Pasta Legion

also re:unity, i remain somewhat skeptical that this represents (as brandon sheffield has said) "the death of unity" or that anyone will stop using it. if it's unenforceable or illegal they'll walk it back and people will endlessly justify remaining trapped in their ecosystem no matter how miserable it makes them, because people who make video games are really stupid.

ultimately there are just so many people who want to make video games while interacting with the actual process of making software as little as possible, and i'm sympathetic to that, but it's a bit like wanting to be a chef without wanting to ever touch a stove

More people want software than there is capacity to train people how to make software well. This would hold even if we were to get much better at training and evaluating software developers, because becoming competent takes time and the dedicated attention of a qualified teacher, placing a limit on how quickly the profession can grow; and because there are more needful things in this world than making computers dance, placing a limit on how many resources can be invested in growing the profession.

Upon encountering this problem, they naturally seek alternatives, such as dubious silver-bullet middleware¹ or hiring a larger number of shitty programmers². Even when these options aren't outright errors from a strategic perspective, they carry significant drawbacks. These manifest different problems in artistic software compared to purely commercial software, but the underlying economic cause is shared.

1. Sometimes middleware helps, and sometimes it creates more work than it eliminates. Unfortunately, if you had someone capable of evaluating middleware before investing heavily in it, you wouldn't be facing this problem in the first place, so this problem compounds itself.

2. Increasing the number of people increases the difficulty of managing them, and bringing on people with lesser qualifications also increases the difficulty of managing them. If your organization isn't very good at programming, it probably also isn't very good at managing programmers, so this problem also compounds itself.