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I don’t personally know any other field whose products have deteriorated over time like the game industry’s and it being clear because the quality of software d

I don’t personally know any other field whose products have deteriorated over time like the game industry’s and it being clear because the quality of software developers in that field have went down. In other industries, changes in material usage can be cost saving in nature or more robust. But in the games industry, new generations of players are literally losing out in features that previously existed, or quality concerns that one never had to think about before.

flir 4y ago
Not convinced about programmers being worse, but printers, maybe? That's an actively user-hostile industry if ever there was one.
sosodev 4y ago
The quality of developers in game dev has not declined. Studios grew and merged into massive companies that follow the established pattern of profits over people.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Exactly. There’s not a ton of competition.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    There is not a ton of competition in games? I generally disagree on that if you stick to Windows based games. Now if you're playing on any of the consoles, well longevity is decided by the platform owner. In the indie games industry there are likely more games than ever that are better than ever and can be self hosted. The unaddressed problem here is that 'online only' skinner box style games are massive money makers when they are a hit. Couple that with ever increasing costs in making top of the line games and you can see why the people handing out funding want to go that way.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      There is not a ton of competition in AAA games. Indie games are getting better, but if you want AAA graphics, etc. your competition is far more limited.
- Retric 4y ago
  Profits over people has reduced the average quality of devs over time. Cyberpunk 2077 shows they are still tossing out unfinished bug ridden messes. The only difference is so many AAA games like Assassins Creed, GTA, Call of Duty, etc are just incremental releases they have more time to polish the same crap.
  - sosodev 4y ago
    The thing that irks me about incremental releases is that they charge full price for every new release AND include micro-transactions. So we end up in this situation where to be consumer friendly they should either adopt a rolling release F2P model (like fortnite, dota, cs:go, etc) or at the very least pledge long term support to each release. They do neither so games like Call of Duty end up as a money pit when they get infested with hackers a couple of years after the series moves on to the next title.
  - SkyPuncher 4y ago
    > Call of Duty, etc are just incremental releases they have more time to polish the same crap. Unfortunately, as this year's CoD release has shown, they can't even do incremental updates correctly anymore. They've broken major parts of the game, removed key features (like leaderboards), and taken months to release content.
  - waboremo 4y ago
    The lessons to be learned about Cyberpunk 2077 have very little to do with quality of devs. Instead it has everything to do with mismanaged timelines, misaligned expectations, marketing based on a game that doesn't even exist, securing brand deals before the game is even playable, and more micro-lessons specific to game development (like assuming your engine is capable of a different genre easily). Speaking of Assassin's Creed, the reason they're able to polish is not because it's the "same crap". On the contrary, every time they've had to deal with an engine upgrade they've suffered huge bugs (and I'll touch on this later on). But they're able to mitigate this by having large teams operate as cogs, with higher level tools, and this has been battle tested for years. Call of Duty is another, huge teams, working on cycles. CD Projekt Red did not have this in place. Their expectations were utterly delusional. Speaking about engine upgrades, maintaining your own custom engine is incredibly costly in every aspect. Harder to find talent, harder to maintain, harder to test. All of this compounds, and gets worse when you're trying to stretch your engine away from "the same crap" and into a new genre. This is why more studios now are relying on the likes of Unity or Unreal - including CDPR. Or EA, who once upon a time had both Eclipse (single player RPG engine) and Frostbite (FPS shooter engine), and are now betting on Unreal.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hourago 4y ago
  This same thing happens to movie stars. Twenty years ago some actors moved masses just by appearing in a movie. Nowadays actors are dispensable and movie characters are performed by different people. Massive studios also kill opportunities for actors. And I am sure that this is true in most industries. A few companies own most products and jobs and can manipulate them as they desire.
  - GuB-42 4y ago
    In Hollywood, actors actually do pretty well compared to VFX artists, they still have notoriety, and a really strong union, VFX artist don't. In fact there are striking similarities between Hollywood VFX artists and AAA game developers in how shitty the work conditions are.
conceptme 4y ago
Prett much the same with all software as service these days, you don't own your software anymore. Even media with all streaming going on it's sometimes just gone.
SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
> I don’t personally know any other field whose products have deteriorated over time like the game industry’s and it being clear because the quality of software developers in that field have went down. Having been playing computer games since the mid 90's I don't know if that claim is actually true. Once upon a time there were games that would delete your entire hard drive when uninstalled and wouldn't last a 15 minute game session before blue screening the whole system. Honestly, given the complexity that modern games require I don't think it's bad at all. I think the problems we're seeing with modern games actually being worse (the new Arkham game compared to the old) are strictly dollar and cents choices. The ability is there, but the industry has become far too pragmatic.
- pathartl 4y ago
  A lot of your concern of older games has been fixed over time by the development of emulators and wrappers. Multiplayer (and live DRM) components of modern games can't be easily RE'd in most cases. Especially with services like Xbox Live the most helpful data is actually packet captures where one can actually go through and replicate the protocol used. I honestly would challenge you to find games from the mid 90's+ that won't work on a modern machine. Many times if there's a feature that straight up doesn't work it's due to online services being discontinued. There's been some work done to rebuild services like GameSpy or Westwood Online, but once more forms of encryption and anti-cheat or DRM were implemented in these sorts of services, the harder it's going to be to preserve their experience.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    That wasn't my argument here - the older games, at the time they came out, were often a mess. Some bugs were patched out, some weren't, but the quality at the time they were relevant wasn't any greater, it was often worse. But yeah, we're in a new phase where publishers kill games and then they are gone forever and that's a real shame. I think there needs to be some sort of legislation around abandonware so that people can host live services and MMOs after the publishers give up on them.
