as a gamedev who doesnt play games
... ?
Why would you work in that field if you're not all that interested in games? Surely it can't be the pay (AFAIK the pay is usually shit).
You’d be surprised with how many people in a large studio don’t play games. Not every job requires an understanding of games. Only a small amount of people work on gameplay. Like artists don’t need to like games to be good artists. A graphics programmer can build a great real time graphics renderer without having played any game. They just need to have a passion for programming graphics. The only people that should love games are the people that work on gameplay. Like the director, gameplay leads, QA etc.
Why work in games then you ask. Because many of those jobs only exist in the games and movie industry. Like 3D animators aren’t exactly in demand outside of those two industries.
also yea this. though for me, my passion for games slowly died out as i became a gamedev. now almost a decade of work in it and minus a few indie games like hollow knight and deltarune, i dont play much. it feels wrong knowing everything and the industry so deeply
plus i work as a marketing and technical artist. most games i've worked on i havent played, i design their posters, covers, logos. i do play the games when i make trailers and in-game materials like screenshots and dev looks. but other than that i dont, and not really even by choice. most of the time the game isnt in a playable state when my work starts.
most professions under gamedev umbrella dont need and hence arent given the chance to play the games until after release anyways. for me atleast, i do love the work i do, it is fun to do that work. but playing the games i worked on is rarely as fun.
i once again mistaked and forgot a word. meant 'doesnt play many games'. let me edit that
Here's my anecdote: I'm not a game dev but I dabble whenever I'm between jobs. I also don't really game very much, maybe 2 or 3 hours every couple weeks. So for awhile I sort of identified as a shade-tree gamedev and super-occasional gamer. I wish I gamed more, but honestly a lot the games that I'd like to play ... don't actually exist . So my motivation for making games was always to pull from those ideas to build something that hasn't been built before. Of course, having to blaze that trail is technically difficult, so though I've spent 100s of hours in unity I don't have much to show for it but a handful of janky demos collecting dust in my harddrive. I haven't done any gamedev in years now, you know cuz of life.
Another anecdote, when I followed the game dev subreddits back when I still used Reddit, I noticed that the hardcore-gamer gamedev's projects tended to be reflective of the games that they enjoyed. That's not strictly a problem, especially when learning, but it does make their ideas...derivative. A Zelda-clone, a souls-like, yet another puzzle platformer about depression. It's kind of no wonder to me that so few make it in indie gamedev; a huge portion of projects I saw were just a worse version of something that already exists.
That's definitely an interesting perspective, thanks for sharing!
I noticed that the hardcore-gamer gamedev’s projects tended to be reflective of the games that they enjoyed. That’s not strictly a problem, especially when learning, but it does make their ideas…derivative.
As someone who dabbles in electronic music, guilty as charged. I like to think that the stuff I copy tends to be niche enough to still be somewhat fresh, but y'know. Plus I'm not actually that good at copying.
engine, graphics, tooling, physics, and audio programming positions don't always require any artistic interest in the medium. unlike artistic work, they can also pay pretty well.
As a gamedev who plays an ungodly amount of games, you'd be surprised. But most of my colleagues that I consider "non gamers" at least know the studios and the games they make
Calculating animations and game mechanics assuming a constant 30 FPS worked well for Eternal Ring, it'll be fine for Elden Ring.
Good luck with writing a software renderer that runs at an acceptable framerate! Even for my pixelart game engine, I had to tap into the dark magic of SSE2 extensions, at least I could write a pretty fast Mode 7 renderer (the only thing that will remain on the CPU so far after the OpenGL transition, due to it otherwise needing compute stuff).
