[chairhairair]

I think we can ignore the selection bias because I’m not aware of any “AAA app” (for lack of a better term) that moves as quickly and productively as the best game studios do (see my comment about Grinding Gear Games below). Additionally, these apps employ engineers that are supposedly amongst the best money can buy. At least, if there is some better way to hire top engineers it should be fairly obvious in AAA app output of some orgs with better hiring processes - but I’m not aware of any such apps or orgs.

As for stability and predictability, I’m not confident that AAA apps are hugely (or maybe even significantly) more stable or predictable than the best games. Maybe my tolerance for bugs is higher in games than apps, but I do seem to tolerate quite a lot of jank and slowness from apps, so I’m not sure.

[bogwog]

Part of that is probably that game developers tend to be passionate about the work they do, whereas most people working in app development probably don't give too much of a shit about the boring apps they're making. It's hard to get motivated when you're just making a glorified front-end to a database, another e-commerce site, etc.

Of course, the tradeoffs in work-life balance for game development is massive, so it's not like that extra productivity is free (unless you're management). Nobody working at a typical software firm is going to be expected to crunch 12 hour work days for weeks just to ship.