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Comment by arduinomancer | Hacker News Reader

The problem I find with the gamedev subreddit is it seems like it’s 90% beginners

And the focus is like all on 1-person indie projects with very little content from professional/AAA devs

This is less a problem with the subreddit and forums, and more that AAA game devs seems to be very reserved about discussing their industry or keep discussion internal to private channels (possibly for IP reasons). Whenever I see a AAA developer pop up on Reddit they're always vague and mysterious; "I work for an unnamed AAA developer.." You don't see people doing that on HN very often, they usually announce unabashedly they work at a well known company, like Google.

I have seen game devs that are public with what company they work for also get death threats/hatred/etc whenever a game comes out that flops even if they didn't work on it specifically. Gamers can come off as a really political audience with a lot of grift money to be made on culture war stuff so it makes sense if you're an apolitical gamedev to stfu.

I've also received surprising levels of vitriol here on HN when I mentioned working for EA (which I did 2015-2019).

There's gamers here too. I'm always surprised at the tonal change in a comment thread on a game related post here.

Sorry we're such a nasty audience. It's not all of us for what little that's worth.

Ahh yes, AKA The Devil. From the Bible. Big fan of his work. /s

Yeah, it sucks. Some people can't separate the grunts just working on features from the suits up top who manage a lot of the things they actual hate. Don't shoot the messenger.

i think a big part of it is that their audience isn't just other gamedevs, it includes gamers

those gamers often have strong emotional attachments to games/characters that very few people have for google sheets

studios get crazy backlash for nerfs and other changes, so i can see not wanting to attach your name and face to that. in the other direction, i wouldn't want a horde of gamers using my words as evidence that my employer is dogshit, unless that was the goal of my message

Yeah it's a bit of both. Last thing gamedevs in industry wants is a bunch of players hounding them over things they 99.9% cant control anyway. That's why any devs that reveal themselves are long gone from an older game, perhaps not even in games anymore.

And yes, the NDAs on a game are bizarrely strict. For B2B stuff like engines and tools, they usually don't care too much what you discuss as long as you don't make a show out of it. For Game studios, you basically cannot say much more other than "I work here" in public unless you're PR.

Thats white washing the whole opium den , not to put the industry into a lootbox. Silence just is the appropriate level of shame.

Its because of crazy gamers online

If you even mention the game/studio you work for they might come at you

The IP and that the industry is very big-release centric. Even the engine you are working with is often news, people monitor and report on job listings for this kind of thing. It's obvious and uninteresting that a slightly updated new version of google sheets will release probably like every day, and they will be virtually indistinguishable from the previous ones. If literally anything you say about your work on GTA6 is news for the next N years, you don't post anything. The few non-indie devs I see publically online are usually for live-service companies like riot.

I work for an unnamed AAA developer..

...and people I work with have gotten mail on their PERSONAL phones, addresses and social media accounts because a, let's say "enthusiastic", fan found out they work on a product they have strong feelings on.

I've noticed the same for many industries across the website. There don't seem to be requisite psychological safety for experts to speak up there, unlike with many forums of 00s or even other modern and current public social media.

This is the problem you will find with pretty much any subreddit, they are always filled with beginners. Drives me a little crazy.

Every programming-related subreddit is stuffed to the gills with content that's mostly relatable to freshman CS students, and it all gets upvoted to the top. I agree, it's infuriating.

If I have see one more meme about missing semicolons...

I can't read ProgrammerHumor anymore for that reason

Its like every joke is aimed at someone who just took their first CS class

The more professional discussions seem to be on the forums for Unreal Engine or Unity, where people are struggling with obscure issues inside those monster packages.

(I'm trying to do 3D stuff in Rust. The number of people who do hard 3D stuff in Rust seems to be very small, which is frustrating. There are many obscure bugs in the graphics stack and not enough people to exercise the stack, find the bugs, and get them fixed. 3D game dev in Rust is below critical mass. Retro-looking 2D is doing fine. But most 2D Rust work could be done in HTML/CSS/Javascript, or could have been done in Flash.

About half of my time goes into graphics stack problems. This is not fun.)

Even Unreal Q&A's get thin once you start looking into features deeper in the engine. Epic's campaign to make the common dev afraid of C++ seems to have worked with ablomb. Maybe there's some closed off sections to look into, but I sadly don't have access to that anymore.

I can't imagine much knowledge out there on Rust gamedev atm. Truly a trailblazer. At that point your resources are more about community discords and arguing in github issues than anything casual.

That’s probably the problem for any HN-for-X because a talking at/with/to beginners and hobbyists is not a rare internet opportunity for experts.

I think one of the things that makes HN HN is that experts can choose to have only incidental open internet engagement with their areas of expertise. Most or all of their time on HN can be engaging with other topics that they are less familiar with.

The attractions of an HN-for-X include engaging with an unfamiliar-X that experts are already familiar with.

I have a suspicion it’s worse than beginners (absolutely nothing wrong with beginners).

There’s a cohort of marketers on Reddit that profit off of beginner-aimed content. Lots of “oh I just built a successful game doing this”, link off to a blog. So the shepherds in those subreddits are not really elders, but sadly, grifters. In turn the beginners sort of stay perpetual beginners. It’s horrific if you go to the /r/startup type subreddits, the grift is super strong there.

Makes you really appreciate HN, good shepherds (not perfect, but good).

I found this very frustrating back when I was active on Reddit. There were times when I put a lot of thought and effort into writing posts drawing from my moderate knowledge and (at the time ~10 years of) experience. And then I get some reply from a complete novice or two saying this is clearly wrong and the post gets tons of down votes. Meanwhile the top comment is another beginner saying something obviously wrong and hundreds more agreeing.

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