Today, more people than ever before are playing video games…but most people still don’t actually understand how games are made. Even for hardcore game aficionados, game development remains fairly shrouded in mystery.
What’s more, a lot of what people think they know about game development is actually misconception. We spoke to a number of game developers who told us about the biggest things people get wrong about game development, and below is where, in their own words, these developers debunk common myths.
Misconception: Game Developers Are Lazy
This, by far, is the most common thing that developers brought up when discussing prevalent game development misconceptions. Over and over again, developers described situations where players called them “lazy” — and this couldn’t be further from the truth. Game development is often gruelling, and it’s not uncommon to hear about people putting in way over 40 hours of work a week just to get a game shipped on time. This is known as “crunch,/” and it happens just as often in critically acclaimed games as it does ones you might find in a bargain bin.
“We work in a culture of overtime, crunch and death marches,” one triple-A game developer who wished to remain anonymous told me in an interview. “People put their physical and mental health on the line every time, some even lose their families to our industry’s overtime culture.
“We do from 3 to 6 months of crunch on any given project and it’s considered NORMAL in our industry,” the developer said. “People with families, older devs get discriminated against all the time because it’s thought they can’t sustain the ‘normal’ work pace, which is ridiculously long hours as the norm, or crunch for months on end.
“We get told to accept lower salaries because of our ‘passion’ for gaming, we sacrifice our healths and families to overtime to get the game done… and then some jackass decides we’re lazy because a bug is still in the game, or a feature they wanted isn’t there? Fuck that shit.”
Misconception: Game Development Is Easy
Here’s Armin Ibrisagic of Coffee Stain Studios, the folks behind Goat Simulator, describing a common game development misunderstanding:
I think the biggest misconception people have is when it comes to the time and effort taken to make games.
I remember when I worked at an FPS/Tower Defence game called Sanctum 2. In Sanctum 1, we had a server browser where you’d manually have to find a map you like, but in Sanctum 2, we’d just let people pick a map and then we’d use matchmaking to fill up the map with other players who wanted to play that same map. Much better and easier, right? But people still wanted a server browser, and they wouldn’t stop making threads about it on the forums. This one guy was like “well you had a server browser in Sanctum 1, can’t you just copy-paste the code into Sanctum 2?” ARRGHH – You can’t just copy-paste an entire server browser from one game to another!
This “game development is easy” myth usually goes hand-in-hand with the misconception of “lazy developers”. People who don’t work in game development don’t understand that game development is a constant compromise between good content/features, and time/resources.
Misconception: A Good Idea Is All a Game Needs
Chandana Ekanayake of Uber Entertainment would like to set the record straight on how games evolve during the course of development:
Ideas are seductive and perfect. How cool would it be to fight zombies while riding dinosaurs with your friends in a galaxy as big as No Man’s Sky? How about a Far Cry game set in the Star Wars universe playing as Han Solo? How about strapping rockets to a moon and sending it hurtling against another planet, destroying your enemies? A space combat game that’s also a seamless FPS? Ideas are the fun part of game development when anything is possible. Most games that start out as an idea are rarely like that idea when they ship or don’t live up to the expectation of that first idea. Sometimes realities of production get in the way and most times when a game gets to prototyping stage, you find that that idea makes for shitty gameplay. This hasn’t usually been an issue as players don’t see the game until it’s been prototyped, iterated on and proven out.
With the volume of crowdfunded games it’s certainly turned into a problem for both developers and players. A player backs a game based on a slick pitch and expects the game to deliver on the promises of that pitch. Anytime an idea is mentioned during development on a forum, live stream, or Tweet, fans treat those as confirmed features. A developer treats an idea as a starting point and expects things to change during development. This disconnect is what causes trouble. There’s a whole lot of unsexy grind during game development that takes up a lot of time that gets glossed over when developers pitch games. Any added feature has a cost to development time. Things like optimising, development tools, asset organisation, updating middleware, testing and bug fixing can take up a significant portion of development that have zero to do with implementing features that the player is excited about. Things always take longer than you think. There’s no one solution to this problem other than constant communication and not over promise.
Misconception: DLC Is Evil
Nowadays, developers often announce plans for downloadable content well before the release of the actual game in question. For some people, this acts as proof that developers are out to sucker as much money as possible from the player, who may believe that they are expected to spend money on an “incomplete” game. The reality of DLC is more complex than that, though.
