And I realize that sentence alone is pretty pointless, so I'll expand on it a little:
One of the huge sources of cognitive dissonance I have in HN and startups in general (and this is coming from someone who is explicitly not a startup/SV person, though I find it a great spectator sport and a wonderful font of knowledge) is the clash of lean against polish. I felt like I've spent the majority of my life indoctrinated to believe that polish above all else is valuable: to spend hour after hour poring over iteration after iteration, to settle with nothing except perfection. This manifests in a few ways: Pixar, for example, calls it something along the lines of 'dusting under the cabinets': making sure each aspect of each scene is absolutely pristine.
And then there's sort of the 'great is the enemy of good' / 'fail fast' / etc line of thinking: get something out the door, optimize for value over time, focus on efficacy. Which has seemingly become trendier than ever -- partly because it clearly works, and because of the undeniable numbers that people rarely buy goods and services because of, say, the fonts -- but an annoying little part of me cringes when I see a new service that doesn't even bother to customize the default Bootstrap theme.
Most times, Ii's hard for me to reconcile these two seemingly distinct philosophies because they seem at so odds with each other. I'm beginning to suspect that the truth lies somewhere in the middle: that there's a time and a place for prioritizing growth and validation above everything, and that there's a time and a place for prioritizing perfection over everything.
Threes succeeded because of a relentless pursuit of quality -- and because of an addicting core concept that arose from that pursuit.
2048 succeeded because it of its price and accessibility, because it was easily hackable, and because it could spread like wildfire. (But then, it also succeeded because of Threes.)
I think "quality" is the key word here, that ineffable property of refinement and aesthetic care that creates beauty in our experience of something. We'd like to live in a world of quality things, but that isn't always where market forces take us, at least in the short term. The most cynical or economically motivated might even discount the importance of quality, but I think most people just want the market to be more aligned with it in the long term to enable more of what's around us to be a work of art.
This reminds me of the philosophical book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", which is all about "Quality" and the difference between "artisitic quality", and "technical/mechanical quality"
I've played both games. It's definitely true that 2048 appeared in a world where threes was popular. But it isn't the case that a bunch of effort improved threes over the simpler 2048.
Yes, it is simpler, easier. Sometimes that's exactly why a game is better. I can appreciate that the threes creators spent months working on their game, presentation, etc. To my taste, the result is poorer than 2048.
Another fun factor is that because it's so simple, and open source, 2048 has all these fun variations available. Those explore the game space in a way that a bunch of WIP snapshots from the threes creators just don't. The result is, I think, a more fun, engaging environment.
