FYI Mesome, i know your sponsored but Raycons are NOT good earbuds for the price, compared to other earbuds in the same price range raycon's features are average and there audio quality is poor. However, I respect you not lying about the product like many other youtubers, so thanks for that. :)
ok, I was like "wtf" when people were saying in the comments that it feels like the dude got the boss on his back, then came the SBMM question... It wasn't just a professional response, that was a corporate response, something you'd hear at an investors Q&A
This should of been obvious, a majority of employers when providing an email disclose that they can retrieving any message your account has sent. Activision would definitely be one of those employers. The second I saw the email I knew either this video was a hoax or the employee is a plant. To keep it a secret from Activision but use your business email was a stupid move if that is the case.
As a developer, I can assure you this guy is NOT a developer. It's probably some upper suit from Activision with intentions to make Activision look good. That or HR tempered with all responses beyond recognition.
It was basically a non-answer too. In their mind compressing texture sizes would make the game look like it's from 2015? Any dev knows that compressed textures get uncompressed and loaded in to memory, they don't stay compressed in the game when running. There is no excuse for the game to be 300gb when a game like Warframe with unique textures for every weapon, frame, effect, multiple enemy factions and literally 11 years of content still manages to be under 100gb by far. It sounds a lot more like Acti simply do not have the knowledge/skill/competence to fix the issue.
@ ok, I work game textures on a daily basis, yes. Yes it would look like 2015 Theres stylistic reasons to go lower or higher. With how close the cameras usually get to assets and characters, it justified higher res textures.
@@TACKO3D You're missing the point, most people would gladly take the hit to quality if it could reduce the size, provided they were given the option, I mean many Switch games barely look better than PS3/360 titles and it's still by far the best selling console on the market.
@@TACKO3D I want my potatoe to play the game at a stable framerate please. 4k Textures dont let even the TOP OF THE LINE COMPUTERS PLAY AT STABLE FRAME RATES. Screw your Bigger numbers i want Consistant Numbers.
I'm a small time dev that's previously worked AAA, and the guy you interviewed is either the most limp-dicked dev in the studio or actually working with comms. Nobody worth their paycheck talks like that and expects anybody to buy what they're selling.
I mean, the dev contacted them through their tracked email account, which Acti would know about immediately as they had a previous dev speak on this channel already. It's clearly pre-planned otherwise he'd be out of a job within days.
Player: "Why can't we reduce the texture size? We don't care about the graphics, we just wanna buy the game!" Dev: "It would look bad!" Player: "but... we just said...." And then, P : "Did upper executives ever hold back a riskier feature" Dev : "Those with more experience in the industry give the greenlight" Me: ..."But... what industry? corporate side? dev side? and we were asking about DENIALS not green lights..... and we weren't asking about the general, but if exceptions were made" These answers felt surprisingly disingenuous from a dev that wanted to "leak". This feels like hiding issues he has been a part of. This was lawyer speak, or very, very poor communication. Since it's a dev, could honestly be either though. Not his job to communicate well. Except he said his role let him in on a lot of inter company communication. Which makes me think he isn't a dev, but instead someone paid to communicate well in corporate speak, and who used his official email to "leak" to a youtuber. It's a stretch, but My mind sees a pattern, and I just think either an honest dev or a internal spokesperson could have answered like this. But their actual business decisions seem to imply a spokesperson to me.
yep, it felt tooo..... corporate i guess.... and he said 2015 graphics like it was a bad thing, but call of duty black ops 3 doesn't look that bad at all, and if games looked like that, it wouldn't even be an issue, so his point was dumb.... unless we are refering to the awful xbox 360 versh, that was just 90% blur and 3 polygon textures the game. BUT the studio didn't even try with it, and it clearly showed.
