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This seems like a bad long-term strategy
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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Gaming
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It kinda baffles me that people still apply for jobs at EA, Activision/Blizzard, etc. We need more disenfranchised developers making their own studios like Supergiant, Respawn and Embark, who go back to making quality games that are passion projects instead of sloppy money churners. I simply don't understand why anyone would buy a game, then spend more money to not play the game in order to progress/level up/whatever.
Just to be clear I'm well aware Apex Legends could be thought of as a money churner, but it's still a free-to-play, quality product that just sells cosmetics so I personally don't see it in the same light as CoD, FIFA or Madden.
Gamedev along with Startups has always been a highly abusive work environment of longs hours and death marches were they just hire and use until they're burned by the job whilst paying them less than similar jobs outside the industry, an endless parade of bright eyed young people.
They're part of what I call "Prestige Industries" - alongside things like Modelling and Theatre, they are industries which attract tons of young people who, knowing only the externally visible side of that Industry, think that it must be incredible to work doing those things. With such an unending supply of eager and naive young people, such industries invariably end up (at least within the largest companies) being places with a very young workforce, highly exploitative (sometimes in more ways than just low salaries and long hours) which burn out their workforce or throw them out when they get older and wise enough to want better pay and work conditions.
This they're now doing looks to me like just doing more openly and on a schedule that's more convenient to them something they already did individually and on an ad-hoc basis (often on timings that were more convenient to workers, for example when people chose to quit after realizing they were being paid shit to work stupid hours).
The general problem of "Prestige Industries" has always been that they basically throw away most of the expertise they're building training people on the job for a couple of years, having basically an ocean of juniors, pretty much no mid-level types and then at best a handful of top experts. This IMHO is why both gamedev and Startups produce much buggier software than the rest of IT.
Probably part of it, but games are also more difficult to test automatically (which also means fast, often and predictable).
"Given these entities, make sure the price is correctly calculated as XY" is way easier than "make sure this game object doesn't clip into the ground", especially with the indeterministic physics systems that are often used.
Because when starting your own studio in the garage you and your family has no money or insurance.
It probably makes for a good look in your CV. You work there for a few years, and then you can apply anywhere else with better chances, I guess.
Nobody but Indies are hiring 30 year old game developers.
I can tell you from experience that most of what you learn developing games is not really applicable in broader Software Development, not just the libraries (and often languages) being different but also the design principles often being different and the software architectures definitely being different - gamedev tend to create systems oriented to visuals and driven by human actions and by timed events, operating both on insanely tight timings that push towards overoptimization (the rendering layer) and on very lax timings (stuff reacting to human actions) plus data integrity isn't much of a concern, whilst most stuff out there is data-driven, often operating at machine-talk speeds (faster than user driven, slower than game screen rendering speeds) and data integrity is often of paramount importance (especially in corporate systems dealing with valuable info, money or things that cost money to do).
So at least in Software Development having "5 years at Blizzard" isn't all that impressive, at least not for the typical hiring manager who tends to be in his or her 30s or older.
You can probably Occam's razor as to why they don't make their own studios
I had a professor who had worked for a big company, was laid off, joined a smaller company, then the bigger company bought that one up.
Was your professor Steve Jobs??
No? I don't think he ever worked in game design.