[Waterluvian]

But they might be right this time.

Many game devs are fungible cogs, implementing a well-defined blueprint. Especially Activision games like Call of Duty. It doesn’t help that there’s just so many devs these days that they can seemingly abuse them for decades and nothing has collapsed.

[BiteCode_dev]

Devs are definitely no fungible, the difference in the productivity, team moral and new bug introduced by just changing one person in the team can be huge.

Even simple boilerplate is done differently by people. Some will automate them, some will do them manually forever. Some will naturally organize to discuss how to limit or improve them, some will stay with the status quo ad vitam. Some will document how to do things, provide templates to limit mistakes and mentor new comers. Some will just do their job.

And that's not even touching the fact some are simply bad at what they do.

In all the successful projects I've seen, hiring the right people or replacing the one leaving were critical processes, not just swapping.

This idea you foster is probably half the reason 2/3 of IT projects fail.

[Cthulhu_]

Big games will have a small core team - engine programmers, creative leads, etc - and a large section of 'grunt work' - modeling, texturing, animation, etc. The kind of thing someone puts on a very long todo list to be picked up. That's likely more work where individual contributions become less important.

It's also an area where there's more and more outsourcing happening these days.

[Kapura]

if you'd ever worked on a call of duty you'd realize how foolish a statement this is.

[dahart]

Try not to take it personally, there are both devs who are replaceable and devs who aren’t, and with ~40 Call of Duty titles on almost as many platforms, a million and one people have worked on it, some doing more mechanical port work than others. There’s truth in there; the games industry is tough, and it’s relevant that some studios that (for example) demand lots of overtime haven’t seen any large exodus, or sometimes there is high turnover and the studio still survives, to parent’s point. There’s a higher level layer to this, that from a publisher’s point of view, there are a lot of smaller studios that are easily replaceable, and I’d speculate studios go out of business over contracts lost to other studios far more often than over employee walkouts (which of course fuels the need for overtime to be competitive). This is true for games and for VFX production in the US, enough people want these jobs that high turnover doesn’t seem to slow the business.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

It's particularly ironic that you mention CoD as an example of how you can treat gamedevs as replaceable cogs. Here's the history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32833895

[actionfromafar]

Call of Duty then and now are very different. Back then, it was more like an indie movie. Now, it's Disney size. Their animators are cogs.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Well for what it's worth my friend is still with them, or at least what you could call the main descendant of that team. They don't treat him as a cog. In fact he was their first full time remote employee as I understand it, as he got sick of living in Tulsa. No offense Tulsans, but when you've lived in the PNW for a while it's kinda hard to give up all the trees, mountains, etc. I do miss thunderstorms though.

[dahart]

That is a great story, and should be an inspiration to aspiring gave devs. As you can clearly see in the thread, I did not bring up CoD. Two comments above me were discussing it. I was just pointing out that it’s now a huge franchise. All the franchises, large and small, have cycled through many, many programmers and artists and designers. It does not disrespect your friend to point out that there are multiple studios he didn’t start that are now developing CoD, or to point out that it has been ported to so many platforms that there has been a metric ton of unsexy porting work alongside the original content work. Having worked on both game and movie franchises, I can safely say that there’s less room for individual input. Not none, just less. I’ve witnessed whole studios (both in games and films) push and push to work on an original non-franchise production, because everyone knew it’d be more fun and felt less like being a cog. The fact that your friend made a wildly successful franchise is absolutely great for him, and for his business, but you can’t claim that it’s creatively great for everyone else involved, even if it does support them financially.

[rasz]

you mean like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered? or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare from 2019 not to be confused with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare from 2007?

[mxkopy]

Games have seen incredible growth as an industry over the past couple decades. It works because everyone and their grandma wants to play CoD, not because what they're doing is sustainable. Let's see how they fare once the markets saturate

[smeagull]

Their games are fungible too.

[Cthulhu_]

Pretty much, yeah. Annual sports games become obsolete when the next one comes out.