Claiming that players just want the game and don't care about high-end visuals is plain wrong. A lot of players do not care, as proven by the statistics that most games bought and played these days are older and not new releases. Games get shit on for not being visually high end. There are people claiming Elden Ring is a shitty looking last-gen game, there are people downvoting and review-trashing 2D games because in an age of advanced 3D "those should not exist" (a quote) and millions of players are buying 2000$ GPUs and those 6000$ gamer PCs and they do that because they want the absolute best possible. It's a huge part of the games industry and it has been like that for decades now. Not all gamers agree on that. I don't. But if you want to sell a new game at day-1 for the max price you need to target people who want the best and newest now and are willing to pay max price for it.
You should have asked these "devs" 2 questions. 1. How many of you "devs" are brand new? 2. Why do you remove every QoL change when you release a "new" game?
because it wasnt a developer. This content creator wrote this stuff himself and is lying about talking to a dev. Activision devs do video interviews all the time and dont need to hide their identity.
CoD doesn't even use SBMM. It uses EBMM, Engagement Based MatchMaking. It's literally designed to give you a hit of that good dopamine-rich, "I'M A GOD AND NOBODY CAN STOP ME!!!" gameplay just often enough that you will stick around and suffer through as many matches of "HE'S HACKING BRO!!! I WAS AROUND THE FUCKING CORNER!!!one!!!" as they can sucker you into enduring. He even admits it with his answer.
thats just wrong tell me, why would they WANT you to have those frustrating matches if they could ALWAYS give you good matches, the answer is simple, they wouldn't, those type of frustrating matches will always, without question, HARM engagement, but its impossible to have a perfect matchmaking system so you have to go for "good enough" which is what cod does, its not perfect, you will have frustrating matches, but if you have a better idea, go apply for a job at activision
@flamingscar5263 they do so because you as a good player will think your just bad and will try to put more time in to get better and when you do get that throw away match, they think you'll try to buy something from the shop, they are praying on your want and need to get better at something.
@flamingscar5263 the best way to have a good match making system is to go back to CBMM connection based match making. Why? Bad players will get rolled find a good player to team up with and learn how to play the game faster then alone, thus making the games about community then anything else.
@@flamingscar5263 No hes actually right. Alot of the big games thate are made of microtransactions (cod, lol, fifa etc.) to generate revenue are using a engagement based matchmaking system cause the first hours in a game are usually the hours were people decide if they spend money in this game. There are even patents about these matchmaking systems that try to predict the player behavior based on their behavior in the past and make sure they keep the engagement by giving them a freewin for their last game of the session so their mind is still positive about the game and they will come again and spend money again. There are also studies that state that a 100% winrate isnt the most statisfying for the human brain. The highest engagement was recorded at around 70-80% winrate so losing 1 out of 5 games when the losing game was the 3. or 4. game of these 5
@@flamingscar5263 It's actually really funny that you suggest getting continuous "good matches" will result in better engagement than maybe sometimes giving you a "good match" because, while that feels like a good enough answer, science as well as certain industries has proven the opposite. Let me explain. To start off, if you want to google this instead of just take my word for it, look up "Skinner Box" and "Intermittent reinforcement psychology". It's actually really simple, you get more dopamine from when something that might gives a reward does give a reward than if something is guaranteed to give a reward. If you pull the lever and it's always a jackpot, it's not as exciting as when you do finally manage to get that jackpot. Finally getting that Ultra Super Exclusive Rare YOU ROCK Supreme Mega SWAWS skin isn't as epic if you didn't have to open hundreds or thousands of loot boxes before it. While yes, TOO MANY bad and frustrating matches will cause engagement to fall off a cliff, Activision has data from what, billions of hours of gameplay sessions at this point that by analyzing your gameplay patterns, the algorithm they have can guess pretty well when you're feeling frustrated enough to quit after one or two more matches. That's when they give you that "good match" where you're one of the players at the top of the skill bracket and you keep going because that last match was pretty great. Repeat that enough times and now you're looking for that next hit, that next spot of dopamine, that next time the slots line up, that next "good match". Now you're addicted. __________ To put it another way CBMM is rolling the dice, you might get rolled, you might do the rolling, or you might barely eek out a win or suffer a tragic last second defeat. It's "truly" random, about as random as you could ask for. Depending on the circumstances one of those outcomes might never happen with CBMM. EBMM is not random, it's algorithmic, it's designed to give you as few of those matches you're looking for as possible to keep you playing as long as possible. Engagement for CoD is a metric of how long a player is interacting with the game. As engagement goes up, the probability of a microtransaction being purchased goes up. Longer play sessions therefore lead to increased revenue. TL;DR - If you put an animal in a box with a lever that always dispenses food, it'll pull the lever when it's hungry. If you put that same animal in a box with a lever that *sometimes* dispenses food, it'll pull that lever all god damned day even after it has all the food it needs. Congratulations, you're the animal in the box and the lever is the matchmaking and the food are the "good matches".
