Game Industry — hire fewer designers, hire more programmers
I use to believe the main bottleneck in the game industry was caused by the fact that there were too many designers that we’re unable to boil down complex systems into their essential components. This was caused by a lack of industry-wide standard design methodologies and practices.
The famous Ubisoft’s Rational Design school of thought is the closest that we have to an actual universal design process for game development. But I’ve recently changed my opinion and observed evidence that I was wrong.
After analyzing the recent bug-ridden AAA game releases that are slowly causing a growing customer-revolt and damaging the relationship between the customers and the creators, I’ve come to the conclusion that the core issue within the game industry is not the lack of good design ideas but a lack of people that actually knows how to implement them correctly.
We have an industry filled to the brim with creative people but of few that can actually implement their ideas in code. And this is caused by the fact that the video-game industry has shifted from software into a creative-driven field. But the truth of the matter, video-games are SOFTWARE not paintings, not films, and not work of arts that need to be displayed in a museum but programs that run on computers.
The industry has forgotten it’s rooted in the Silicon Valley hacking culture and not in the Hollywood system. At the end of the day, video-games are an 80% technical endeavor and a 20% creative process. The current tropes and core design ideas were not invented by designers but programmers. Not even 40 years ago, games were made by one person, a programmer. But as the “cool” factor of the industry started going mainstream, it attracted people from other fields that didn’t understand the software development process.
The current panoply of game studios has pivoted towards such a creative focus organization structure that programmers are being left behind when in fact they’re the actual people that make video-games even possible. And that’s the root cause why there are so many bug-ridden AAA games coming out with incomplete features and patches that are bigger in size than the actual original version of the released game.
