10 Biggest Misconceptions You Have About Video Game Developers
6. AAA Devs Don’t Care About Their Work
This is another sad one to hear, because in my twelve-plus years of working in the industry, I’ve only met a couple of developers, tops, who treated the job as a means to an end.
Have you ever worked in a job? Like, any job? Well, you’ll have had a boss, right? And their boss had a boss, who had a boss... and now I’m thinking about that song where the old lady swallowed the fly for some reason. Anyway, the point I’m making is, you likely had ideas about how to do a task, and that pesky boss told you to do it a different way, but you couldn’t feel too angry, because they blamed their boss for not allowing it.
Just because game development is a creative industry, doesn’t mean you have a lot of leeway for creativity a lot of the time. In AAA, a lot of the details get locked in from the start, and as a developer (a programmer, an artist, an animator... anyone) your job is just to get it done. Certainly, you can have some ideas, and pass them on to your team leader, but they’ll need to pass it on to the department lead, and sometimes that’ll mean talking to studio heads and... you can see how, at any point of this process, your little idea might get lost or shot down, right?
Don’t say we don’t care. Don’t say we “didn’t think about X”, or “the lazy devs didn’t add Y”. The chances are we did, we fought for it, we moaned about it, and we got shut down by someone with some real decision-making power. We love the games we make, and we want them to be the best they can be, but hearing “no, we can’t do that” happens nine times out of ten.