REPLY FROM THE DEV: "Hey everyone, This is the dev here! I took some time to read your comments, and I truly appreciate your energy and passion for the gaming community. I also respect the strong opinions many of you have about certain practices in the industry, like monetization or decisions around textures and features. (Also, please remember that I’m not the right person to provide a precise answer about the textures, as I didn’t work on them, which I’ve mentioned before. ) You might see this as an advertisement for Activision, but honestly, when you work for a company or at least a team you truly love, why wouldn’t you share your happiness with friends and family? I’m genuinely proud to be part of Call of Duty and Activision. My goal in life is to genuinely help more people enter the gaming industry. It’s an amazing field! It’s worth remembering that human nature often leans toward focusing on the negatives rather than the positives. Also remember, most decisions about what gets accepted into the game are led by seniors and directors. I completely understand this, as it often involves a high-risk, high-reward. At this point in my career, I don’t have enough experience to take on that level of responsibility or even fully understand the challenges of managing over 5,000 employees and making critical decisions. It takes a tremendous amount of courage and energy. I think we, as gamers, have become a bit tough on games these days. I absolutely love my job and enjoy working at Activision. From my perspective and the team I work with, I haven’t encountered anything that’s gone wrong on my end, so I feel the need to share my experience. I understand the frustrations you’ve expressed, but I aim to remain professional both online and offline. I’m incredibly grateful for this opportunity, and I genuinely hope that everyone striving to achieve their goals in game development, gets the career of their dreams. Thank you"
"high risk high reward" like putting $30 packs in a already $70 game? I see what you're saying but if Activision actually cared for the gamers instead of blatantly coping other games and following in their footsteps the game would be much better off. Like SBMM, while a lot of new players are used to it there's tonnes of people that work and only play a few hours a day being put with chronic sweats cause the last game they played last night they went 10-0. I'm not a dev nor would I ever work for such a greedy company like Activision you have got to look from the eyes of the players. We know we're just a number on the board, there's other games made by single Devs that are more community driven than Activision. We know Activision silences it's dev team, it's obvious how two Devs have had to keep their IDs hidden just to talk out. It's a disgusting thing but you seem to love it so you do you.
I think we, as gamers, have every right to be a bit tough on games these days. If games are going to be implemented with as many ways to pull as much money from us as possible, and in the case of bo6, on top of a $70 price tag, we have every right to expect a great product.
Kind of comes across as out of touch because they work behind the scenes from what the average consumer sees. Sure, people do have a tendency to be harsh but good games are appreciated massively too, Armored Core 6 and Baldurs Gate 3 both released to practically nothing but love and support for their devs. Gamer's aren't stupid (unless they're from Twitter). Meanwhile, their comments seem to try and defend a company which is notorious for nickel n diming everyone in every franchise they own. This dev clearly doesn't see the perspective of average customers any longer, which is often the case when your position changes, e.g. how you can't relate to children much when you're 30+. It's why getting community feedback is important rather than living in echo chambers within a business which shield you from honest responses.
