Enough people seem to want to work on gaming, even under the extreme conditions, for devs to not be very valuable in that context.
Passions projects as a job can be very expensive.
Passions projects as a job can be very expensive.
It's just an anecdote, but one dev told me at the studio he worked on, his project had 22 engineers assigned, but just 3 devs ultimately contributed 90% of the code written. And while those 3 devs were very skilled developers, he claimed they weren't so-called "10x" engineers. They've all since moved on to greener pastures doing work outside the industry making substantially more money.
Well, sounds like they were more like 7x engineers /s
Consequences also can be extremely subjective. I have the experience of a single team architecting/coding the core of the system to ensure nobody ever adds any kind of concurrency because "it's hard to reason with and we want nobody to spawn threads." Let us say the networking layer teams were not excited about this. Who is right and who is wrong: both teams had "consequences" to deal with.
I’m getting the feeling from some recent AAA games (looking at you EA/DICE) that quality is going down with each released game while spin-off studios pop up indicating to an outsider that some “core” competence has left.
All that seems symptomatic of under-investing in development, especially the exploratory & creative type of development, i.e. R&D. At least Epic has spent some of that Fortnite money on building great tech for UE5, it seems, and that will get proliferated through use of their engine and matched by competitors in time.
There are very few people with relevant graphics programming skills. Who cares if 10000 undergrads wanting to be game devs if none of them know C++, and even fewer know what a pointer is.
You may think I'm joking, but even undergrads coming out of the most elite institutions have no knowledge of these things.
How the hell you gonna explain compute shaders to a guy like that? You can only license out these problems to third party tools so much. Epic isn't going to come in and save you when you fuck up the release.
I believe there are lots of people who have a strong desire to get into the game industry and will accept low pay, miserable work environments and uninteresting assignments to "get their foot in the door" because building games is a "dream job" to many young people going into software development. Little do they realize that there aren't very many people who get to single-handedly invent and code up the next big game hit. They're going to spend approximately 0% of their time creating kick-ass gameplay and awesome pixel shaders, and almost all of their time doing something mundane like being the expert on the "loading..." screen or figuring out why the menu animations glitch in this one weird scenario.