I actually think the talent drain is so bad at this point that AAA teams are incapable of making great games. The skilled are passed over in favor of diversity hiring and go indie instead. If you think this isn't true look at a Bloomberg article that showed 94% of all new hires in Fortune 500 companies (in 2021 I think) were non-white. No doubt this practice has continued, leaving many competent and skilled devs without a job.
Not only did developers 20 to 30 years ago need to, usually, develop their own proprietary engines, but much of the middleware in use today didn't exist, they had to account for much greater variety of hardware - PS2, XBOX and GameCube were wildly different systems, to say nothing of the jungle that the PC hardware landscape was.
Modern developers use mature engines that are well documented and have many programmers trained in their use, many of the hardware associated headaches have been done away thanks to standardization, they have access to a huge library of middleware and assets that can be easily adapted for their needs.
And yet, despite all this, despite dwarfing old dev teams by orders of magnitude, making use of outsourcing and having generous development times and budgets, they still fuck up, and fuck up massively.
I actually think the talent drain is so bad at this point that AAA teams are incapable of making great games. The skilled are passed over in favor of diversity hiring and go indie instead. If you think this isn't true look at a Bloomberg article that showed 94% of all new hires in Fortune 500 companies (in 2021 I think) were non-white. No doubt this practice has continued, leaving many competent and skilled devs without a job.
Not only did developers 20 to 30 years ago need to, usually, develop their own proprietary engines, but much of the middleware in use today didn't exist, they had to account for much greater variety of hardware - PS2, XBOX and GameCube were wildly different systems, to say nothing of the jungle that the PC hardware landscape was.
Modern developers use mature engines that are well documented and have many programmers trained in their use, many of the hardware associated headaches have been done away thanks to standardization, they have access to a huge library of middleware and assets that can be easily adapted for their needs.
And yet, despite all this, despite dwarfing old dev teams by orders of magnitude, making use of outsourcing and having generous development times and budgets, they still fuck up, and fuck up massively.