This guy says he loves activision, Meanwhile I just got my 50th Warframe skin for free, Warframe has like 9million free expansions, AND it's not like 200gigs for all of that. This dev is so cooked in the head.
Hate to tell you bud, but you just straight outed the dev even with redacting the email - they'll be able to look at IT logs and find that message by date and time. Best edit that and hide all of the message details.
@@TDTProductions As someone who has worked in an IT department for a bit. The moment that email was sent the IT department had a log of it on their internal server. Literally all it would take to figure out who it was, even if you blocked everything out, would be to search for TDT and they'd have 1 of 1 matches to search through. Unless your guy is in the IT department, he can't cover his tracks. And if he *is*, then they'd have to look at the administrative logs to see who was deleting messages and still narrow down who it could be. I'm sorry, but this is clearly a sanctioned 'leak'.
@@TDTProductions I’ll describe the timeline and consequences in steps: 1. TDT reach out to leaker for identity verification. (a little sus but IT don’t manually examine every incoming email) 2. the leaker sent email using company account. (this is where the leaker’s identity is exposed to the company but no one is actively looking, yet.) 3. TDT mention that the leaker verified their identity with the email “in a publicly accessible video on the internet”. (this is where the company has all the information they need to hunt down the leaker. I say hunt but it’s more likey just looking up TDT’s email address followed by a log query to find out who sent the email.) note: every email is logged and stored on the email servers. Deleting it from your own inbox doesn’t impact the a company’s access to it. the leakers might not be aware of this themselves because the tech industry is so complex that no one knows every little details. moral of the story: you should not have said the method leakers used to validate their identity. Yes, it makes the video more credible but it also exposes the leaker’s identity indirectly. what’s done is done. the only way to protect the leaker now is to take down the video immediately and pray the company never caught wind of this.
Clearly this dev was put up to it, he isn't going to get in trouble because the company undoubtedly already knew/were the ones giving him these PR answers lmao
I feel like this whole thing read as a calculated response to downplay all the issues people have with games, not a genuine person reaching out but instead someone trying to "wrong" all of us "hateful gamers" I will say it again: You are a CUSTOMER, not JUST a "gamer". You are, in fact, entitled to a proper product. That's why we pay for it.
I work as a game dev and also spent a few years in AAA. The texture resolution thing was a bit of a cop out, there could easily be a limited resolution copy of the assets released with games to keep downloaded file sizes more appropriate. The idea that the costs are covered by micro-transactions is almost pretty disingenuous, these teams are incredibly bloated, they could easily half the size of the workforce on any given big project and they would still produce the same quality result, in fact from my perspective I've seen much much faster work being completed by far smaller teams including the one I currently work with.
The microtransaction answer is bullshit. They can absolutely fund game development with revenues from *selling the game*. They just choose not to, because making content for whales is very, very profitable. ATVI posts net profit margins of over 20%, where the oft pilloried health care industries would be incredibly lucky to reach 10% net margin.
sure they COULD fund the next game based on the current games sales, but it wouldn't leave a lot of room for profit, and you can't expect companies to operate near margin, because what happens if 1 COD game bombs like MW2022 did, then you start losing money for an entire year, which would lead to job cuts which would lower the quality further and spiral downwards MTXs gives a nice safety blanket if a game fails, the whales will still keep you going and it can keep the boat floating while you cook up a really good game, like black ops 6, black ops 6 would not have happened if MTXs were not here, after the bombshell that was MW2022 activision, if it wasn't for MTXs would have had to rush BO6 out the door ASAP, and even with MTXs they had to rush MW2023 out the door, but MTXs gave enough of a blanket to fund at least MW2023, without them BO6 would have launched way to early and been really undercooked
@AaronMichaelLong I think k bot are true im.not against microtransactions when they are fair and fund future development like new maps guns and stuff like that but many game just charge to much for what they sell especially when full price games sell skins that are 1/3 if not half the games price for skins that's just no
God it feels like everyone here is being a Negative-Nancy. I loved the questions that were presented this time around and I have a lot of appreciation for how thorough and informative the devs answers were. Their answers didn’t sound like they had a gun to their head at all. Great stuff @TDT
"so long as I keep their details anonymous" Immediately after using their work account to send an email? Ok, sure. Either this person is really, REALLY stupid, or is doing this with the full knowledge of activision. EDIT: Just watched the vid, YEP this person is an absolute activision PR plant. What a scummy move. F-CK activision.
