>AAA game development is rushed; the pressure is to ship.
I'd be more understanding if GTA Online hadn't already shipped its first version in October of 2013. Surely there would've been some time after shipping the first version to profile the game.
I'd be more understanding if GTA Online hadn't already shipped its first version in October of 2013. Surely there would've been some time after shipping the first version to profile the game.
But I should note that once you ship a product in this space there is a heavy emphasis on not breaking much. Changes are for the next milestone (seasons, service packs, new features). There's very rarely any emphasis on "fixing" something because it could introduce even more bugs and Producers prefer sitting on a stack of known issues than addressing them with more unknown ones. Since known issues have a known cost.
Until it gets so bad that you have to make health patches, we made such patches (and referred to them internally as "Sanity" patches)
Usually different staff rolls on and off at different times of product development and post-release lifecycle. I understand that most programmers would have been rolled off a while before launch. You early on have people build or adjust the engine and tooling, but later on you don't need most of them anymore and things come down to creating content.
Usually in software development you have different people over time, because of individual churn, not because you are changing the role mix