LogFAQs > #985595818

ParanoidObsessive posted...

With the current state of the industry, another crash would probably do us all good.

There won't be another crash like '83. The industry is just too diversified now. We may see the collapse of some of the giants like EA or Ubisoft, and that will have a significant impact on the market, but there's no version of this where anyone will have to be re-convinced that selling video games is worthwhile. The corporate investment side of things is the only one that stands to suffer, and even then a couple of the major players collapsing won't necessarily undermine confidence in the ones that are still doing fine, it'll just reinforce that kowtowing to shareholders at the expense of making games that are actually worth buying isn't a sustainable business model.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

From the state of the industry today, a lot of people in game dev right now (from the low-level coders and QA testers all the way up to the exec level) pretty clearly aren't qualified to hold the jobs they do as-is.

In the AAA space, it's pretty much just the management level that's the problem. Lower-level devs are all perfectly competent, their projects are just being mismanaged and meddled with in ways that undermine the quality of the product. It's not QA testers' fault that their teams are chronically understaffed and subjected to brutal crunch periods because their producer doesn't understand enough about game development to set a deadline, or decided halfway through the development process that the game should be pivoted to a more popular genre.

In the indie space, you do indeed get devs that just plain suck at coding, but they aren't particularly noticeable.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

While it might be sad for them if they lose their jobs, clearing a lot of the bloat out of the industry increases the odds that we might actually get more games worth playing, for cheaper, and potentially even faster.

There isn't really a shortage of worthwhile games coming out at reasonable prices, for anyone that actually tries to like things. If anything, the opposite is becoming a problem: There are too many good games coming out and many of them struggle to be noticed because everyone only has a finite amount of attention to pay to marketing (formal or otherwise). Hoping that people lose their jobs so you'd have more choices is almost as out of touch as it is misanthropic.