I don't think he said that to imply he deserved success. The way I read it: he mentioned it to disqualify those factors (not working hard enough or not having enough discipline) as reasons the game flopped.

I'm a smart guy too. You know what you hear all the time growing up when you're smart? "Oh, you're smart, you're going to be rich and famous someday."

You hear it enough times and you might start to believe it too, that you're so smart you'll make all the right decisions and you can't fail. But then you become an adult and throw yourself into a passion or product and send it out there and realize the harsh truth that the market doesn't give a shit if you're smart or not, or even if what you made is "good", or even "great".

And it's impossible for you to know everything about everything, so somewhere along the line you will make a suboptimal choice, or choose the wrong time to release it, or release it on the wrong platform, or the people you hired to do X for you (development, marketing, distribution, qa, whatever) screwed up and leads to you getting terrible press (or no press coverage), or all sorts of crap that you have little control over or can't foresee.

I've personally worked for three game studios that made multiple games that flopped hard upon release. It gets depressing and frustrating when the creative products you spend months and months of your time working on didn't even make enough back to pay back your own salary for that time, let alone anyone else who worked on the project, and where you might as well never have spent that time in the first place.

The guys in the article only had a couple of failed games, and one monster success that continues to bring in millions of dollars in revenue. My only big success was a free flash game (before in-app purchases even existed) that I released 13 years ago....so yeah, no money there, at least not directly. I've worked on at least 8 failed games professionally, and many other failed or cancelled apps or enterprise software, since then.

For example, a year ago I wasted 6 months on a project at work that was supposed to sell to two major Fortune 100 clients and didn't, so it was killed without ever being used once. Even my biggest failed game projects I worked on at least had a few fans.

I've easily worked on more failures than even minor successes. It starts to drain on you. My confidence in my ability to make a successful anything in the future is pretty shaken.

Anyway, long story short, I was led to believe that my life would be easy and I'd find success after success by many people in my life, parents, teachers, fellow students, etc. And so far pretty much my entire adult life, with a couple of exceptions, has proven that what I was told was total bullshit and I'm just as capable of making bad decisions and getting unlucky as people half as book-smart as I am.

So maybe some of the people that do make those assumptions or have heard those same things as they grew up need to be told that it doesn't matter.