Yes, but none of the failed projects were built in any kind of professional capacity. Basically, the failed projects I joined were amateur led projects that often had minimal commitment from engineering being done on them. The volunteer engineers did whatever they wanted to do, and often didn't do the less fun work of fixing the bugs and stabilizing the systems in order to maintain a stable build. Lack of build stability kills any chance of anyone else on the team doing real work on the project.

This is the reason that crash bugs and build instability are always the highest priority to fix in professional game development environments. When the current build is broken or unstable, a huge number of people simply cannot do any meaningful work. That kills practically all productivity until the build is fixed, which is why we are required to fix these issues ASAP. In any professional environment, the engineering team knows how important stability is so we never have an unstable build for very long because it absolutely wrecks productivity until the environment is stable enough to work again.

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