Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nobody cares how hard you had to work to get from idea to product. That was my initial reaction to that statement as well, but upon reading on I realized that's not the point they're trying to make. They're not saying "respect our efforts," they're saying "we spent a year on designing this to be challenging and replayable," and they go on to provide evidence for their claims of superiority.
It's almost a shame they spent so much time talking about 2048; it takes away from the point I gleaned: to make something simple and "obvious" takes a ton of work. I've spent months on designs, and felt bad because the end design was so obvious . "Why didn't I think of that in the first place?"
It may be very hard to make an idea's time come, but once it arrives it's almost trivial & unstoppable. The "four minute mile" (running) was considered impossible ... until someone did it (under adverse conditions to boot), then it almost immediately became the norm for serious runners. The tablet as we know it was pursued for decades with resounding failure ... until Jobs nailed it with the iPod Touch, then variants proliferated. Threes took months of nuanced polishing and nobody had anything like it ... until it was released, then 2048 et al was created & became unstoppable almost overnight.