The quality of developers in game dev has not declined. Studios grew and merged into massive companies that follow the established pattern of profits over people.
Profits over people has reduced the average quality of devs over time.
Cyberpunk 2077 shows they are still tossing out unfinished bug ridden messes. The only difference is so many AAA games like Assassins Creed, GTA, Call of Duty, etc are just incremental releases they have more time to polish the same crap.
The lessons to be learned about Cyberpunk 2077 have very little to do with quality of devs. Instead it has everything to do with mismanaged timelines, misaligned expectations, marketing based on a game that doesn't even exist, securing brand deals before the game is even playable, and more micro-lessons specific to game development (like assuming your engine is capable of a different genre easily).
Speaking of Assassin's Creed, the reason they're able to polish is not because it's the "same crap". On the contrary, every time they've had to deal with an engine upgrade they've suffered huge bugs (and I'll touch on this later on). But they're able to mitigate this by having large teams operate as cogs, with higher level tools, and this has been battle tested for years. Call of Duty is another, huge teams, working on cycles. CD Projekt Red did not have this in place. Their expectations were utterly delusional.
Speaking about engine upgrades, maintaining your own custom engine is incredibly costly in every aspect. Harder to find talent, harder to maintain, harder to test. All of this compounds, and gets worse when you're trying to stretch your engine away from "the same crap" and into a new genre. This is why more studios now are relying on the likes of Unity or Unreal - including CDPR. Or EA, who once upon a time had both Eclipse (single player RPG engine) and Frostbite (FPS shooter engine), and are now betting on Unreal.
> having large teams operate as cogs, with higher level tools, and this has been battle tested for years.
That’s what I mean by the same crap. It’s not that the engine is unchanged and they never add new gameplay elements, but rather the team/company knows more or less exactly the kind of game that they’re making on day one and therefore what kinds of people they need etc.
Specialization isn’t a bad thing, but it does mean you can get away with less generally competent team, which very much plays a role in staffing etc.
game quality is mostly driven by story, UX (fucking launchers, tens of GB to download, absolutely shitty menus, worst in class config, everything is a lobby - driven by multi-platformness and everything being a port, everything fitting into whatever cloud shit they have)
the game part is mostly ok, just boring
they rebooted Modern Warfare 1 and 2 for fuck's sake. how more unoriginal one can get!?
that's absolutely on business and not on the coders IMHO
> Call of Duty, etc are just incremental releases they have more time to polish the same crap.
Unfortunately, as this year's CoD release has shown, they can't even do incremental updates correctly anymore. They've broken major parts of the game, removed key features (like leaderboards), and taken months to release content.
The thing that irks me about incremental releases is that they charge full price for every new release AND include micro-transactions.
So we end up in this situation where to be consumer friendly they should either adopt a rolling release F2P model (like fortnite, dota, cs:go, etc) or at the very least pledge long term support to each release.
They do neither so games like Call of Duty end up as a money pit when they get infested with hackers a couple of years after the series moves on to the next title.
This same thing happens to movie stars. Twenty years ago some actors moved masses just by appearing in a movie. Nowadays actors are dispensable and movie characters are performed by different people. Massive studios also kill opportunities for actors. And I am sure that this is true in most industries. A few companies own most products and jobs and can manipulate them as they desire.
I generally disagree on that if you stick to Windows based games. Now if you're playing on any of the consoles, well longevity is decided by the platform owner.
In the indie games industry there are likely more games than ever that are better than ever and can be self hosted.
The unaddressed problem here is that 'online only' skinner box style games are massive money makers when they are a hit. Couple that with ever increasing costs in making top of the line games and you can see why the people handing out funding want to go that way.
