[shubhamjain]

I find it hard to wrap my head around how the whole AAA VG ecosystem works. How is it able to function? AAA Video Games are highly complex engineering projects but, as I understand, under the hood you have naive and inexperienced kids, horrible engineering practices, and a chaotic work environment. How does this industry manage to hire so many quality engineers and treat them as dispensable that easily?

[user5994461]

Because games are cool and there is no shortage of good developers.

All games are throwaway projects. Write one, sell for a year, gone. There is no maintenance period.

[flohofwoe]

Not true for MMOs and F2P games, these often run for many years some with biweekly or monthly content updates.

[Moru]

Some of the simple but popular mmorpg f2p are licenced engines that you can customise into your own game and just run an update now and then.

Content updates don't need programmers.

[samplonius]

Except for DLC. A AAA title will need to ship at least 4 x DLCs over a 12 to 18 month period. And no doubt the DLC development will expose serious bugs along the way, so the DLC will have to contain patches as well.

The lifespan of AAA titles is longer now that most are purchased digitally.

[EnderMB]

A friend of mine has worked on AAA games in the past, and although he says it's fairly hard work, there is always work out there.

Also, he likes to chop and change every now and then, and the norm seems to be that once a company delivers a game the vast majority of the development team is made redundant. He takes the redundancy, moves to another company/game, and repeats this cycle.