It’s no secret that Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street has some Opinions™ about the gaming industry, especially since his years of experience has led him to found Fantastic Pixel Castle and begin work on the MMO Project Ghost. But just in case that wasn’t clear, Street has started a series of dev blogs titled Ghost Stories, the first of which lays out his frustrations with gamedev in the US.

“In my opinion, the appetite for risk at big American game studios and publishers (as those are the ones I know) is quite low. They have to provide for hundreds if not thousands of employees. They are publicly traded. They usually have a board of directors monitoring CEO performance. They have a brand to uphold. I often heard they’d rather not launch a game at all rather than launch one that could possibly hurt the brand. And I get it. It’s not an illogical sentiment. We’ve all seen what happens when a studio makes a misstep that has hurt their brand, and it can be hard for them to recover.”

This aversion to risk of any sort, in Street’s estimation and experience, leads to projects that incubate for years on end, which ends up ramping up the costs of development all in service to making sure “nobody makes a bad decision” to the point where the only way to break even is for a studio to land on a gargantuan hit. “[T]hat’s just unrealistic,” Street writes. “There is no way to guarantee a hit in this business, or we’d all be retired in Bali by now.”

While Street makes it very clear that he lucked out in terms of his own experiences with the industry, acknowledges that companies have to be gun-shy, and expresses gratitude for his time working at some of these larger studios, he ultimately feels that he and his team would just not be allowed to attempt to innovate if they worked for a larger publisher nowadays. “I wanted to make a new game. And I didn’t think the traditional American studio was likely to let me,” he concludes.

Readers might recall that this sentiment could almost run parallel to Street’s earlier expression about eastern MMO development, which he first characterized as “10 years ahead” of the west after a visit to China, then attempted to apply nuance in replies to the opinion after counterarguments (to put it mildly) erupted.

Those series of interactions are likely what has led to this new blog series if his sharing of the post on Twitter is any indication, in which he writes, “I have tried to find a good way to share more with the gaming community, and social media usually isn’t long enough for as verbose as I am.”