That's the meme, and I used to think that it could be true. I'd worked at some small and large game studios, and now I'm at one of the big three software compan

That's the meme, and I used to think that it could be true. I'd worked at some small and large game studios, and now I'm at one of the big three software companies. Things are much, much more hacked together here than in any of my previous jobs. The main difference here is that we can throw money and people at a problem: over-scale things by ridiculous amounts, hire whole teams for basic things. At the game studios I've worked at, programmers created unique designs that worked really well for the games they were made for, usually created and maintained by a single person. These things are rarely evangelized due to lack of time, resources, or need (games still come in boxes, and the codebase doesn't need to live forever.) An outside engineer might see it and think it's poorly designed because they haven't seen the pattern on HN. I think that we'll see more robust engineering discussion from game programmers as games as a service becomes more the norm. This is all anecdotal, and I'd like to hear what others think.