community managers are marketing not dev. some of them are devs who should demand extra pay for the extra work they're doing out of scope but the guy i know who is a CM and the guy i know who is a dev that gets saddled with the CM work because the company is small talk about that job very differently.
A common complaint I see on gaming forums (especially after a new patch) is "Why is team working on X instead of Y?!" as though the people working on Y could switch to X or should be fired or sit around and do nothing until X is fixed. The people doing content creation stuff (e.g. artists, writers, scripting team, voice actors etc) are probably not going to be able to fix the netcode of the game.
(obviously, there is also mismanagement and failing to read your audience, but god damn gamers are the most entitled audience I've encountered in doing any art)(as a gamer etc etc)
I see it too, I tried explaining how it works a few times but the complainers don't give a shit, they want X and they want it yesterday! Even if X is a vague concept that we don't know yet. Frustrating.
It's one reason I prefer a community forum over a community Discord. The forum tends to keep the complaints to a few easy to ignore threads. Meanwhile in the Discord someone asks the same braindead question every 5 minutes.
I say "developer" is only for code, "designer" can be any system, level, or character designer (ooh they use spreadsheets!), "artist" is only for drawing things. Marketing douchebags are "marketing douchebags". And since I'm indie, I'm all of those.
But some studios just don't care and have stupid titles; as long as thy get paid it doesn't matter to them. WTF cares what some idiot screaming in a forum says?
What a bunch of elitist horseshit.
As a senior engine developer at a games company, this is how I see it:
- Your shitty flappy bird clone is worth less than the cheeto stain on your t-shirt as a cultural artifact
- I have met countless programmers who have never finished a single game, because they can't design for shit
- I have met countless artists and level designers who have made commercially successful games after learning how to use 10% of a single scripting language
- The word "developer" predates software engineering and has nothing to with tech. We changed the meaning and now 14 year olds on reddit have changed it back. It doesn't matter.
- If you were really some hot shit solo developer you would not need to look for validation in your job title. Seeing thousands of people enjoy something you designed every day would be enough.
