"Aiming for the Game to be Reborn for the 2nd time" - YoshiP Interview

[YumieYumiki]

Well, after working and living with back end developers for most of my life, I am confident enough in saying that technical debt so bad that nobody can change it without breaking everything is, unironically, a skill issue. One that no other company seems to have with as much frequency as CBU3 seems to.

Being an actual video game programmer (on a live service game) I can tell you, from my direct, personal experience spanning a couple decades, that technical debt cannot be dealt with if it's not included in planning and budgets, and that even in my current company that is fairly good at it we still need to work at convincing producers of the necessity of doing it. (and that despite our lead producer being a former programmer himself!)

Honestly, if you are not a programmer yourself, you have no business calling "skill issue" on that.

Then again, we did just get confirmation for universal glam after being told that spaghetti prevented it for years, so maybe that was just a huge lie.

???
We have been told for years that is was about "job identity", not technical reasons. One thing where they invoke technical reasons is adding glamour dressers in houses, but even that doesn't necessarily mean "spaghetti code", it could very well just mean "server architecture limitation", in itself not a sign of bad quality, just that the use case doesn't fit the existing technical design.

Either way, I have no problem with firing a bunch of managers and directors instead of the ground floor keyboard jockeys. Something needs to change, urgently, so start from the top, work your way down, and see what sticks.

My god, changing things doesn't have to involve firing anyone. It could just be management greenlighting a plan that is different than yet another iteration of the exact same expansion pack template.