[rawbot]

They aren't long gone. There's a ton of very successful indie or AA games with shoddy development practices: https://www.reddit.com/r/programminghorror/comments/e0bub9/t...

A game isn't a fundamental or structural part of a system. In the end, it is just a game. The goal of a game is to deliver an experience. It doesn't need to be scalable or robust. If the experience isn't marred by bad coding or bugs, then it can still be a great game.

[jordand]

Yeah all of that is always going to be true across hobbyists, indies and small studios. But for commercial game development at scale, where there's multiple studios or outsourcers/co-devs brought on, there's real expectations that people can be on-boarded quickly and work productively on projects with tight schedules. A poor quality, fragile codebase (usually with technical debt) is a recipe for disaster when things are at being worked on at that level.