A thousand times this.
Most of my long-time followers know I started SAGE (the Sonic Amateur Games Expo, which started to celebrate Sonic fan games, but is increasingly a venue for indie developers to show their original games as well).
I retired from managing SAGE many, many (MANY) years ago, but I have continued to cover the event in some form. And when I was younger, and still felt like the Sonic fangaming community was full of peers and friends that I personally knew, it was a lot easier to be snarky and yell about how "this game sucks!"
But as I grew up and got older, my perspective began to shift to this "Everyone starts somewhere" vibe. Because, I mean, when you're playing a game that might be some 14 year old's first foray in to any game development, the fact they have moving characters and recognizable gameplay is at all is a feat.
Yes, Unity and GameMaker and Construct and whatever else make it so game creation is easier now than it ever was before. But it's still not that easy. And just like how a lot of younger artists start out by redrawing existing artwork as a learning mechanism, you're going to see a lot of first-time game developers remaking their own version of something established.
They are making an effort to learn something, and that's enough.
Say what you will about Todd MacFarlane, but he started out as a kid doing cruddy-looking Spider-man doodles in the margins of 5th grade school notebooks.
Everyone starts somewhere.
even the silliest barely-playable fangames show so much heart. if you're seasoned enough yourself, you can often identify their influences better than they can, and then boom: you're thinking about a kid sitting at their computer so excited about the story of sonic adventure 2, or the never-released game they just learned about, or whatever else inspired them enough to pick up The Games Factory and start banging Active Objects together until they approximate something resembling a game.
it's a real manifestation of the "passion" for game development people can have, not just the weasel-word the industry uses to mean "okay with crunch."
and in this light, that guy on youtube that makes a bit out of playing Sonic fangames to poke fun at them and doesn't know how to turn off sticky-keys on his computer is so transparently a pathetic fucking loser.
(of course, i'm saying this all from the perspective of someone who grew up in the Sonic fangaming and reverse-engineering communities many years ago - that's how i started out too, and now people tell me my skills terrify them.)
