Endlof right. I have NoScript here to block those useless flash ads and annoying webs that play music. Gonna need to whitelist it.
Doh! I’ll have to add a no-Javascript link or something.
Thanks for the info!
Simon
Hi
As time goes by, I don’t really underestimate the required time to finish any project in computer science in general, not only for games. Working a long time on some projects learns a lot of things about our own abilities and our limits. At the very beginning of my main project, I estimated I would need between 4 and 6 years to finish it if and only if I don’t switch to another engine. At first, I switched from d3caster to my own engine. Then, I switched from my own engine to JMonkeyEngine 2.0. After that, I switched from JMonkeyEngine 2.0 to Ardor3D. Finally, my game will still require between 4 and 6 years of hard work without replacing the current engine.
You only have to look at how trivially “simple” our games are versus the time taken to produce them to realise just how much effort really goes into making something commercial.
Cas 
Just for fun we can try putting a number on that.
Two of the games in our little list are Space Invaders/Galaxians clones, but at different ends of the spectrum.
Starbugs is at the ‘hobby’ end. Gameplay is very basic, but I’d argue that it’s reasonably polished (at least I remember it being a hard slog getting it into a state that I felt was finished).
Titan Attacks on the other hand offers the deluxe, award-winning (I’m too lazy to check but presumably ;D ) alien-shooting experience, and is very obviously ‘commercial’.
One took 80 hours to make, the other 1680 hours.
So we could claim that the difference between hobby-standard and commercial-standard is a factor of 20 in the development time.
As I say, just a bit of fun. 
Simon
For a game as polished as Titan Attacks that sounds pretty accurate from my experience. However these days I’m questioning just how important that level of polish is.
Skyrim (and F3, and Oblivion) are horrendously unpolished games, yet everyone loves them and they sell by the bucket load. Similarly, I bought Dark Scavenger last week ( http://www.darkscavenger.com/ ) which is a hilarously unpolished game with terrible production values, yet it’s still strangely compelling.
Of course Dungeons of Dredmor was hugely polished and also sold a bucket load, so who knows what this tells us.
It is true in some cases but not in general. We can find examples showing that it is completely wrong and what is a standard? I don’t find Minecraft graphics pretty, it doesn’t mean that the game itself “is” bad but it is a commercial game whose graphics are not very polished, rather quite “simple”. An hobby project can require a lot of work and some people are ready to spend a lot of time on such a project even though it does not lead to something commercial.
You’d be surprised just how much polish you don’t even notice in games like Skyrim. It’s already polished to buggery and could be polished far, far more. It’s all a balance. For indies polish can make or break sales because there’s so much dross to stand out from. For Skyrim they’ve got a AAA marketing budget and don’t have much competition. They make up for polish with marketing.
Cas
Minecraft has roughly the same factor of 20 I’d say - ignore the graphics, that’s a red herring. Minecraft ‘classic’ took how long? A few weeks? And then a couple of years of development / alpha / beta after that to turn it into Minecraft 1.0.
In other words producing a tech demo took a few weeks, producing an actual game on top of it (which still had half-implemented features at 1.0 release time by the way) took an additional 1.5 years and required at least 3 rebuilds of the internal plumbing to keep it going.
Minecraft is a bad example though; its not only a sandbox for players, its also a sandbox for the developers and modders. It is the one game for which “its never done” rings true as people will probably be adding stuff to it long after Mojang ditches it - which I sort of have a gut feeling is going to be sooner rather than later. The modding API they’re implementing isn’t just to keep the community happy, its also a possibility for Mojang to let it go when it is polished off.
I don’t actually spend much time on each game. Instead I spend most of my time developing my AllBinary Platform then occasionally making a new game.
All game designs are mainly generic to me.
10 years in my AllBinary Platform
1 year for 15 games
I spend a bunch of time doing new builds for new platform features like right now I am adding HTML5 versions.
According to https://www.ohloh.net/p/AllBinary-Platform/estimated_cost I have 56 man years for about half of my code.
So I have about 100 man years of code because I wrote code 7 days a week 10 hours a day for 10 years and did not focus a bunch on design or complex code and just meld in feature after feature.