This might be my most stupid question yet, but what the hell:
I’m reading about the GTA VI leaks on Wikipedia, and it talks about the various impacts the leaks had, one of which was low morale amongst the developers. Why is that? The response from the internet to the GTA VI leaks in particular seemed to be positive and caused renewed excitement in the game. Everyone [seemingly] understood that it was early, non-final work, but were nevertheless impressed/excited, as far as I could tell anyway 🤷 Besides, it’s GTA, it’s not like they’re gonna break much new ground in terms of gameplay mechanics that need to be kept secret. Things were more or less set in stone in that regard in GTA III.
Why so sad?
My assumption has always been that this is just the usual made-up corporate nonsense that comes from management and marketing departments, to try to turn public opinion against leakers.
My guess is that most of the humans actually creating the game don’t have strong opinions. Marketing teams probably care because it disrupts their plans. Management of course cares because it could impact sales. And with big dev teams with dozens or hundreds of people working on a game there will never be a consensus opinion. Maybe some would be upset that people get to see placeholder work or rough drafts, but only a fool would look at a leaked game and judge the individuals who made it based on that. Heck, even when games are officially released in functionally unfinished states I think most fans these days know to blame management and ownership rather than the workers.
I don’t remember ever seeing an actual dev talking about leaks much. Even content creators that are former devs. Absense of evidence is not evidence of a sense of course, but like… If I apply that to my own work I don’t think I would really care.
For real though, I appreciate that you’re trying to disclaim that it is much more of an educated guess than an objective truth, instead of just trying to paint it as if it were that truth…
…
…but you still sound like you’re just a professional opinion haver. It’s nice that you’re trying to contribute, but you end up producing information noise due to the fact that your takes don’t seem to be based on any meritorical backgrounds.
So what are you looking for here? Some sort of objective and peer-reviewed academic research of the morals of videogame developers and the impact of leaks upon that? I think you’ll find that does not exist.
I’m just pointing out that the only people who seem to be complaining are managers and PR departments. And it’s not that dev’s don’t have voices- there are plenty of current and former developers who are now producing social media content and talking about the industry, and I cannot remember this ever even being addressed as an issue. I DID bring up my personal experience in the corporate world is that management and marketing craft these narratives for public consumption which are just lies, and I don’t have any reason to think the videogames industry is any different.
The very topic is one that is nebulous and subjective. That’s why it’s on c/nostupidquestions and not c/askanexpertwithameritoricalbackground.
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