and id, which is what I was talking about in that paragraph.

The article clearly uses id as an example of a broader point and ends the post by bridging into the present situation. Talking about what people should do in the present, which you did, while ignoring present evidence and focusing only on the past sounds like poor thinking, doesn't it?

>No way. Fucking hell, Valve. Sort your shit out. How many thousands of hours have been wasted because of this?

This is to prevent abuse. Some games will have 1000s of achievements as a feature, because gamers like games with lots of achievements (and because Valve kinda encourages that with some of their store features), so forcing people to do it manually is a way to decrease that kind of activity somewhat.

No one needs to explain anything. I transact in it and it works, therefore it is an efficient mechanism for value transaction. If you don't want to participate then fine, but as the person you replied to said, evidently enough people do.

No, it actually is that simple. Recreational drugs that significantly change your state of mind and that create chemical dependencies (this includes alcohol), or that permanently make you mentally ill are, in fact, bad, and their careless use should be shunned.

If you're prone to it (family with history of mental illnesses) you shouldn't use it no matter your age. Why risk it? Something like schizophrenia is no joke and ruins your life completely. And if you don't find meds that work for you you literally can't fix it and go back to normal.

>You mean you are going to prefer anecdotal evidence over scientific research?

Yes, if it has the potential to ruin my life and the life of people I care about, as it is plainly obvious to anyone who pays any attention at all to the world around them that these drugs are extremely harmful to a subset of the population.

Sorry, but I'm just going to trust my own observations of reality over some random paper. It's plainly obvious that these drugs trigger schizophrenia and other mental illnesses in a percentage of people who use them. Sometimes all it takes is a single use even. If you haven't met people who have had this happen to them then I advise you to search online for people's stories since it's not that hard to find them.