I have worked in the gaming industry and let me tell you that in some game studios most of the people involved in making the games are not gamers themselves.
Lots of programmers and artists don’t really care about the final game, they only care about their little part.
Game designers and UX designers are often clueless and lacking in gaming experience. Some of the mistakes they make could be avoided by asking literaly anyone who play games.
Investors and publishers often know very little to almost nothing about gameplay and technology and will rely purely on aesthetic and story.
You have entire games being made top to bottom where not a single employee gave a fuck, from the executives to the programmers. Those games are made by checking a serie of checkboses on a plan and shipped asap.
This is why you have some indie devs kicking big studio butts with sometime less than 1% the ressources.
Afaik even in other “similar” industry (e.g filmmaking) you expect the director, producers and distributors to have a decent level of knowledge of the challenges of making a movie. In the video game industry everyone seems a bit clueless, and risk is mitigated by hiring large teams, and by shipping lots of games quickly.
I’ve been a game programmer for >10 years and I would be fucking miserable if I spent most of my free time with video games as well. Isn’t that what we call work/life balance? And from my experience, most game devs either stop being “gamers” at a certain point, or they burn out and quit the video game industry.
That being said, almost everyone I know from gamedev is really excited about video games, and they have a ton of experience, even if they are not playing games in their free time anymore. It could be because I’ve only worked for indie projects and small publishers.
