>Look at all the games that flop on Steam each year. These are made by professionals. It's disheartening for kids when the thing they've worked hard on simply isn't fun — particularly when they share it with friends and are met with, at best, a shrug.
Why should this be a concern? Should people not paint for fun if their pictures aren't museum-worthy? Should they not play basketball just because they aren't NBA material? The point of doing something yourself is to do it, not to compete with professionals.
If the child is creating games because the act of creating games is fun, it's fine- great even! Same thing for painting, or playing basketball, etc.
The point I think GP was trying to make is, if the child is creating games because they want to share the games and they think other people will enjoy the games they created- that's where the problem is. GP is saying that kids can get disheartened because their expectation was others will enjoy their game, when potentially (very likely), others won't enjoy their game, because game design is hard. Adults may be more able to handle this emotionally and 'push through it', but children could potentially take this poorly and not want to continue game development because of the negative reactions of others.
We should absolutely continue to encourage game design (or really anything a child is interested in); I would say generally we should be aware of this potential concern for anyone developing games.
of course it's a concern because kids don't know that there's going to be a big gap between what they create and what they envision so it's disheartening for them
Well, I wrote games as a child in BASIC in the 1980s which weren't on the same level as the commercial assembly-language games. but I still enjoyed doing so.
Why should this be a concern? Should people not paint for fun if their pictures aren't museum-worthy? Should they not play basketball just because they aren't NBA material? The point of doing something yourself is to do it, not to compete with professionals.