No, I’m not talking about dev team size, before somebody comes in here telling me about how 6 squillion people worked on the latest Ubisoft game.
I’m talking about genuine, high level talent. True creative visionaries with extreme passion and drive. Have these people been poached by other tech jobs or what? Because I’m trying to find an explanation for what is turning out to be the most disappointing console generation I have ever seen. Today’s showcase solidified that for me.
Everything is a reboot or remake, or a sequel. That’s if it’s not a shitty GAAS. Everything is seemingly stuck in development hell.
I hate to be that guy, but I also have to wonder if the extreme emphasis on diversity while hiring is having an effect? Is the industry pushing away talented people in the name of checking boxes? Just a question, not necessarily a conclusion.
I would reason that necessity has largely been removed from the world to recreate the talents of Cerny, Carmack, Sweeney, etc and all the largely unknown Ice Team level devs in abundance anymore.
Just look at the super talented Sean Murray of Hello Games, he was in two minds to be an astronaut, and his foundation knowledge will comes from that high bar education IMO.
The educational abstractness of analogue to digital electronics circuit design is a by-product of microchips getting smaller and smaller, and this has then lead to H/W accelerators abstracting the highly complex maths for things like 3D geometry rendering that previously required the devs to know and implement in software to run on a CPU, and all before tools like Autocad and Studio max or 3D blender were around.
Devs had to make their own tools from scratch for many things. Want to use a jpg from a camera in your own game engine, you might need to write your own reader and raw converter and mip map generator, which might require you to understand Fourier analysis - or be able to understand the gist of it quickly - just to understand the JPEG spec to implement a reader.
At the point that every University in most countries were offering course to learn specific skills for careers in gaming the necessity to be a knowledgeable and multi skilled and talented as the previous generations was well eroded by then.
People with Sean Murray level skills get to start their own studios to build their game the way they like, and as gamers we still get hyped for that. Not seeing a lot of others doing what he has done certainly suggests these level talents and better are in short supply and paid so well at the Epics, Unity, Sony, Microsoft, Activisions, Ubisoft, EA, Rockstar, etc that they don't do their own thing because the massive pay and job security is the better option for them, despite their visionary skills being under utilised and the games they work on being prescribed by managers looking at meta data.
So, yes I would say there is less talent today because the pre-requisite skills for game development have largely become more specific, and educationally less advanced, leading to less classic dev talent, and people with those advanced educational skills are likely being given amazingly paid jobs in other industries too, reducing the talent pool further.
