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?

This is cool! How did you make this?

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.

gamedev be like

Relevant.

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.

You say that, but…

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.

Internet janitors gonna internet janitor.

Yeah, man…it’s not like the largest global superpower of the last century has an effect on the rest of the world economically or anything. Must just be burger-brain.

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.

I mean, the other guy brought it up.

This is also true. I’ve worked at a number of startup indies/AA splinter-studios (studios comprised of former devs of hugely successful AAA franchises), and most of them were horribly mismanaged. The sheer existence of good videogames is a testament to the blood, sweat and tears poured into them by groups of insanely talented people finding ways to work together efficiently.

Tbf most gamers are, indeed, losers.

^ ^ ^ This is true, but I also think it’s important to note the role repeated financial and cultural success has on one’s mind and ego when elevated repeatedly by both the market and culture. You are not only just financially incentivized not to innovate, but your ego continues telling you “my ideas are always good no matter what others think” after these successes, even when that’s not necessarily true and you need to be reined in by others so your good ideas can still shine and the bad ones can be challenged. This is how top-down cultural problems in studio disciplines calcify in addition to financial incentives. It’s important as a person(s) running a successful studio to not surround yourself with yes-men, which is not an easy task due to the previously-mentioned perverse financial and egoist incentives.

Young millennial/zillennial AAA game dev speaking.

It is 100% a top-down issue. Most devs are talented people. When you’re incentivized by quarterly returns as management, over a long enough timeline you begin to care less about game quality and more about stock prices and net revenue in addition to whatever else you need to satisfy your bloated ego, even if you started out as a passionate dev initially. The Indie and AA space is currently thriving because these incentives don’t factor in as much for them.

Just like game design, it’s an issue with a series of carrots and sticks, not necessarily the people involved (although psychopaths do exist and tend to be overrepresented in c-suites worldwide).

The mod hat in question.

No.