An Extra Credits of note for future Bloodstained development

Going to split this up a bit. It feels like they touched on a bit too many topics on the video to be neatly encapsulated.

On the idea of the fan dev being a problem:
I fundamentally disagree with the premise. They have couple of good points but I would argue that they are not strikes against hiring, even primarily, from the pool of devs that already like your games. Look at the many modders and enthusiasts studios like Paradox have hired and flourished on. Wiz himself started on as a modder IIRC. Sonic Mania is another glowing example that refutes it. Fresh talent has its benefits, but so does talent that already knows your stuff inside and out. As long as they are professionals who know their stuff, I think there is far less danger in it than what the video portrays.

That's not to say there aren't risks which they point out. Ultimately, designers that live and breathe games and just games are going to have a lot less diverse experiences to draw from. Nintendo's various games are a good example of this, plenty of their games grew out of their head devs favourite hobbies and interests, from bug collecting into Pokemon to gardening into Pikmin. Kantai Collection is another success rising primarily from ultra-geek / otaku interest into wartime navies.
It's also very important to avoid yes-men. There absolutely has to be an understanding that others can have valid criticism and points about the decisions of the head honcho and that it's okay to say them without having to expect getting fired. Otherwise we get George Lucas and the prequels. (FYI, I cannot for the life of me see Bloodstained falling for this. I think it is just a valid point brought up by the video.)

On the premise that I think they implicitly hold but never outright say, that focusing heavily on the skilled and invested players, especially the ones that favor game mechanics, is detrimental for the games and studios:
I disagree. It is not the deep systems and heavy mechanical design focus that drive away people, it's the lacking User Experience design. Tutorials, UI, conveyance, all that is crucial for new players. While that is admittedly helped by a designer that is not used to genre conventions and thus can more accurately think of the first-time players perspective, the same can be done by QA and testers in general. A special out-of-genre designer hired just for this purpose seems wasteful.

A game that is all about User Experience to gain new players is Monster Hunter World. Almost all of their streamlining is squarely focused on getting the UI and the world to communicate with the player in a clear way, rather than relying purely on external wikis. Its sheer success should show that a well designed User Experience is the key here, not shallower mechanics.


However, what bothers me most in the video is the lack of explanation and proof about these issues, or what I'd consider a fundamental misunderstanding of the underlying issue. As the biggest example, the guy mentions Dwarf Fortress in what I assume is meant to be illustrative of his point, but DF couldn't be further from what he's talking about. Bay 12 has never ever hired anyone for development, it's purely a two-man show. Toady One, DF's head dev (in the sense that he's the programmer and the one ultimately deciding what gets made and what doesn't) doesn't consider his UI at all good but doesn't think it's smart to rework it until after they have some sort of feature completion. To top it all off, he is not a fan of colony management sims. He is a university mathematician by training and frequently uses his and his brother's love for history and trashy fantasy stories as inspiration. The games he does like to play are stuff like Dark Souls and Avernum. Nothing in Dwarf Fortress is even remotely linked to what he is talking about, aside from the fact that the symptom (UI that actively repulses new players) has a passing resemblance to his point.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the relevance or looking too deep into a quick joke, but he seems to repeat the same mistake with StarCraft and just vaguely say that lots of games are making this grave error of going too deep into mechanics and closing the door for wider audience when personal experience would point towards overt "streamlining" / dumbing down being the norm and the core audience being the abandoned one by publishers too concerned with mass market and all the money it might make to see their actual current market and actual revenue.

To top this all off, I still find it weird to see an argument made to turn away from what the core fans liked and to eye the mass market instead, on a project specifically about returning to the core experience that fans liked and to not worry about the mass market too much. The argument may not be automatically invalid, I just find seeing it here of all places incredibly ironic.

This is more or less how I feel, too.  Fighting game fans instantly come to mind.  Diehard fans dearly love all the wacky and clever advanced techniques their games let them do, to the point where those advanced techniques more or less define the experience for them.  When you spend a lot of time at that skill level, it's easy to forget what it's like to be a complete newcomer.  If those diehard fans then go on to make a fighting game entirely based around wacky and clever advanced techniques, without even bothering to try and help curious newcomers learn how to perform them, then that could certainly limit the potential audience of the game, even if it's actually a really great game.

Of course, while this is no doubt an important theoretical problem to keep in mind, I don't know if I've seen it too often in practice.  Take Skullgirls for example.  Even a few quick glances can tell you it was made by some Grade A fighting game nuts, and yet it's one of the most accessible fighting games around with a startlingly robust tutorial mode.  It's the AAA fighting game franchises I find the least accessible, ironically.

Granted, the more Extra Credits videos I watch, the harder I find it to relate to them.  If there was a Venn Diagram of all the games I've played vs. all the games they've played, it often feels like the overlapping section might be big enough for two, maybe three ants to sunbathe in.  With how alien their experience is, for all I know, this might actually be a rampant issue in some strange corner of the gamingverse.

I think Run DMC said it best: