10 Biggest Misconceptions You Have About Video Game Developers

Game developers. To those on the outside, looking in, there are so many misconceptions about who they are and what they do. And yet, for some reason, despite being a game developer myself, I get plenty of angry internet people telling me they know better about my job than I do.

I mean, welcome to the internet, I suppose, right?

I’ve compiled a list of some of the more common misconceptions of who we are, and what we do...

...and I’m sure you’ll all be right around the corner, waiting to tell me how wrong I am.

This one tends to start a wee bit of a scrap every time I bring it up, but not all developers are coders. This comes from the outdated conception of a one-man developer coding alone, and doing all the art, sound and design alongside it.

But, where we are now, teams consist of upwards of three-hundred staff, with the majority of those individuals involved in developing the game itself. With the introduction of engines and all manner of middleware (pieces of software designed to ease back-end development), a developer can edit, update or amend huge pieces of a game with little to no programming knowledge (I, for example, look at C++ like it’s hieroglyphics, but I can understand the occasional phrase, like an ignorant Labradoodle that always miraculously seems to respond to “want a steak pie?”).

Incidentally, this shift in accessibility has created an ongoing argument about which roles are and are not “developer”-roles. Some of the stubborn old guard still believe only programmers can be developers, whilst on the other side, there’s a camp that believes everyone in a game development studio is a developer, whether or not they work on the game itself.

I, like the vast majority, tend to reside in the middle, believing that developers actually have to help develop the game, but that everyone in the studio is crucial, whether they are “developers” or not.

And yes, I would like a steak pie.