Re: It turns out Live Service Isn't Guaranteed Money after all

On Mon, 21 Jul 2025 07:43:52 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
<dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:

On 7/21/2025 12:15 AM, JAB wrote:

On 20/07/2025 16:39, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

The TL;DR was that a lot of these companies didn't have the
programmers and artists who had years and years of game development
skill which let them know what made for a good game. It was as if
every game was their 'first game', and that was one of the reasons for
the diminishment of quality in game design. And it was only going to
get worse as attrition takes out the older programmers what had
learned their necessary lessons before corporations started treating
developers as fungible units.

 
I never worked on a game in my life but in my experience there is a
general lack of understanding of what software development entails and
just how important domain knowledge is. A simple example is I had a
project manager who had bought into the whole idea that it was like
building a house so once you had the design in place it was just a case
of cranking the handle and the product came out effortlessly.
 

That last sentence alone proved that project manager was an idiot with
no real world experience.  NOTHING as complex as building a house ever
comes together without some issues.  And as a former programmer the big
software packages are MUCH more complicated and troublesome than
something as simple as a house.  And I'm sure the software has gotten
much more complex in the 20 years since I worked on code.

The solution, I'm sure this hypothetical project manager will suggest,
is AI. Who needs these ornery programmers when you can just get AI to
write the program for you? What could go wrong?

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/i-destroyed-months-of-your-work-in-seconds-says-ai-coding-tool-after-deleting-a-devs-entire-database-during-a-code-freeze-i-panicked-instead-of-thinking/
(summary of article: AI tool used in database coding project
irrevocably deletes production database despite being specifically
instructed not to do that exact thing)


Oh.

Maybe two AIs, then? ;-)