    - 4y ago
wlesieutre 4y ago
Is the switch to always-online game services (even for single player, looking at you Diablo 3 and many more since) really driven by the quality of software developers? I’ve always assumed this was a management issue.
fullshark 4y ago
The problem is the monetization strategies have completely upended the industry to the point that it's basically anti-consumer and pro-gambler/addiction.
- soderfoo 4y ago
  Sadly, this is the most accurate answer. Random number generators, premium stores, pay to win, etc... Seeing anything appurtenant to these features take top priority is frustrating.
taeric 4y ago
I mean... do we even know what games people played long long ago? We have a few ideas, but surprisingly few. And that isn't even getting into songs and other stories that have been lost to time. What about recipes and such? But, with longevity, what other industries are there? Furniture is one that frustrates me, as everyone is sold on the idea that some furniture is for a lifetime, at least. Which is borderline bullshit. There can be some things that will last with maintenance, but a lot of really pretty things that last are also done using materials that we flat don't allow the harvesting of nowadays. Such that things can only last if they aren't getting used. :(
- gameman144 4y ago
  I don't know about that, well-built solid wood furniture can last a really long time. (Upholstered items, though, I'm with you on.)
  - pixl97 4y ago
    The combination of solid wood items with replaceable upholstery is the middle ground that allows the furniture to be updated with whatever is popular at the time. Of course finding a shop that does upholstery these days isn't easy or cheap.
  - taeric 4y ago
    The hardwoods that help solid furniture last forever aren't really allowed anymore. Softwood furniture is highly dependent on the level of use you throw at it. And I'm willing to let my kids go wild and live on our stuff. :D
maccard 4y ago
I think this is a bit disingeuous. I probably fall into the category of "quality of developers in that field have went down", I've been working in games for a decade. Many of the problems with games are to do with game engine architectural decisions made 20 years ago - anything based on Unreal Engine has code that was last touched in the mid 2000's for example, and some of that is _not good_. Lots of issues around sloppy drivers, bad memory management stem from an overuse of the "old way" of doing things, which is driven by the programmers you're glorifying in your post. Some of the smartest people I've worked with are still working on their first game, and some have been in the industry long enough to be veterans. The quality isn't deteriorating, the market has expaned hugely. Companies that are now considered "small" would have been considered enormous productions 25 years ago, and those companies are pushing out incredible quality experiences. Companies that are absolute behemoths now are putting out iterative works that people _clearly_ enjoy because there are alternatives to them and yet they buy Call of Duty because it's fresh, fun, exciting, nostalgic. > I don’t personally know any other field whose products have deteriorated over time like the game industry's Ignoring the fact that I disagree about the quality having fallen (stray, tunic, and vampire survivors are some of the best experiences I've had gaming, and they're all relatively new), people lament the same way about everything. Cars aren't built like they used to be, household appliances used to be more robust, movies were better in <X> time, children's toys are just ads for <y> show, there's no good music these days. Look on any thread here and you'll see the same thing (and if you speak to your parents they'll say the same about things that were better when _they_ were younger)
- ipaddr 4y ago
  People buy call of duty because of the name regardless of the current quality vs an unknown title. Movies were better, they made less movies which increased quality, had better actors who had more talent (singing, dancing, acting). Kids TV shows are created to sell toys. Products are cheaper and made to be thrown out vs repaired. Profit keeps going up, quality goes down while prices try to stay the same.
duxup 4y ago
>and it being clear because the quality of software developers in that field have went down I don't think the decisions John is talking about are in the hand of individual devs.
NathanFlurry 4y ago
In my experience, game developers are some of the most talented engineers I've ever met. But they're very different from the "high quality" engineers you'd find in the rest of tech. They're usually really good at getting the job done and balancing quality + productivity. However, most things are written with a one-off mindset because chances are your next game will need things to work completely differently. Everywhere else in tech you find "scalable" and "backwards compatible" solutions; not in gaming. Part of this is the job description. Unlike the rest of tech, you're usually building a game that will be popular for 2-3 years then disappear. It's not common to find that model anywhere else in tech. Just my 2 cents.
- brailsafe 4y ago
  Wouldn't that not be true at all for a significant portion of games that are long-running franchises, perhaps even less true than for any other software product that doesn't live for longer than 2-3 years? Either way, I would never attribute this to ICs, they're just doing the best or fastest job they can with the requirements they're given. A lot of the time anyway.
  - Dork1234 4y ago
    By the time you a a long-running franchise you gained so much technical debt that rewriting the entire engine not to have hacks is a very development intensive. Then you never know if the franchise will fad away.
- protocolture 4y ago
  100%. Everyone I know succeeding in that space is the premium top tier cowboy coder. Self starter, interested in the end product, but ultimately just able to sit at a computer and belt out 100 solutions to 30 problems a day.
renewiltord 4y ago
I don't feel this way at all. Played the new Call of Duty : Modern Warfare and it was a mind blowing cinematic experience. Felt like I was in a blockbuster movie. Watching a friend playing Ghost of Tsushima and it's the same. So good. Horizon : Zero Dawn. Crazy stuff. I don't know what these guys are doing, but the scenes are gorgeous. The gameplay is loads of fun (MW2 is sooo much fun). The choreography is great. Love it all.
Dalewyn 4y ago
>I don’t personally know any other field whose products have deteriorated over time like the game industry’s Household appliances?
lmm 4y ago
Bullshit. Games are being made more cheaply maybe, and some user-hostile product decisions are being made, but developer quality is better than it ever was. If you play the release version of an old game without the nostalgia filter you'll pretty quickly notice how much worse basic software quality was.
quietcomments 4y ago
Blizzard's reputation for quality was sourced from a stellar QA department, overworked and underpaid. People won't grind on small details for low pay, so simplified games are the way forward.
- astrange 4y ago
  Once you have the QA department you still have to listen to them and implement the fixes. When a bad game comes out they usually know it's bad, they just shipped it anyway.

