I've worked with overseas coders since 2012 - Claude is much easier to communicate with, faster and more responsive.

I have a (relatively simple - by design) calendar/scheduling app. It just keeps schedule planning slots for people, they can check their own schedules, my wife can arrange schedules to get coverage, it tracks "vacations" when people aren't available, etc.

Last night, we decided we needed to track monthly budgets as well as schedles. Literally 4 prompts to Fable 5.2 and I have the monthly budget tracking feature, showing N (N=4 today) categories of budget tracked, against M (M=8) employees each earning different pay rates (3 different rates today) and showing how the budget spends down across the month as each week goes by in all the categories. It has a web interface, can be managed on a phone, it has .pdf outputs with nicely formatted tables. 4 prompts in one night starting after dinner, and I barely paid attention to it as it ran, tested out working after 2 prompts, added the .pdf outputs and reformatted one view with the last 2 prompts.

hire a company to port the game

Management potential. If they have negotiated / found a clear legal path to at least distribution - if not profit, they're operating on a higher level than a lot of traditional businesses.

The test is in the results - are people happy playing the port? If it "works for them" then, yeah, the kiddiez have done something worthwhile, at least to the happy players.

Does it matter if they wrote it in Rust, or C++, or Assembly, or english language prompts?

I mean, if you're ordering Pepperoni, no...

If you're ordering a pumpkin curry with sweet corn on feta/pesto base, and your friends don't vomit when they try it, you just might be the cheff.

significantly more authentic than what most of the current crop of script kiddies are up to.

I think it's just that skript kiddiez theze daze can do somewhat interesting (at least to their peers) stuff, whereas you had to bust ass a whole lot harder just to get Hello World to animate back in the day.

Doesn't make what they do any less impressive just because it's easier to do flashier things - the interesting part is always the originality of it, if you're "in the scene" is this kiddie doing something of their own, or is it just a copy-pasta? Same applies to music, visual arts, literature, etc.

I was always turned off by the "ripoff games" - but, then, back when the Palm Pilot was hot, the top earners in PalmGear H.Q. were all "ripoff games" - so, I guess I just wasn't serious about being popular / making bank.

By 15 I could earn $200/mo after school saying "you want fries with that?" into a microphone and running a cash register for a drive-thru, and that was at $3.35/hr minimum wage. In Florida minimum wage is $15/hr now, so $200/month is less than 2 4 hour after school or one 8 hour weekend shift a week, even after taxes.

The $9K figure, as I read the summary, is total spent by all contributors to the project, and if they manage to develop a full commercial quality port for under $100K they've beat what the industry players would spend on developer time for the same job by a wide margin.

How many of their constituents will remember this 23 months from now?

This would work a whole lot better for me with some transparency, like a video archive of Sray making the sweater, a little bit of following her through her day, the ability of independent people to come in and visit / interview Sray once a month or so and include those in the video archive. Keep all that and get a link to it with purchase of your sweater.

Otherwise Sray might be some dirty sweaty unschooled kid walking 5km barefoot through untreated sewage to work under a tin roof making 3 sweaters an hour with machinery designed to mimic handmade details, complete with "attractive" human hairs to embed here and there, and $399 of your $400 purchase price is going to the factory owner and his distribution channel.