Dumb and annoying is worse.
I mean, some of the most experienced and successful devs in the world are telling you (some random guy) these things bluntly in the article, and you are proving their point for them by acting how you’re acting.
Congrats on being a sentient stereotype with a keyboard and access to the internet, I guess?
AAA gamedev here. I agree in principle with the gamefeel critiques, but I’d like to bring up that scale absolutely matters here. Every degree of complexity your codebase adds can cause cascading issues, which is one of the million reasons indie devs are told by everyone to keep their game scope small. Not saying these kinds of games shouldn’t improve, but it’s not as trivial as it might appearr.
I agree with you, but I’d also like to add the caveat that even with commonly-used engines shit can still be incredibly complex.
UI is incredibly complex under the hood. Cryengine is also difficult to work in. There are tons of reasons games with distinct outstanding features don’t switch engines, though, and it’s usually due to the specific features said engine provides, no matter how difficult it becomes to work with as a legacy system over the years.
Yeah, you’re probably right, the video game you personally made is probably better and we’re just lazy. BTW I demand 20 hours of brand-new content to be released next week, and it better be cutting-edge, uniquely interesting and creative, bug-free and $4.99, or else you’re a lazy dev, too.
It’s genuinely funny watching these people learn absolutely nothing when slapped in the face with hard facts.
Gamer who doesn’t understand how gamedev works gets mad at guy telling them they don’t get how gamedev works, demanding their treats get here, right now anyway after being told it actually takes a bit to make. News at 11.
Correct. Once again, Gamers take developers for granted because something LOOKS like it’s simple, but it rarely ever is. It’s hella frustrating to deal with this every day as a dev, but I guess that’s what you sign up for in this line of work.
AAA dev here; it’s not that. It’s that attempting to standardize development in a highly fluid and innovative sector can kill your competitiveness as a studio if you’re not careful. That being said, unionization is also desperately needed. Blizzard recently unionized across their while studio, which is probably the best model out there right now; allow companies of a certain scale to unionize so that positive and competitive aspects of company culture/organizational structure can be maintained/improved while ensuring worker’s rights against exploitation from the top-down and abused of shareholders/management. Games, and by extension their studios, are intended to be things greater than the sum of their parts, and this is reflected by each company’s unique internal culture; every studio operates differently, and this is directly reflected in the games they end up putting out (OG Valve is a great example). How many big studios have you seen shed a sizeable amount of senior devs, after which they no longer seem to be able to make the same quality games as before? Happens all the time, and this is why; the internal culture and proprietary knowledge-base has had a paradigm shift wherein a lot of the studio’s previous identity has been lost. That’s the magic of gamedev studio culture and the people that create it, and that needs to be protected while also upholding workers’ rights simultaneously. The best way to do that is to allow all members of said culture to create their own rules of union governance from within, not necessarily to have standards that maybe disrupt said culture from without. This is obviously a generalization, as you could additionally have a looser external unionization framework protecting and binding/collectively bargaining on behalf of gamedevs as a class of worker; there is more than one way to skin the cat here. Obviously there’s a “who watches the watchmen” situation that arises here, so this needs to be done in accordance with reforms in worker advocacy laws holistically, because I don’t even need remind anybody of the deluge of “toxic company culture” Kotaku exposés over the years; we certainly need an external and legal framework to push back against that. It’s a tough nut to crack, and it’s why things seem to be moving so slowly. We’re pushing a boulder up a massive hill here while fighting bad actors and neoliberal capitalism at the same time.
Reddit comments have always been insufferable, this is just a 2025 makeover.