this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
90 points (96.9% liked)
Games
33164 readers
979 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
TLDR Bloated staff sizes and poor workflow management means salary costs skyrocket while a lot of people on staff are left waiting for things to do. The article keeps saying the costs aren't just about better graphical fidelity, but I think this issue is somewhat related because a big chunk of staff are going to be artists of some variety, and the reason there are so many is to pump up the fidelity.
Not that it much matters to me personally. I've said before that games have long ago hit diminishing returns when it comes to technical presentation and fidelity. I'd rather have a solid game with a vision, and preferably a good visual style rather than overproduced megastudio visuals. Those kinds of games are still coming out from solo developers and small studios, so it doesn't affect me one bit if big studios want to pour half a billion into every new assemblyline FPS they make.
As someone who works in corporate America this is 10000% true. Giant corporations are hugely bloated, inefficient, slow, and stupid. I honestly can't believe they are somehow the best way to do things in groups of people. I have never had less work to do than working in a huge corporation.
It's no surprise that indie games can compete with them. Working in startups compared to huge corporations, I did more code and we got more done in shorter amounts of time vs big corps. There's no red tape, there's no committees or directors or people you have to please. There's no political games, you just do your work. As simple as that. You come in, you code for 7-8 hours, you push your feature, and you go home.
In a megacorp you come in, you get 5 minutes for coffee before 3 people are pinging you on slack for some stupid downstream thing they didn't read the manual on or was never documented, and then you have 5 hours of meetings, lunch, 2 hours of ad hoc meetings, and then Shirley has to swing by to ask you to take another HR training. So you get maybe 20 minutes of coding done in a day.
For you engineers who have never coded in a megacorp - As an example, most megacorps have an ID service (usually named after a comic book character). This is usually a real service deployed somewhere that nobody maintains anymore, but it's where you get your.... IDs from. Really wrap your head around that. It's a microservice who is in charge of returning
Guid.NewGuid(). Then they get pulled into meetings because the ID service doesn't support this or that, they never thought of this case or that case, how can we upgrade off the old ID service to the new one. In a startup, you're callingGuid.NewGuid()Libertarian mythology
Clarification: right wing libertarian
Fair enough