flir 4y ago

Not convinced about programmers being worse, but printers, maybe? That's an actively user-hostile industry if ever there was one.

sosodev 4y ago

The quality of developers in game dev has not declined. Studios grew and merged into massive companies that follow the established pattern of profits over people.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Spooky23 4y ago
Exactly. There’s not a ton of competition.
- pixl97 4y ago
  There is not a ton of competition in games? I generally disagree on that if you stick to Windows based games. Now if you're playing on any of the consoles, well longevity is decided by the platform owner. In the indie games industry there are likely more games than ever that are better than ever and can be self hosted. The unaddressed problem here is that 'online only' skinner box style games are massive money makers when they are a hit. Couple that with ever increasing costs in making top of the line games and you can see why the people handing out funding want to go that way.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    There is not a ton of competition in AAA games. Indie games are getting better, but if you want AAA graphics, etc. your competition is far more limited.
Retric 4y ago
Profits over people has reduced the average quality of devs over time. Cyberpunk 2077 shows they are still tossing out unfinished bug ridden messes. The only difference is so many AAA games like Assassins Creed, GTA, Call of Duty, etc are just incremental releases they have more time to polish the same crap.
- sosodev 4y ago
  The thing that irks me about incremental releases is that they charge full price for every new release AND include micro-transactions. So we end up in this situation where to be consumer friendly they should either adopt a rolling release F2P model (like fortnite, dota, cs:go, etc) or at the very least pledge long term support to each release. They do neither so games like Call of Duty end up as a money pit when they get infested with hackers a couple of years after the series moves on to the next title.
- SkyPuncher 4y ago
  > Call of Duty, etc are just incremental releases they have more time to polish the same crap. Unfortunately, as this year's CoD release has shown, they can't even do incremental updates correctly anymore. They've broken major parts of the game, removed key features (like leaderboards), and taken months to release content.
- waboremo 4y ago
  The lessons to be learned about Cyberpunk 2077 have very little to do with quality of devs. Instead it has everything to do with mismanaged timelines, misaligned expectations, marketing based on a game that doesn't even exist, securing brand deals before the game is even playable, and more micro-lessons specific to game development (like assuming your engine is capable of a different genre easily). Speaking of Assassin's Creed, the reason they're able to polish is not because it's the "same crap". On the contrary, every time they've had to deal with an engine upgrade they've suffered huge bugs (and I'll touch on this later on). But they're able to mitigate this by having large teams operate as cogs, with higher level tools, and this has been battle tested for years. Call of Duty is another, huge teams, working on cycles. CD Projekt Red did not have this in place. Their expectations were utterly delusional. Speaking about engine upgrades, maintaining your own custom engine is incredibly costly in every aspect. Harder to find talent, harder to maintain, harder to test. All of this compounds, and gets worse when you're trying to stretch your engine away from "the same crap" and into a new genre. This is why more studios now are relying on the likes of Unity or Unreal - including CDPR. Or EA, who once upon a time had both Eclipse (single player RPG engine) and Frostbite (FPS shooter engine), and are now betting on Unreal.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hourago 4y ago
This same thing happens to movie stars. Twenty years ago some actors moved masses just by appearing in a movie. Nowadays actors are dispensable and movie characters are performed by different people. Massive studios also kill opportunities for actors. And I am sure that this is true in most industries. A few companies own most products and jobs and can manipulate them as they desire.
- GuB-42 4y ago
  In Hollywood, actors actually do pretty well compared to VFX artists, they still have notoriety, and a really strong union, VFX artist don't. In fact there are striking similarities between Hollywood VFX artists and AAA game developers in how shitty the work conditions are.