“I see a lot of disparaging of Day 1 DLC especially, but I wish the gaming public understood that in many cases this is in no way taking away from the core title,” Elizabeth Zelle, a games user researcher at Deep Silver Volition, told me in an email. “[DLC] is teams continuing to generate digital content, that doesn’t need to be finished months before the street date like the core title does.”
For developers, having something to work on in-between major releases is huge. Yes, that’s partially because DLC is profitable. But! DLC also provides much-needed security in an industry with an abundance of layoff horror stories.
“In the past you would see large layoffs when a game submitted because there simply wasn’t any more work for a lot of the devs on a team,” Zelle said. “The same studio would start hiring back up months later when their next project got to the point of needing that large team again. DLC production, the employment it provides devs, and the bonus income it generates to pay them works to keep game studios out of the layoff-hire back cycles and lets game devs enjoy a more stable life.”
Misconception: All Game Developers Are Rich
It’s easy to get swept up in all the dolla dolla billz floating around in this industry. You read about games that cost millions to make. You hear about deals that net game developers billions. You look at the swank mansions that gaming YouTubers buy. It’s easy to think that every game developer is swimming in cash, but that’s not actually the case.
“I’m lucky,” Cliff Bleszinski, co-founder of Boss Key Productions, told me in an email. “I may have worked my butt off for years and made some great games with some great people, but Tim Sweeney was a very kind boss who treated his earliest employees very well. For every person like me that’s been successful there are hundreds of developers that are just getting by.”
Misconception: Realistic Graphics Mean a Better Game
Shawn Allen, designer of Treachery in Beatdown City, thinks that people are seduced really easily by photorealistic games — which can leave titles with “beautiful aesthetics” and “exaggerated features” in the dust.
“Pixel art is devalued as a medium because it is considered ‘easy’ when really, ease of creation is not and should never be the only metric for examining art,” Allen wrote in an email.
There’s a danger in valuing realistic graphics so much, Allen says.
“There is a great deal hyperbolic fervor for the newer, bigger worlds featured in games regardless of if they are bringing anything new to the table. Again, [for most people] frames per second & texture resolution trumps art direction.”
Misconception: Everything a Developer Does Is for Profit
Matthew Medina of ArenaNet says that, while developers do have to making a living, making more money doesn’t necessarily drive everything they do:
It is true that there ARE certain design decisions which are made that do in fact hinge on maximizing VALUE (not profits) – but in reality in my experience those design decisions usually boil down to the dev team looking at it from the standpoint of [return on investment] – does it make sense to put X number of developers and Y numbers of dollars towards a feature or a piece of content that you can reliably predict won’t generate adequate revenue to warrant that investment? At the end of the day game studios are businesses where it behooves all employees to be weighing these things to some degree. But I will say that in my 23 year career, I’ve never felt as though any employer of mine was ever out to get as much money as possible from their players (and I worked at EA…twice).
Misconception: Game Developers Don’t Care About Bugs
When you play a game, any bugs you come across might seem obvious. I often read comments and forum posts where people are flabbergasted that nobody caught a certain hiccup that thousands of people online encountered right away. Here’s how something like that can happen, according to A Hat in Time developer Dan Tsukasa:
Players completely overlook that a bug requires a very very specific set of circumstances to be met in order to crop up. Sure it might appear [during a certain common situation] but it [also] only appears if you have X number of items, Y amount of ammo, have killed exactly 20 soldiers all before the game’s timer hits 12:01 and 0.003 milliseconds — that’s when the bug crops up, in that seemingly random circumstance. Bugs are a combination of many many factors coming together at the same time; it’s almost never a simple “Ah, it’s exactly this value we need to fix.” You could play the game for 20 years and never encounter it, whilst a new player could encounter [the same bug] in 5 minutes. It’s up to chance. Players give developers like us a really hard time for this one.
Misconception: “Casual” Games Don’t Matter
Robert Yang, developer of erotic games such as Cobra Club and Hurt Me Plenty, thinks that people underestimate just how important “casual” games actually are:
The Kim Kardashian game, across iOS and Android, has at least as many installs as DOTA2 if not many more — except DOTA2 is #1 on Steam by far, while the Kardashian game is just one of many huge mobile hits with tens of millions of users.
I think what people don’t understand (and what I barely comprehend myself) is the magnitudes of all these numbers. Gamers were shocked that Bioshock Infinite selling five million units was deemed a “failure” — well, maybe we wouldn’t have been shocked if we knew that Clash of Clans has several hundred million downloads on Android alone… and was probably much cheaper to make, market, and maintain.
