Therumancer said:
....A whole lot of opinionated crap.....
Oh god,
I'm sorry dude but you seem to be spewing out complete ignorance there. Blantant, rabid, ignorant stereotyping, from what you "get" from studio walkthroughs.
First off, this walkthroughs normally show the more light hearted areas of a company simply because it is more likely to entertain an audience. But Dev companies often have several different components all in charge of different areas of the production, not always as clearly portrayable. (also, I'd love it if you could point me to those really efficient lawyers you speak of, becaus I don't really know any)
Sure, people in game dev seem laid back, but this mainly responds to the fact that they love doing what they are doing, and not about them not working hard enough. One of the most complex and highly demanding fields of computing today is gaming and real time visualization and it requires some extremely specialized knowledge. The production process is far from what you are describing, and I am inclned to believe that you are just saying this without actually knowing what any of it entails. First of, Different areas of a company work at different times, artists are often very active at the start of a project when doing concept design, and other artists pick up 3d and texturing later in the development cycle. There are several different specialties of graphic arts required for the complete production of a game. Some of them will temain through the whole process, while others will only be required for specific situations, NOT ALL ARTISTS CAN DO ALL ART.
Similarly, an AI programmer will likely only become really active later in the game production cycle when basic gameplay dynamics have been defined. While an engine programmer will actually be busiest before the actual production is started. But these are just a few, through the production dozens of specific programmers might be needed for different areas of the game.
Then you are forgetting the sheer volume of content games have today, Levels all have to be designed, each set piece must be produced as a unique structure. Acting, Music, Sound, UI, Lighting, Gameplay Systems, Architecture, Writing, Network, all of these have specialists that iterate towards producing the exact result that the director and publisher expect.
Also, as many other people, you are falling into a profound ignorant fallacy, which is that working more is better... When in fact working BETTER does MORE. Looking busy does not equal producing better work.
As a programmer myself, I can tell you that a programmer that types furiously and restlessly, may be very good when properly directed, but it is far more important to plan ahead and solve the system problems elegantly and thoughtfully, since a single slip can come back later in the development process and destroy hundreds of hours of work.
Often 3000 lines of code are not the answer, and believe it or not, when you are typing furiously, it is hard to see the bigger picture and easier to fuck up.
In my indie team, I had a "very good" programmer, that was busy all the time, typing thousands and thousands of lines of code, seemingly complex as hell. But it all fell apart when we found a bug: I went in to revise it, I realized that it was all trash Thousands upon thousands of cryptic trash. I had to re-think everything, recode thousands of lines into 20 lines that did the same, faster and better, but that realization took time. Efficiency is priceless.
But efficiency actually implies doing the same work in less time, not the other way around. Complaining about the inefficiency of the process when you don't really understand the necessary steps is plain ignorant.
Underestimating the importance of pre-planning, prototyping, iteration, refactoring, bug fixing, and optimisation is one of the worst mistakes in companies, and it shows lack of experience and profound short-sightedness that ends up killing and driving projects over budget.
The other point that you are shamelessly ignoring is that a lot of publishers use more than half the budget of a game in publicity, PR and Press coverage, Market research and simply Publisher's cut.
Just so you get an idea, in a market as small and independent as the app store, apple takes away 30% of all profit, and a publisher takes an extra 30-40% on top of that, meaning that the developer gets less than half the money that is paid for the game.
Many bigger publishers fund the production of a game by a limited amount, without actually taking into account the profit to be made from the game, and only if a profit margin is reached, the development team receives a certain percentage as bonus. But it is not as if the developer can demand a higher pay from the publisher. They just present a budget that the publisher approves (or normally cuts), to begin production.
In fact it is well known that most positions in game companies are not the best paid in their field either, A Programmer can make MUCH more money, working on banking administration systems than game physics engines, shaders, or AI, even though it is a lot easier. And an artist can probably have a much more reliable work in fields of marketing, publicity or editorial design.
I really encourage you to learn about game development from more than the occasional "inside x game studio" documentary, before you make such thoughtless comments.