conceptme 4y ago

Prett much the same with all software as service these days, you don't own your software anymore. Even media with all streaming going on it's sometimes just gone.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago

> I don’t personally know any other field whose products have deteriorated over time like the game industry’s and it being clear because the quality of software developers in that field have went down. Having been playing computer games since the mid 90's I don't know if that claim is actually true. Once upon a time there were games that would delete your entire hard drive when uninstalled and wouldn't last a 15 minute game session before blue screening the whole system. Honestly, given the complexity that modern games require I don't think it's bad at all. I think the problems we're seeing with modern games actually being worse (the new Arkham game compared to the old) are strictly dollar and cents choices. The ability is there, but the industry has become far too pragmatic.

pathartl 4y ago
A lot of your concern of older games has been fixed over time by the development of emulators and wrappers. Multiplayer (and live DRM) components of modern games can't be easily RE'd in most cases. Especially with services like Xbox Live the most helpful data is actually packet captures where one can actually go through and replicate the protocol used. I honestly would challenge you to find games from the mid 90's+ that won't work on a modern machine. Many times if there's a feature that straight up doesn't work it's due to online services being discontinued. There's been some work done to rebuild services like GameSpy or Westwood Online, but once more forms of encryption and anti-cheat or DRM were implemented in these sorts of services, the harder it's going to be to preserve their experience.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  That wasn't my argument here - the older games, at the time they came out, were often a mess. Some bugs were patched out, some weren't, but the quality at the time they were relevant wasn't any greater, it was often worse. But yeah, we're in a new phase where publishers kill games and then they are gone forever and that's a real shame. I think there needs to be some sort of legislation around abandonware so that people can host live services and MMOs after the publishers give up on them.
  - 4y ago

wlesieutre 4y ago

Is the switch to always-online game services (even for single player, looking at you Diablo 3 and many more since) really driven by the quality of software developers? I’ve always assumed this was a management issue.

fullshark 4y ago

The problem is the monetization strategies have completely upended the industry to the point that it's basically anti-consumer and pro-gambler/addiction.

soderfoo 4y ago
Sadly, this is the most accurate answer. Random number generators, premium stores, pay to win, etc... Seeing anything appurtenant to these features take top priority is frustrating.

taeric 4y ago

I mean... do we even know what games people played long long ago? We have a few ideas, but surprisingly few. And that isn't even getting into songs and other stories that have been lost to time. What about recipes and such? But, with longevity, what other industries are there? Furniture is one that frustrates me, as everyone is sold on the idea that some furniture is for a lifetime, at least. Which is borderline bullshit. There can be some things that will last with maintenance, but a lot of really pretty things that last are also done using materials that we flat don't allow the harvesting of nowadays. Such that things can only last if they aren't getting used. :(

gameman144 4y ago
I don't know about that, well-built solid wood furniture can last a really long time. (Upholstered items, though, I'm with you on.)
- pixl97 4y ago
  The combination of solid wood items with replaceable upholstery is the middle ground that allows the furniture to be updated with whatever is popular at the time. Of course finding a shop that does upholstery these days isn't easy or cheap.
- taeric 4y ago
  The hardwoods that help solid furniture last forever aren't really allowed anymore. Softwood furniture is highly dependent on the level of use you throw at it. And I'm willing to let my kids go wild and live on our stuff. :D

