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Comment by ThePadawan | Hacker News Reader

I truly wish journalists would learn to not refer to companies that produce video games as "developers".

No software engineer is getting a bonus because the microtransaction they implemented is getting purchased more often.

I guess it makes sense to refer to products as product of a key role (e.g. "Tarantino's new movie" or "Dreamworks' new movie"), but I feel like titles like OP's just further the public misconception that a regular developer has any input into their product, or financial profit from their work.

(I am aware that the HN audience might be used to bonuses and stock options etc.. These are very not a thing outside a few giant US companies in my experience.)

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Both companies that develop games and individual programmers are correctly called developers, and have been since the start of gaming.

Those companies develop games. And for a long time, almost no programmer develops a whole game - they provide code, artists provide art, producers direct, investors fund, and so on.

So while a large group develops the game, most of which aren't generally called developers, programmers have shrunk in scope from when they did do most of the work (say in the 70s and early 80s).

If anything, game companies are more correctly labeled developer, and programmer should be programmer.

For example, search for top game developers... Not an individual in the list... Such uses go back as far as gaming.

The word simply has multiple meanings.

> No software engineer is getting a bonus because the microtransaction they implemented is getting purchased more often

This isn’t necessarily true. Blizzard bonus compensation is tied to game performance through profit sharing. So if the games that year does well, the bonuses are going to be higher too.

> I feel like titles like OP's just further the public misconception that a regular developer has any input into their product (...)

As someone whose job has a very heavy programming component, I want to ask: ".... Don't they?"

It’s a thing here in Australia. 1/3 of my total comp

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