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Game industry continues to be just incredibly bleak behind the scenes. Ecosystem is in free fall. Doubt there’ll be an easy solution, or a quick one. This darkest hour has dragged out to a darkest couple of years.
— Mike Bithell (@mikebithell.bsky.social) 2024-12-01T19:04:43.910Z
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Wtf why is our business failing
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Modern software processes have bloated every step of the process to take 3x longer and with 5x as many people as it should, at a minimum. Even if those people are all competent, that's how many the company wants it to take. Old school games were made by neurodivergent savants that all had to be amazing coders so there wasn't this giant kraken gobbling up the budget
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I love learning about how the old guard worked around limitations.
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It's not the processes. Modern gaming is an order of magnitude more complex than during the 90ies. The problem with that is that there are legitimately only so many John Carmacks that exist in the world and getting more than 2 in a room is practically impossible. And that's ignoring the feasibility of hiring even one by the incredibly stingy modern game studios. The only studios that aren't stingy and are flush with cash are studios making gacha slop. But hyper-competent and passionate developers aren't going to want to work there either.
So modern game development is stuck in the same predicament that every mature industry is in: the workforce is average and (by definition) mediocre. Which means they need to hire even more people, to compensate for their more mediocre capabilities. To manage, control and focus this large mass of people the studios need to again hire even more people, whose job ends up requiring them to create processes and standards.
The processes are a symptom of the rot, not it's cause.
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This is a good comment
I think the rise of engines like unity and UE5 are further proof, where few people have the know how to make a modern graphic engine, so they use mass market cowtools.
There are some great games made on unity or unreal, but there's also a ton of unoptimised slop
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It's because of... young men... who buy video games. It's the consumers' fault.
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This is just
@BipocCuteSantaG-slur's take, but worse
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Its true. AAA Games have stagnated or some cases regressed. But now they are trying to get more money out of these games.
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