[hibikir]

I do not think that games need more project management, but more people who share the lessons we've also learned in business and system programming.

For instance, we've had articles here about how beautiful the Quake 2 and Doom 3 codebases were. It's not that John Carmack isn't an amazing programmer (I am sure he is far better than me), but the techniques for readability and maintainability that he used in those games are just what anyone writing in a large codebase should be doing. The style he used is exactly what we demand when interviewing senior devs. But then game programmers look at it as if he had discovered cold fusion. But when all you see is games, that are written expecting that once the game is shipped, nobody is going to touch your code again, standards go down. Very different from what we do in business programming, where we know some systems might end up living 15+ years, so we have to write things planning for the system to keep evolving for decades.

If anything, online games and MMOs should be written better, precisely because they are far long lived, and will be edited more, than a throwaway that will just see a few patches if users complain.