| Something about your last paragraph rubbed me the wrong way. Sorry. > about 10X the competition Steam added 1500 games in the first 7 months of 2015. Crunchbase had over 8000 investments in 2015. So I don't think that's true, even accounting for a Christmas peak. > juggling massive game assets Lots of data goes into games, lots of data comes out of websites. The difference to my eyes is that the industry has multiple, principled, well-understood frameworks to deal with the data problem and the games industry has...what? Maybe the state of the art has moved on in the last 5 years but when I left it was all "well it's just a DAG, how hard can it be to write a tool to recursively build it". > a fraction of the budget, finance, and exit options Being willing to work for less and with fewer resources is not a sign of good engineering practice. I don't know if I'd say it's the opposite but it's at best irrelevant. > a tough frame rate budget Not very different to needing to meet tough latency/error rate SLAs, except instead of failing TRC (or getting your exec producer to stare down MSFT/Sony), you'll just go broke. Oh, and you don't know what the SLA is, ever, so it's a continuous process of tradeoff. > all issues GPU-ish (when was the last time you wrote a shader, Mr. Website Developer?) Ignoring that some "website developers" (many of whom are not "Mr" - something else that the games industry does not do well at) do write shaders in the form of GPGPU optimization of ML tasks, obviously tasks differ. Let's not pretend that banging out something in Cg is PhD-level shit. It's not harder than writing a Spark job, for sure. > having people with a huge range of technical skills requiring direct access to the source/asset repo. You have Mr. Blow upthread sneering at Twitter for employing 4000 people to build something "trivial" but you think that each of those people have identical programming chops in every bit of the code they touch? If there's a single thing that argues against your idea it's this - the rest of the industry has become pretty good at modularizing areas of the business and auditing changes to it with code review, build/asset/deployment tagging etc. The last games company I worked at, someone stayed at the office until 5am before going on holiday for a week and sent an email that effectively said "I've rewritten quite a bit of the engine, you'll probably need to fix the build because I didn't test anything, see you in a fortnight". People gasp when gmail/twitter/facebook is down for half an hour but I've worked in places where there _wasn't even a canonical build_ that could be broken. |
Almost everything you implement in CG is "PhD-level shit". Implementing techniques from SIGGRAPH papers in your game engine are usually non-trivial. Game engines/games are some of the most complex systems in software engineering, the complexity can't be compared to web apps at all.