Gamers want to deny this because it upends a lot of our ideas about which games deserve to be considered popular or successful; games with novelty, systemic depth, high artistic intent, expensive production values… the Kim Kardashian game has none of these things, but by the numbers, it is so much more successful and culturally influential than practically any “real” game on Steam.
Misconception: Players Always Know What’s Best for a Game
Fans are defined by passion — they often know a franchise inside and out, and have very strong feelings about the way things should work in a game. Often, people can be vocal about the changes they want to see, especially on forums and comments section. But catering to fan demands doesn’t necessarily make for a better game, according to the founder of Panache Games.
“If we [listened] to the public and the general feedback [from players] Assasin’s Creed would have [had] dragons and monsters…and nobody would die in Game of Thrones,” Patrice Désilets, creator of Assassin’s Creed, joked in an email.
BONUS ROUND
While many developers couldn’t chat with me one-on-one, I was provided with a deluge of opinions on game development misconceptions on Twitter. Here are some of the best Tweets:
https://twitter.com/p/655533764462776320/
https://twitter.com/p/653632371946819584/
https://twitter.com/p/655880953449943040/
https://twitter.com/p/655533140451045377/
https://twitter.com/p/653634253394178048/
https://twitter.com/p/653642680673566720/
https://twitter.com/p/653630523030437888/
https://twitter.com/p/653986282201178112/
https://twitter.com/p/653886946050187264/
https://twitter.com/p/653646222322831360/
https://twitter.com/p/653629692474454018/
https://twitter.com/p/653657782684508160/
https://twitter.com/p/655532497195937792/
Illustration: Sam Woolley.
Comments
44 responses to “10 Big Myths About Games, Debunked By The People Who Make Them”
Are the developers responsible for the responses in this article self conscious that someone on the internet said something mean? Welcome to the internet!
Get some thicker skin and quit the qq.
How were they supposed to answer the question, lie?
Your face is stupid.
– Internet Welcoming Committee
Not all game developers! 😉
In all seriousness, game devs have many misconceptions about players as well, which makes the designer<->player relationship really interesting, and difficult to maintain for everyone. I’ve seen some games where the devs were absolutely sure they’d made they best design decision, but have to reverse it because they’re about to lose their entire audience. Just like any good relationship it comes down to communication.
Those Twitter links don’t work for me – anyone else have the same issue?
Also, on the DLC. Some of it is evil and obviously just done to squeeze cash out of people. When done right it adds valuable content to a game and is worth the price tag. I always think of it in terms of expansion packs that you’d get for games like Age of Empires, Heroes of Might and Magic etc. If it adds to the game like those did then it’s worth it.
Worst case though if you don’t like the DLC don’t buy it.
*raises hand* I think some coding was missing. Looks like it’s not just Game Developers that don’t care about bugs! (tic)
DLC used to be called Expansion Packs.
Some DLC is a money grab. But not all of it, and I try to evaluate each piece based on it’s individual Merits.
Yeah. Look at horse amour vs Mario Kart tracks.
Got as far as “Far Cry game set in the Star Wars universe playing as Han Solo” and now that’s all I can think about
I got as far as “A space combat game that’s also a seamless FPS? ” and went trololololol!!! 😀
So a one-way conversation that does nothing to support or inform the insight held by consumers? Isn’t this the ideal way to communicate? It really, really seems like there’s some weird sort of delusion happening en masse where people arbitrarily demand to control the conversation whilst feeling a false sense of certainty over their narrow and prejudicial perspective.
If we [listened] to the public and the general feedback [from players] Assasin’s Creed would have [had] dragons and monsters
…that sounds friggen awesome! If Syndicate did that I’d pre-order the game!
Hey they could branch out and do a Assassins Creed based in Fantasy Universe.
Styx?
I would buy the shit out of that.
Wait… I think I already did. Wasn’t it called Shadow of Mordor?
I just recently purchased the GOTY version of Shadows in a sale and I want to finish Mad Max (which although I’m making slow Progress I’m really enjoying) and the soon to be Released Halo 5 first.
But there is room for Ubisoft to make a Fantasy or even a Sci Fi Assassin’s Creed game if they wanted to. Let’s be honest Assassin’s Creed: Ankh Morpork would be a must own for me and I never purchased an Assassin’s Creed game before.
I would do such terrible, terrible things to secure a copy of that. So fast. Without hesitation.
Terrible things.
Also, AC: Ankh Morpork made me for some reason think of CSI: Ankh Morpork. Which would be an amazing show that I would watch. Or a potential game, although CSI games’ track record hasn’t been pretty.
