Daily Inspiration Quote by John Romero

Romero’s complaint lands like a shotgun blast because it flatters and indicts at the same time: it assumes games are a craft with standards, and it accuses a swelling crowd of treating that craft like a weekend hobby. Coming from one of the architects of the FPS era, it reads less like elitism for its own sake than a veteran’s panic that the medium is drowning in its own accessibility.

The specific intent is gatekeeping with a purpose. Romero isn’t merely saying “bad games exist.” He’s drawing a line around competence: design literacy, technical rigor, and an understanding of why certain mechanics feel good rather than merely function. The phrasing “no business” is doing heavy work: it’s moral language applied to production, suggesting not just low quality but a kind of category error - as if shipping a game without chops is an imposition on players and the medium.

The subtext is a collision between two cultures. One is the old-school studio lineage where scarcity of tools made expertise visible and failure expensive. The other is the post-Unity, post-Steam Direct world where the barriers to entry collapsed, curation weakened, and “I made a game” became as common as “I started a podcast.” Romero’s irritation is aimed as much at platforms and marketplaces as at creators: when everyone can publish, discovery becomes noise, and the audience’s trust erodes.

Context matters because Romero’s generation built games when the medium was still fighting to be taken seriously. His warning is a defensive move: if games are to mature, the people making them have to treat them as more than content.