Is this true?
I thought that actual "game design" jobs in terms of creative direction were like gold dust and something you could only get by either starting your own studio or rising through the ranks.
All of the game jobs I see advertised are either art,programming or testing.
Probably 75% of the designers I know had a background in QA. Some of them were good designers, most were not. The ones who did have an art or tech background tended to be more grounded in their designs because they had a better idea of what is really achievable with the current tech.
Honestly, though, I don't think it's that bad. Design is kind of hard to get in, so most testers that aren't passionate about it end in production, and most designers spend their time implementing content. endianswap's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5408304 mirrors my own experience in the industry.
That's because the management have tricked people into getting the game design jobs - the easiest (in terms of stress and problem solving) job there is with most often the highest pay check.
Lotta' ass kissin'.
The good ones are able to catch problems before stuff is coded or modeled. A good designer manages to describe every object needed (including rough sketches what they should look like and describing needed animations), every mission condition (which is very close to coding and needs good understanding what is technically possible). A good designer can describe the GUI pretty much ahead in a way that coders don't have to rework it over and over until it fits (including describing stuff like left-click/right-click/drag&drop/selection box behavior which can get very tricky pretty fast in games). A really good designer might even know excel good enough to calculate all kind of stuff through before even approaching any coders.
A bad designer thinks it's all just about some great idea and throwing in lots of stuff and the team will do the rest. A good designer knows it's 90% about describing details and about removing as much stuff as possible.
EDIT: decreased from 90 to 70 - need some space for voice acting, sounds and music.
But it's really as in all jobs - the difference between good and bad designers is so absolutely unbelievable huge that if you worked with some bad ones and then meet good ones you hardly believe they are doing even similar jobs.
The number of water cooler game designers is immeasurable.
I would agree on his assessment of Chris Roberts though, of himself I do think he was truly innovative when the media was young but I am not so sure now.