If they nailed the writing, any game set in Ankh Morpork would be awesome. I’d take any game set on Discworld.
For CSI: Ankh Morpork “Somebody is killing people, a common occurrence in this city, but these people are dying before their time. Death himself has charged you with solving these murders.”
Or, someone important is killing people, which is totally Vimes’ turf.
CSI: AM, with an open world map ala L.A. Noire, start off as a rookie and call in support from the big guns…Cheri’s chemical analysis, Angua’s nose, Carrot’s ability to interview even the most recalcitrant suspect, Detritus as a riot shield/head of the incursion squad…
…now I want this. Badly.
I have the greatest respect for video gamer designers and programmers. The complexity of games has risen exponentially over the generations and we are truly spoilt for choice.
The biggest danger in my opinion is the hype and hysteria that the Internet is able to generate over games now. There seems like there is a whole self entitled generation that is not able to cope with any deviation from their ideals or “truths”. The hysteria and noise over story lines in Mass Effect 3, no story in Destiny, DLC in Evolve and Payday 2 microtransactions, for example. There is serious danger of companies taking the easy option and heading off into the mobile land.
Whenever I feel myself getting riled up with a current generation game, I just remember how lucky I am to live in such times and remember how far we have come since I was putting that cassette into the Atari and trying to get the tape deck to play my Spectrum games.
“self entitled generation… The hysteria and noise over story lines in Mass Effect 3, no story in Destiny”
These come down to communication. If the Mass Effect devs had (pre-launch) said something like “although your story choices throughout the series will continue to have effect right up to the end, the ending is independent of any story choices you make and indeed, is probably not what you were expecting from the narrative to that point”.
If Bungie had not hyped the heck out of this massive new universe with deep story and lore before releasing Destiny and just gone with “massively online shooter with minor story elements” then people would know what to expect before they got invested.
If you’re a dev and you’re setting expectations, then try to make those expectations as clear as possible =D
I think a lot of the time the hype comes from the publisher rather than the developer. The publisher promises the moon and devs are left with having to somehow meet these expectations or be labelled a failure.
The moment you start being grateful just because someone is releasing games is the moment that standards start to decline.
It’s less about being entitled to games and more about filtering through the flooded game market to buy games that you’re actually going to enjoy. Gamers are a vocal group and if they find out that the game they’ve chosen to spend their cash on turns out to have something nasty hidden away then they’re going to express their disappointment. If devs are up front and honest about what they’re doing then not only are people happy with them but they go out and say that and the dev gets a good reputation, helping to sell more games in future.
As for going mobile, no dangers there. That market is the most flooded in gaming at the moment and only games that are right at the peak getting all the attention make money. It’s a very hard market to get into and doesn’t have much rhyme or reason to success vs failure.
Don’t take this the wrong way but I though most jobs (including my own job) work around 50 to 60 hours a week.
Although I haven’t worked in a job outside the consrtuction industry since high school.
I would love to work 40 hours a week, I wouldn’t even know what to do with all that spare time!
Edit: I get it now, unpaid overtime! Sorry.
most jobs are 40hrs a weeks ie 9 til 5, monday to friday but are still plenty of jobs that go upwards of 60hrs a week
Perhaps I’m just ignorant, but wouldn’t expansion packs be just as viable at destroying the hire-develop-fire lifecycle as the ridiculous “Day-1 DLC” and “pre-order bonuses”? Back in my day we didn’t pay $5 for horse armour and $10 for a marijuana skin for a f@#$ing gun, we paid $30 for 20+ hours of additional content to a game that already cost us at least 3x that to buy!
If you want to continue making money and giving your developers something to do between big launches, make expansion packs! Diablo 3, Pillars of Eternity, Path of Exile, these are all games that make big money with expansion packs and have developers that don’t have to fire everyone just because a game is out. I’m sure there are a dozen more examples but I’m procrastinating so really shouldn’t spend the time looking them up.
Expansions and DLC suffer from diminishing returns with each subsequent release to the point that it becomes no longer worth the cost of development. Better games with better expansions/DLC tend to last longer, but it always happens.
Publishers have, in recent years, begun doing something about this by re-releasing the product with expansion/s to pick up customers who never bought the original game, but even doing that is merely delaying the problem.
Path of Exile is a whole different kettle of fush (& chups). I didn’t pay for my expansion, I know a lot of people that didn’t pay for the expansion. I have on the other hand felt like I owed it to the devs to buy a bunch of stash upgrades. PoE is one of those free-to-play success stories that really works. They can clearly maintain dedicated servers and constant updates the size of full expansions through the cost of cosmetic items and extra stash tabs only. I hope Dungeon Defenders 2 is able to do the same.
