When game designers talk about games and game design, you may want to consider what they have to say. As this is their chosen vocation, they may actually know a thing or two about the topic.
When game designers want to pontificate about the business of the game industry, it’s best to just ignore them unless they are talking about specific experiences (the pitfalls of freelancing, for example) or they are also publishers. Unless they have real experience to back up their opinions and prognostications, they are almost inevitably full of shit. It doesn’t matter how many freelance assignments they’ve completed, how many hours they’ve spent hanging out at the Big Bar on 2 at Origins, or how many Ryan Dancey manifestos they’ve memorized. If game designers say they’re going to tell you how the game industry “really works” or tell you what’s going to happen to the business in the future, just keep on cruising down the information superhighway.