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I have worked in the gaming industry and let me tell you that in some game studios most of the people involved in making the games are not gamers themselves.
Lots of programmers and artists don't really care about the final game, they only care about their little part.
Game designers and UX designers are often clueless and lacking in gaming experience. Some of the mistakes they make could be avoided by asking literaly anyone who play games.
Investors and publishers often know very little to almost nothing about gameplay and technology and will rely purely on aesthetic and story.
You have entire games being made top to bottom where not a single employee gave a fuck, from the executives to the programmers. Those games are made by checking a serie of checkboses on a plan and shipped asap.
This is why you have some indie devs kicking big studio butts with sometime less than 1% the ressources.
Afaik even in other "similar" industry (e.g filmmaking) you expect the director, producers and distributors to have a decent level of knowledge of the challenges of making a movie. In the video game industry everyone seems a bit clueless, and risk is mitigated by hiring large teams, and by shipping lots of games quickly.
A lot of the same things you mention about game development are also apparent in open source software which is why it is usually so terrible. Someone that can program some complicated visuals for a 3D modeling program does not mean that same person actually does 3D modeling, which is why the interface for so many open source programs are abysmal.
I have a friend who has been coding various things for years and they are never successful because he builds interfaces he understands how to use. No one else does things his way.
Yup! That right there. You give a technical person a job that requires some level of "soft skills" and that is what you get.
This is probably true of many many other industries. I work in automotive and while a lot of us care about delivering a quality product, the majority are not "car people" and have never changed a part on their car.
Yeah, it is kind of the default isn't it. It kinda make sense for the programmers and artists, but it is still kinda weird that the actual designers don't really understand why people play video games. You wouldn't expect a movie director to not like movies, or a car designer to not like cars. I guess it must be happening everywhere at least to some degree.
Nowadays I would compare some game studios to what some boys bands were to music. You start with some guys with money who are neither musicians, nor sound engineers, nor anything really. They pick singers and musicians based on look and market research, they hire a large team of specialized workers, and then they spend millions on marketing to flood the space with their new album. The indie developers in this scenario would be Pink Floyd.
It wasn't always like this, at least for video games. I feel like in the 80s up to the early 00s it was mostly dominated by passionate workers, but there just isn't enough passionate workers for the demand. As the industry grew, big players started building those "soulless" projects to make good return on investment. Not to denigrate the individual contributions of the workers, but sadly the people who own those business don't really care if they're making games or cars or selling cigarettes. They care about r.o.i.
I'm not sure what kind of role you had in the industry, but I'm not sure what you're saying is entirely accurate... although there are some bits in there I agree with:
Accurate. And that's ok. A programmer whose job it is to optimize the physics of bullet ricochet against thirteen different kind of materials can go really deep on that, and they don't need to (or have time to) zoom out and care about the entire game. That's fine. They have a job that is often highly specialized, has been given to them by production and they have to deliver on time and at quality. Why is that a problem? You use the corrolary of film, and nobody cares if the gaffer understands the subtext of the Act 3 arc.... it's not their job.
Which one? A game designer lacking in gaming experience likely wouldn't get hired anywhere that has an ounce of standard. A UX designer without gaming experience might get hired, but UX is about communication, intuition and flow. A UX designer who worked on surgical software tooling could still be an effective member of a game dev team if their fundamentals are strong.
Again, which one? Investors probably don't know much about the specifics of gameplay or game design because they don't need to, they need to understand ROI, a studio's ability to deliver on time, at budget and quality, and the likely total obtainable market based on genre and fit.
Publishers -- depending on whether you are talking about mobile or console/box model -- will usually be intimately familiar with how to position a product for market, what KPIs (key performance indicators) to target and how to optimize within the available budget.
This has happened. I'm not sure it's an actual trend. There are lots of misses in the game industry. Making successful products is hard -- it's hard at the indie level, it's hard at the AAA level. I would estimate there are a thousand failed Indies for every one you call out as 'kicking a big studio's butt.' Lots of failed AAA titles too. It's just how it goes.
The same, by the way, is true of film, TV, books and music. A lot of misses go into making a hit. Cultural products are hard to make, and nobody has the formula for success. Most teams try, fail, then try again. Sometimes, they succeed.
Hey, fair points. I am not saying that all big are bad and all indies are good. The industry is definitely getting carried by indies in some genres and that is ok.
It would seem you agree on most points, as I passionate myself it just surprised me to sometime be surrounded by people who didn't really care. It depends on the project and the studio of course. I can't really blame the workers though as I said, so I agree with you that it makes sense in most cases to not recruit only "gamers". Thanks for sharing!
I've been a game programmer for >10 years and I would be fucking miserable if I spent most of my free time with video games as well. Isn't that what we call work/life balance? And from my experience, most game devs either stop being "gamers" at a certain point, or they burn out and quit the video game industry.
That being said, almost everyone I know from gamedev is really excited about video games, and they have a ton of experience, even if they are not playing games in their free time anymore. It could be because I've only worked for indie projects and small publishers.
Yeah, that explains it I think. Making video games is hard work and it is normal quit or stop caring.
Agree on all points, I was just making an observation. It sucks that all the people with money don't care though.
But not about the source material.
Adaptations nowadays suck ass because there's no fans in charge.
Making games is an art form... The fuck
It was a thing I noticed regarding Ubisoft games that upper management seems to wish to make movies rather than games. It struck me home when the knife fight with Buck Hugues in Far Cry 3 was just a long chain of quicktime events like it was Dragon's Lair from the 1980s; disappointing because Far Cry 2 was all about game mechanics telling the story rather than cutscenes. (Which was, admittedly at cross purposes. It's a game about violence in a failed state in Africa with the futility of violence as a running theme. But it did that very well.)
Game designer here. I'd say there are degrees in these. Most game designers I know love to play game, but which type of game that they love? Well train designer should be able to design anything, you might say that, but most people have a thing that they keen more than the other thing.
So, they may be very well verse on some genre and might not so much on some. Now, getting a job in the right company that making the right game that you are keen of might not be that easy.
I've seen some young to old designers who only play certain type of games and be clueless on other type and some who can adapt their design skills to many types of games.
But game development can't be without testing if they design something wrong, it should show up on test...
Still, sometimes you got the best devs and the test results came out surprised you.
It's easy to point what is wrong looking from the end product pov but when the design starts with a clean drawing board it's also very easy to miss things.
Game dev is hard man...
I 100% believe this. It doesn't necessarily mean it's bad work, but the way you phrased it makes a dozen or so instances of "something feeling weird" make sense. Sometimes it's just a mismatch between the intensity of the fans fanaticism and the developer having to go to work every day and do a job.
I think game developers can harness this by embracing their modding communities. I'm currently waiting to see what Cities Skylines 2 is like. It has to be hard for a bunch of devs who seem like normies to develop a game for a bunch of nerds, some of whom know more about civil engineering and traffic planning than real engineers. :D The original was well-modded and it feels like the game was a collaboration between the community and the developers. To me, this kind of bridges the developer/gamer gap.
Idk but I really like Valve, I believe they care about the stuff they push out.
Do you think this occurs equally across all big budget games?
No, not to the same extent. I mean past a certain size we probably shouldn't expect big executives to care, but you still have a lot of passionate people in this industry, so you can totally have "true" gamers working in big budget games.