The point is that a lot of the time, a game’s actual assets – the art, animations, sounds, plot and so on – are basically done 3-4 months before the game goes ‘gold’ and it will go into a testing / bug fixing and polishing cycle for a bit. During that time, all those people that make all that actual content are doing next to nothing. Most studios don’t have a new project lined up for them to move on to, so what used to happen is that they’d hire a lot of those people on as contractors and let them go en masse when the project was winding down. Then 6-9 months later they’d have publisher money to do an expansion pack / sequel / new game and would re-hire, but that meant hiring from the contractor pool again. It meant that a ton of people in the industry had zero job security and no incentive to put in their best work knowing they’d just get let go again a year later.
Instead, they put those people onto creating DLC. During that 2-3 month window when the original game is done (as in feature-complete) but not shipped, all those writers, animators, artists, level designers and so on can be employed doing DLC, allowing them to continue to be employed longer term, and in the interim their next big game has been pitched and approved and development ramps up and those people can get moved onto the next project.
Also I think you might be underestimating how much work is involved in doing a big story DLC expansion. Something like that needs to be worked into the development schedule from the get-go, and that means being fairly confident you can actually turn a profit off the base game and at least break even on the expansion. Put it this way, if it takes 24 months to make a 20-hour game, and you were going to make an expansion, that expansion probably needs to be at least 8-10 hours to be worth it. That’s probably 9-12 months development work. Why would a publisher or a studio invest that much time and manpower into something they’re going to sell for a fraction of the price and not just develop a straight up sequel? That’s where your expansion packs have gone – they’ve become actual games in their own right.
I’d also argue that in a lot of AAA cases, if you added all the DLC together it’d be equal to or more than you’d have gotten from an expansion pack anyway. You probably paid more for it though, and it trickled out over time rather than all in one go.
Spring and Autumn we do anything from 50 – 80 hours per week in the horticultural trade (unpaid OT) so I feel for these guys and gals.
At least what these people do have lasting memories for average Joe’s like me.
THANKYOU THANKYOU THANKYOU for all your incredibly hard work!!!!!
Re: the discussion of graphics and how pixel art is looked down upon:
I don’t avoid these games because I don’t like pixel art or because I think the devs are lazy. I avoid them because I usually don’t like the sorts of game that use pixel art – most commonly puzzle platformers, because two out of three indie games seem to be puzzle platformers.
Flipping through the Steam release list, when I see the words “puzzle platformer” (or sometimes just “Platformer”), I immediately flip to the next game.
That just means you’re not part of the target audience of those games so it doesn’t matter whether or not you like the art style.
The smart devs would listen to the people that play those games and see what art styles they like, what has been successful and also what has failed.
I just skimmed through to look at the titles first, didn’t get to reading the actual slabs inbetween… but this just looks like a list of common sense?
Or uncommon sense, as I guess you might have to call it these days.
2 days, 2 condescending articles that speak down too and insult the intelligence of its readers. I’m taking a break from this site, its really turned into garbage.
The thing that still amazes me when I see it, and you can see it a LOT these days, is the players who think they’re somehow entitled to a say in how the game is made because they paid for it. This mentality seems to run even deeper in any sort of game where theres an ongoing cost too like a subscription.
I mean, you don’t really see this expectation anywhere else, but it shows up constantly with games. People don’t expect to get a say in how Holden makes cars because they bought a car, or a say in how Sony makes TV’s because they bought a TV. Drop $60 on a game though and suddenly some people feel like they’re somehow entitled to have a say in how Destiny should be made, or what design decisions Blizzard should make with the next WoW expansion. In some of the more extreme cases groups of people with this mentality form a kind of virtual lynch mob and boil complex issues down to being the fault or one or two public facing devs and crusade against them trying to get them fired or worse.
Yeah, sure, good devs will take community concerns and feedback into consideration when they’re designing new features or content or working out where to go next with a game/franchise, but to do this they need actual good quality feedback to work from; the breakdown in communication is just as much the fault of the players as it is of the devs more often than not. The vast majority of players don’t know how a game is designed or developed, so don’t give feedback about how you’d make things different or how you would change x or how easy it would be to change y. And I don’t mean that in a condescending way, its just the fact of the matter. Much more useful is feedback about what you like in the game and why you liked it, or what you didn’t like and why you didn’t like it. Thats the sort of the feedback thats going to be useful to them, that they’re going to take onboard. Try and avoid the urge to tell them how they could fix it or how to do their job, because thats a sure fire way to get anything useful you had to say dismissed out of hand.
