[ipaddr]

My point was unnecessarily they split the roles. An artist can cover concept and materials. A programmer can do gameplay, graphics, rendering and builds. In fact having people who understand the entire project makes for a better project.

It's like moving from custom built cars to the assembly line where someone's job is putting in one screw. I understand it's cheaper/faster because you can hire anyone unskilled for cheap but cars were all suppose to be identical. Software should be unique (if not just copy the last thing built) but I guess when it comes to major games things are more of factory throwing millions of pixels of characters at existing game engines while copying gameplay of successful games. That's why games are shovelware these days like a netflix original.

[ajsnigrutin]

But we now expect a single person to design the engine, the bodywork, both aesthetically and technically, make an engine, actually make all those parts, assemble them together, pain the car and test it.

Jack of all trades, master of none. This is why we need clusters, "stacks" and "clouds" on the server side and gigabytes of ram on the client side + many megabytes transfered, just to show one simple weather forecast website that gives the user the same amount of information as a WAP site did on a five line mobile phone back in GPRS times.