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).

Yep.

Just checked and the mods removed all my comments in that convo, but left the other guy’s up, despite me providing objective evidence and research (from Harvard, no less). The annoying social media circlejerk from resentful losers is so real.

AAA gamedev here. Had a guy scream at me on here on a different account for several days straight last week that “AI will eventually take your job, too, just wait and see” after I told the guy “all you have to do as an artist is make better quality work than AI slop can produce, which is easy for most professionals; AI is still useful in production pipelines to speed up efficiency, but it will never replace human intuition because it can’t actually reason and doesn’t have feelings, which is all art is and is what programming requires”.

Got told that I was a naive and bad person with survivorship bias and hubris who doesn’t understand the plight of artists and will eventually also be replaced, as if I’m not a technical artist myself and don’t work with plenty of other artistic and technical disciplines every single day. Like, okay, dude. I guess nearly a decade of senior-level experience means nothing. I swear, my team had tried and tossed away anywhere from 5 to 10 potential “cutting-edge AI production tools” before the general public had even heard about ChatGPT because most of them have such strict limited use-cases that they aren’t practically applicable to most things, but the guy was convinced that we had to boycott and destroy all AI tools because every artist was gonna be out of a job soon. Lol. Lmao, even.

This is the correct answer.

https://youtu.be/_2C2CNmK7dQ

Clicks the upload button

“I did it. Nintendo is surely finished. This will definitely work.”

And then you get hired back 6 months later for more pay after they realize how badly they fucked up.

I had a dude screaming pretty much the same thing at me yesterday on here (on a different account), despite the fact that I’m senior-level, near the top of my field and that all the objective data as well as anecdotal reports from tons of other people says otherwise. Like, okay buddy, sure. People seem to just like fighting things online to feel better about themselves, even if the thing they’re fighting doesn’t really exist.