Think about it, if someone with a layman’s understanding of your job starts trying to tell you what to do and how you should do it while at the same time simplifying and dismissing your hard work, are you going to take anything they say onboard as valuable feedback? Or are you going to shrug it off, think ‘what a tool’ and move onto the next thing. Gamers are passionate about the games they love, use it for good! Be the change you want to see in the games you love! Don’t be that tool.
Kickstarter has really fed that mentality a lot too, I think. Developers setting up to give Joe Bloggs a say in the way things are developed because he pitched in $20 instead of $15 and so on. Problem with that is that most people don’t know a thing about games development, plus a lot of the time it devolves into majority-rules voting decisions and that will always end up upsetting some portion of the audience.
Armchair critics are not unique to the games industry yet somehow those other industries manage to continue on despite the mountains of criticism.
How much criticism do you hear for good games? Should we pretend that a shit game isn’t just to protect the apparently fragile ego of developers or criticise it in the hope that the next effort will be better?
Developers and publishers want to ‘connect’ with their respective communities, but they only want praise? You don’t get to choose the feedback you get, but you do get to choose how you react to it.
Personally I believe that a huge number of modern gamers have an incredibly bloated sense of entitlement and need a dose of reality and to get over themselves.
I know, right? How dare customers have opinions on products they purchased!
Seriously though, I think you need to stop romanticising the games industry and see it for the corporate money machine that it actually is.
How esgy.
Umm of course it’s a business, no one disputes that. We all participate in a capitalist and consumer driven society..
when a piece of code isn’t flawless or when a company has the audacity to make paid DLC or any of a number of other petty reasons – there is an absolute torrent of pedantic, whiny , infantile and downright misinformed crap from consumers who behave like game companies owe them a pound of flesh and a blowjob just because they bought a product.
My conceptions
1 Game developers work insanely hard for pretty average pay.
2 Game development is hard as hell
3 An idea is only as good as its execution which in turn is often only validated in number of sales
4 DLC is often evil – kinda got me here, but I’m still not a fan of the idea or the way it is implemented for the most part
5 Game development = money in the same way architecture = money, getting a job alone can be difficult enough, getting rich is largely luck and timing
6 realistic graphics are boring as hell; have a little stylistic direction and you’ll improve the game tenfold; see the indie title The Music Machine or the AAand a half (AA0.5? AA1/2? AAa?) title Alien: Isolation (even if it did just copy the movie the art direction is still great)
7 Most things in major titles are done for profit, most things in smaller titles/ development are done for the fans or creators
8 Bugs are hard to find or test for but make for hilarious reading when it’s apparently EA or Ubisoft’s fault
9 Casual games are increasingly offering a better return for investment and tempt once great publishers (cKoNuAgMhI) to do unspeakable things and other companies lesser evils such as microtransaction riddled FTP games
10 Audience feedback is fickle if handled incorrectly
Some of these I really don’t understand how they could be an actual misconception; devs being either lazy or rich is just ridiculous.
I actually agree with most of what is said in the article, but I don’t see the point in airing your dirty laundry. Most of the issues are ones that we can’t do anything about and it all sounds like developers having a whinge.
They don’t get paid a lot? I don’t see how this has even the tiniest bit to do with me as a consumer.
Development is hard? What would you like consumers to do about this?
They need a strong dose of reality and to learn that they don’t have the hardest or most under-appreciated job in the world.
Listen bud. Just STFU. Seriously – STFU. Seen marriages/lives/mortgages/mental health ruined, all for the sake of game development.
Game developers are, by and large, an exploited section of the work force. They are typically underpaid, overworked, and treated very poorly by their employers, not to mention ‘consumers’. Devs, consumers – doesn’t matter fuckwit, we’re all people, and you need to grow the fuck up.
Thanks for your input.
I’m not disputing it being bad (and ruining lives, etc.), not working in the industry myself I wouldn’t know, but it begs the question of why they choose to put themselves in that situation. I mean, if it’s so bad why do it?
I find it difficult to sympathise in general, a character flaw of mine, but in a case where people are knowingly setting themselves up to have their lives ruined I struggle to understand what the rest of us could possibly do about it. How are the rest of us responsible when they’re choosing to do it?
This isn’t a dig at developers, because most of the time they create fantastic experiences I thoroughly enjoy, this is general advice to anyone: if you’re not happy, make changes.