If you’re talking COVID(?), fair point I guess.
But every other industry is back to normal the past couple years. And most other companies doing business and products also went through the hassle of port strikes, trucker strikes, and a lot more back to the office work. everything seems chill. Not too many industries can have companies doing digital file sharing for workers and digital downloads for customers at a whim.
I thought WFH was suppose to be ultimate productivity booster as people save time and energy commuting, gas, and wasting time talking at the water cooler. So any company with a big wfh focus should be firing on all cylinders.
First things first, I stressed the length of dev cycles to point out how pretty much any big game you see released right now will have been affected to some degree.
I mentioned back during Covid that they were severely soft-pedalling the impact of WFH on productivity, and ultimately I think even I underestimated the impact because when I made my assessment I was mainly thinking in terms of how it would affect the collaborative nature of production.
What I hadn't factored in was how the "return to normality" would be handled, with the sales bubble creating a false sense of security and the sheer extent of how far off-course hiring practices had drifted.
Devs of my generation (Gen-X types) I honestly think would have reacted quite differently to the Millennials who had become so prevalent in the workforce; there's no way to put this without sounding like a curmudgeon but the truth is I simply cannot imagine complaining about /resisting having to return to standard office working in the same way that a lot of younger employees apparently did.
A lot of the stuff I read really had me scratching my head wondering how "soft" so many industry people have become! I'm sorry, but what a lot of people consider abuse/exploitation in the workplace regarding hours and the need to crunch was just part of the job in my time! If you had a problem with it you simply had to strap on a set and refuse, knowing full-well how it'd affect your future prospects!
The observable fact is that Covid has clearly hit Western devs way harder than those in the East, and I think a lot of that is simply down to expectations and willingness to take the rough with the smooth.
The harsh truth is that game-dev isn't easy, it demands a lot, and as a result the attrition rate is pretty brutal. So, long story short, this cultural shift towards a "kinder, gentler" workplace was always inevitably going to impact productivity. Especially compared to workers in more traditional cultures.
And you might think that sucks, but its just reality. Western devs can't sit around patting themselves on the back thinking they are intrinisicly "better" than their counterparts in Japan or China or Korea! Ultimately their output is all ending up competing in the same commercial marketplace where nobody really gives a flying fuck about how overworked the staff were on the project! The audience will just compare on merit, and buy accordingly.
Pretty sure this is going to rattle a few people's cages, but its just how I see it.
