Yeah, but Black Mesa was late. Very late.merman wrote:Black Mesa didn't.
So late that it was given a "vaporware of the year" award by Wired and folks were making jokes, listing it alongside Duke Nukem Forever and Longhorn, because people didn't think it'd ever be finished at all.
It took 8 years for it to be released and, let's remember, it still isn't finished even now.
(It only goes up to the part where Gordon is about to be teleported to Xen. I know because I played it that far and I'm hoping that, now Greenlit on Steam, they'll use that to update the game and add on Xen, when it's ready, as I was very much enjoying it. It was a strange experience playing something that, on the one hand, seemed very familiar yet, on the other hand, I've strictly never seen any of it before. Both replaying a game and playing it for the very first time simultaneously. Weird.)
I mean, will it take another year or maybe two, before we get Xen? That'll bring it up to around a decade of development.
And, looking at Wikipedia, the volunteer team on Black Mesa was about 40 people in all. That's, all things considered, a decent number of people to have on a development team, particularly on a voluntarily project - indeed, how many people did Valve originally have? - so the length of development time can't really be blamed on a lack of manpower.
Rather, it probably can be blamed on a lack of manhours. That is, because these people were doing it voluntarily, they couldn't prioritise it over paid work, as they all need to eat and pay the bills. It was being squeezed in between real life and real work. An hour here, an hour there. Entirely in their spare time - assuming their actual jobs and family lives left them much in the way of spare time at all.
So, sure, Black Mesa didn't have any formal investment. But it clearly suffered for that.
It's taken 8 years to still only be some three quarters complete?
That's the price you pay for not paying the price.
