I think that experience in shipping and experience in maintaining a project is largely different. I'd rather work with someone who has maintained one live project, rather than with someone who has shipped 5. Especially on mobile. Shipping a simple game is not hard. Understanding how much you have fucked up with load times and fps is valuable. Understanding why certain technical and architectural decisions are wrong is valuable. I have rewritten big parts of the game just to fix performance issues even though the team has shipped 5 games before.
> I'd rather work with someone who has maintained one live project, rather than with someone who has shipped 5.
I agree, I coupled shipping with maintaining as I see that as one. Just getting it out in the world isn't enough, updating it, not breaking it, smooth updates for users with little friction, not breaking profiles, no crashes, upgrade/update testing, library/version updates etc are all massively important.
Definitely better to have someone that has done some production on a live state of the game over someone that shipped and forgot, but both are better than no shipped title or production.
