ofmoonlightandthesun:

robotsfromouterspace:

mistresstrevelyan:

peebsayle:

alienshepard:

trained video game designers who get paid thousands of dollars for making video game: some things are way too difficult to create with this engine, you have to understand that we are very limited in our possibilities for this game

modders with a pirated version of photoshop who work full jobs outside the video game industry: hey guys I made 100 hairstyles and re-textures of 750 outfits during my lunch time. Also this female character now has proper armor and can be romanced by a female protag. I was kinda busy last night but here are 20 new complexions you can download for free

hi, resident games art student here! i am. bad at articulating stuff but let me explain why there aren’t 100 hairstyles and 750 re-textures made by game devs! there are a LOT of misconception about the game industry, most prominently maybe that there is this Huge Capitalist Entity™ behind them when in fact there is a team of hardworking devs. These people spend SO much time and work on these games, they’re the last ones who want to release a shitty product. I’m sure that at this point everybody has heard about how stressful making games is but let me tell you exactly HOW bad it is. Because this industry truly treats their people like crap. Like they literally made up a new term for overtime, “crunch”, so they wouldn’t need to pay people extra. Let me add a quote from Blood, Sweat and Pixels, a book that follows the development stories of popular games such as Diablo 3, Dragon Age Inquisition, Stardew Valley, etc.

“The developer’s team had to spend the next few months “crunching”, working eighty- to one-hundred hour weeks (…) Some of them slept in the office so they wouldn’t have to waste time commuting”

So yeah.
It’s not really an issue of “do we have the skill?” but more “do we add another hairstyle or do we fix these game breaking bugs?”. When you literally have to decide which bugs you have to fix in time and which ones you can’t there simply isn’t enough time for adding more cosmetics. All games are released unfinished because it is simply not feasible to fix everything. Game development is brutal. Our lecturer told us that people in the industry usually work there for no longer than 8 years simply because it is so demanding and soul sucking. So why is crunch a thing, you may ask.

“I think it remains to be seen whether crunching actually works. Obviously a lot of literature says it doesn’t. (But) I think everybody finds a time in their development careers where you’re going ‘I don’t see what other options we have’” (Aaryn Flynn)

One huge part of that is because the games industry doesn’t have something which almost every other industry has: unions.
This has recently gotten more attention with the whole voice actor thing, but the simple fact is that as of now there are no unions for people working on games, something big publishers want to keep that way. Working in games still has kind of a “rockstar” image, it’s a small industry and there are thousands of eager people who would take any kind of job. As a result there are no real actions that get taken against overworking as everyone is ultimately seen as replaceable.
Not only that but individual studios are largely at the mercy of their publishers. Let’s look at Ensamble as an example. Instead of making the original IP the studio wanted to create they were told by Microsoft to make a game within the Halo franchise. Only to be told that after the release of what was now “Halo Wars” the studio would be shut down.

So while they might not add tons of additional content in form of cosmetics a TON of the work goes into the less glamorous systems like inventory, pathfinding or 3D modelling hundreds of assets only 10% of players are going to look at in detail. And don’t make me go into the topic of 3D modelling because THAT is a whole other rant bc it is difficult AS FUCK and incredibly underappreciated.

And lastly, it is a job. a not very well paid one so you can shove that “thousand of dollars” up your ass.

Last time reblog. Because THE COMMENTARY is important.

I legit love discussing games on here but seeing posts like this getting THOUSANDS OF NOTES despite its fallacies, misconceptions and outright ignorance of how our industry works is beyond frustrating.

Hi, yeah, dev here, let me add a few more points to this.

• Modders do not have deadlines. We do, and they often are handed down by people who don’t give a flying fuck about our well-being or, yes, technical limitations. I have shipped some hellaciously bad code, you guys, because of execs who decided we were going to ship a feature three weeks early, consequences be damned. I’ve been pushed into a monthlong crunch that never needed to happen, because management was in too much of a hurry to actually let us do things right. And I’m not even working on AAA titles, we don’t have nearly as much pressure from investors as they do. You want to know why you can hardly play Knights of the Old Republic II without an extensive mod? It’s because LucasArts suddenly wanted it by Christmas, no matter what the devs at Obsidian told them about its real state of readiness. But the people who made the massive hoard of Dragon Age haircut mods that I have installed? Did not have a deadline for those. Amazing what you can get done when you’re able to budget your project time however the hell you want. (I do specify project time, because OF COURSE many modders have school and jobs and what have you. But whatever time they spend on the mod, that’s by their own pacing.)
• Executive meddling also prevents us from putting in features we really want to give you sometimes. 
• Not every game dev is a designer, mate. Often when something doesn’t make it into the game, it’s because they were missing resourcing in a given discipline. I can write you beautiful code; I can’t make beautiful haircuts for your avatar. If there aren’t enough artists on my team because of management’s resourcing decisions, and the ones we have are tied up on assets for key NPCs and backgrounds, then we are going to be S.O.L. on the extra haircuts front.
• This is not to say resourcing decisions are absolved from all criticism, of course; if a game has the resourcing for 10 light skintones and includes 0 dark skintones, then it had the resourcing for 5 light skintones and 5 dark skintones, and someone made a bad decision re:inclusion and that is ABSOLUTELY very much worth criticizing. But depending on resourcing, the plausible solution there may have been to make sure they have 10 diverse skin tones; having there be 20 may have been out of reach. 
• Related to not every dev being a designer, I want to get this out there: Not all game dev roles are paid equally. QA (who are INCREDIBLY important) and artists are grossly underpaid, and in many places so are designers. Engineers tend to fare better, but I know there are still some fairly beloved game companies in the area that do not pay their engineers enough to live nearby. (Most of the games industry is incidentally centered in some VERY expensive areas; the Bay Area, LA, Seattle, and so forth.) The point made further up the thread about there being no union in this industry is relevant here. There have been rumblings lately and I really hope we can get something started, but for the time being, there’s no organization protecting people’s jobs (you know what else we have a lot of? mass layoffs due to poor planning by execs!), wages, and working conditions like that. Overall the OP’s implication that because professional devs can’t do some of the things that modders can do for free, somehow means they shouldn’t be able to make a living off their work, is pretty godawful.

I have no intention of implying that game devs are above criticism. There are SO MANY issues with video games, my dudes. And I appreciate the hell out of modders, both from the “they make a bunch of stuff I like” player standpoint and the “important relationship with the dev community” standpoint! But their role is fundamentally different from ours, and the implication that their free work somehow invalidates the facts that we do this for our job, are subject to executive requirements that they are not, and need to make a living off our job, is bullshit. PLEASE keep applying constructive criticism to games, and PLEASE keep modding if it brings you joy, and support modders that do. But as it turns out it’s 300% possible to do that without being a shitbagel about it.

While I’m not in the video game industry, I do PM for IT projects and holy shit, half the time it’s actually the CLIENT who botches things. Demanding features, functions or shortening deadlines despite our ardent caution not to do it. But the client is paying for it so… you’re S.O.L. And the programmers pay for it the most. So for sure there are shitty shitty execs and managers but half the time even WE have our hands tied due to investors/clients.

It’s honestly more complicated then what OP thinks and it’s an insult to everyone in the video game industry to assume it’s simple.