maccard 4y ago

I think this is a bit disingeuous. I probably fall into the category of "quality of developers in that field have went down", I've been working in games for a decade. Many of the problems with games are to do with game engine architectural decisions made 20 years ago - anything based on Unreal Engine has code that was last touched in the mid 2000's for example, and some of that is _not good_. Lots of issues around sloppy drivers, bad memory management stem from an overuse of the "old way" of doing things, which is driven by the programmers you're glorifying in your post. Some of the smartest people I've worked with are still working on their first game, and some have been in the industry long enough to be veterans. The quality isn't deteriorating, the market has expaned hugely. Companies that are now considered "small" would have been considered enormous productions 25 years ago, and those companies are pushing out incredible quality experiences. Companies that are absolute behemoths now are putting out iterative works that people _clearly_ enjoy because there are alternatives to them and yet they buy Call of Duty because it's fresh, fun, exciting, nostalgic. > I don’t personally know any other field whose products have deteriorated over time like the game industry's Ignoring the fact that I disagree about the quality having fallen (stray, tunic, and vampire survivors are some of the best experiences I've had gaming, and they're all relatively new), people lament the same way about everything. Cars aren't built like they used to be, household appliances used to be more robust, movies were better in <X> time, children's toys are just ads for <y> show, there's no good music these days. Look on any thread here and you'll see the same thing (and if you speak to your parents they'll say the same about things that were better when _they_ were younger)

ipaddr 4y ago
People buy call of duty because of the name regardless of the current quality vs an unknown title. Movies were better, they made less movies which increased quality, had better actors who had more talent (singing, dancing, acting). Kids TV shows are created to sell toys. Products are cheaper and made to be thrown out vs repaired. Profit keeps going up, quality goes down while prices try to stay the same.

duxup 4y ago

>and it being clear because the quality of software developers in that field have went down I don't think the decisions John is talking about are in the hand of individual devs.

NathanFlurry 4y ago

In my experience, game developers are some of the most talented engineers I've ever met. But they're very different from the "high quality" engineers you'd find in the rest of tech. They're usually really good at getting the job done and balancing quality + productivity. However, most things are written with a one-off mindset because chances are your next game will need things to work completely differently. Everywhere else in tech you find "scalable" and "backwards compatible" solutions; not in gaming. Part of this is the job description. Unlike the rest of tech, you're usually building a game that will be popular for 2-3 years then disappear. It's not common to find that model anywhere else in tech. Just my 2 cents.

brailsafe 4y ago
Wouldn't that not be true at all for a significant portion of games that are long-running franchises, perhaps even less true than for any other software product that doesn't live for longer than 2-3 years? Either way, I would never attribute this to ICs, they're just doing the best or fastest job they can with the requirements they're given. A lot of the time anyway.
- Dork1234 4y ago
  By the time you a a long-running franchise you gained so much technical debt that rewriting the entire engine not to have hacks is a very development intensive. Then you never know if the franchise will fad away.
protocolture 4y ago
100%. Everyone I know succeeding in that space is the premium top tier cowboy coder. Self starter, interested in the end product, but ultimately just able to sit at a computer and belt out 100 solutions to 30 problems a day.

renewiltord 4y ago

I don't feel this way at all. Played the new Call of Duty : Modern Warfare and it was a mind blowing cinematic experience. Felt like I was in a blockbuster movie. Watching a friend playing Ghost of Tsushima and it's the same. So good. Horizon : Zero Dawn. Crazy stuff. I don't know what these guys are doing, but the scenes are gorgeous. The gameplay is loads of fun (MW2 is sooo much fun). The choreography is great. Love it all.

Dalewyn 4y ago

>I don’t personally know any other field whose products have deteriorated over time like the game industry’s Household appliances?

lmm 4y ago

Bullshit. Games are being made more cheaply maybe, and some user-hostile product decisions are being made, but developer quality is better than it ever was. If you play the release version of an old game without the nostalgia filter you'll pretty quickly notice how much worse basic software quality was.

quietcomments 4y ago

Blizzard's reputation for quality was sourced from a stellar QA department, overworked and underpaid. People won't grind on small details for low pay, so simplified games are the way forward.

astrange 4y ago
Once you have the QA department you still have to listen to them and implement the fixes. When a bad game comes out they usually know it's bad, they just shipped it anyway.