General Gaming News and Discussion

I do think its lots of factors.

1. just too many games. any famous dev is going to be famous in their circle and not really break out. Everyone thats played PoE knows who Chris Wilson of GGG is. regedit (andrew spinks) of terraria is pretty famous in his circle. concerned ape, Eric Barone of Stardew valley. and so on.

2. dev time on games is long these days. ultima 1- 81, ultima 2-82, ultima 3- 83, ultima 4- 85, ultima 5-88 and so on. every ultima was 1-2 years after the previous.

3. dev teams are also huge. back in the day 1 guy being THE guy for a game was the norm. or even a handful of core people that could become famous. now dev teams are hundreds of people. its impossible to even tell who does what.

4. dev time and "forever games" is a thing too. A lot of those famous guys are famous for basically just fine tuning their games for decades, instead of pumping out many games. terraria, stardewvally, minecraft- and markus, etc. chris with PoE.

Vanilla WoW was like 40 people. You can’t even come close to that big a game and that quality for that number of people.

I’ve also wondered if the whole DEI push and then the explosion of AI and other shit have resulted in guys saying fuck that and just dropping out of game dev for something more meritocratic and lucrative.

Caeden said:

Vanilla WoW was like 40 people. You can’t even come close to that big a game and that quality for that number of people.

I’ve also wondered if the whole DEI push and then the explosion of AI and other shit have resulted in guys saying fuck that and just dropping out of game dev for something more meritocratic and lucrative.

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Look at John Carmak for evidence of moving on to more lucrative things. Easily a once in a lifetime game dev.

End of the day, money is what changed stuff. Games suddenly had budgets like Hollywood blockbusters because big publishing houses were willing to toss more money at projects in the hopes it would equal big returns. With more money comes more expectations, so you need to bring on more people to meet those investor expectations. You also had the "Peter Principal" thing going on where your former MVP devs get promoted for the good work they did on those prior games, leading to new people coming in and those former MVP devs now primarily focusing on management and team coordination instead of actually making stuff themselves. Or those former MVP devs figure they will go it alone and leave (with mixed success).

Cybsled said:

End of the day, money is what changed stuff. Games suddenly had budgets like Hollywood blockbusters because big publishing houses were willing to toss more money at projects in the hopes it would equal big returns. With more money comes more expectations, so you need to bring on more people to meet those investor expectations. You also had the "Peter Principal" thing going on where your former MVP devs get promoted for the good work they did on those prior games, leading to new people coming in and those former MVP devs now primarily focusing on management and team coordination instead of actually making stuff themselves. Or those former MVP devs figure they will go it alone and leave (with mixed success).

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It's even more Hollywood than that. Bigger budgets mean less risk which means more remakes and safe franchises. Luckily, things like Steam have allowed indie developers to achieve success that 10-15 years ago was not really possible.