Smash Bros creator Masahiro Sakurai laments loss of “all rounder” devs as AAA forces devs into specific roles
Smash Bros creator Masahiro Sakurai laments loss of “all rounder” devs as AAA forces devs into specific roles
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I remember Tim Cain talk about it to. But I first thought it was a USA “problem”, seems like this is everywhere.
I think this is happening across most businesses. I did retail for a decade and as someone who “specialized” in the ops part of the job, I could easily flex to manage the merch side when the merch manager was out for a week, or handle the specialty side of it when she took a vacation. This was incredibly common a decade ago, but at the end of my tenure, the new people had almost 0 idea what to do outside of their assigned roles.
That was part of the reason I got fired as well, I could speak to the whole business and call out bad ideas when they justwanted yes men. Was entirely evident by the replacements for 2 peers who couldn’t even balance a P and L report, literally the most basic ops thing around. Had no idea how the business actually worked.
Video game is an industry and like all industries when the project is bigger there is more division of labor.
There are still a lot of all-round devs but most of them work on smaller indie projects. Examples are Stardew Valley (1 dev) and Slay the Spire (2 devs).