"The game itself is pretty optimal already, and if they did reduce the texture sizes, the graphics would technically look worse and the amount of compression would make the game look like it's made in 2015." Do... they think we give a shit about reduced graphics quality in favor of performance...? I'd rather play a game with lower graphics settings and be able to ACTUALLY PLAY THE GODDAMN GAME than have 10/10 graphics and never be able to play the game. The cost of tech/consoles is prohibitive to many players, and having an option to play with reduced settings, reduced game size, and increased performance, is critical. As the cost of tech produced in other countries increases over the next 4 years, it's going to be more difficult for American folks to purchase new tech to play newer AAA games. A lack of options for players to run a game outside of the "standard" graphics designed for PS5 and XBSS/X is crap for the consumer. It's cost prohibitive, and it's internet-cost prohibitive too. Video games should be built for the maximum available audience, not just the maximum available console and GPU.
I think the question about game size needs to be more closed ended. Ask directly about how the game size affects the CPU, graphics card and the RAM. And maybe a good follow up question, “Are they planning on zipping up the game files for faster remote download times?”
I might be late to the party, but regarding the first question about the game size: A prime example is Watch Dogs: Legion. Currently, it’s listed on Steam as requiring 115GB of storage space on disk. In the "recent" leak of the WD: Legion source code, it provided some insight into why it takes up so much storage. The whole archive (game source and all the assets) is around 560GB packed as a 7z file. Unzipped, it is around 1.1-1.2TB in size! That’s not unheard of in game development for AAA studios. To break it down: in the source code, there is a "data" directory. It includes all the assets needed for the game. In itself, it’s around 1TB of storage space. So we can safely assume the game code and everything unrelated to assets takes up only 200GB. From that 1TB, there are 207GB of animations (which also include textures in .png format)... And another 227GB of graphics, where most of the storage is taken up by .png files-4K, 2K, 1K textures all over the place, ranging from 2MB to 100MB per image file. However, textures are difficult to compress even if they used DXT/S3TC/DDS (which they already do, as far as I know), so we end up with that amount of storage usage just for some beautiful .png images (to be fair, they are crisp and beautiful even if compressed). What’s not surprising, though, is that the "Sound" folder takes up 523GB of storage space. But they do actually compress it down far more effectively than they can with textures. The voice languages in the original are around 87GB per language (e.g., English 87GB, German 87GB, and so on). In my opinion, they’re not optimizing due to either time constraints, laziness, or straight-up ignorance. I wish they would just ship the textures at 1-2K by default and offer 4K textures as additional downloads. That would already help massively. But yes, textures are large, and even DXT/S3TC/DDS at that size won’t help much compared to the sound compression they can achieve. The game code is tiny in comparison to that.
Just to mention, I think when they spoke about tools saving 10-20 seconds I believe they were on about Dev Tools not things that would be player facing. The time saving they were on about probably referred to things like Compile improvements, fast shader rebuilds, better swarm review tools etc... Things that save time for the Devs day to day and task to task, so the 6 month investment is then worthwhile as over the course of a 4 year dev cycle the whole team (or company) can shave time off their tasks.
@@sQuaTsiFieD His answer did but TDT said for things like saving time on load screens when you have so many players and so many load screens you can see how it adds up. So I was just letting TDT know they were referring to Dev Time
I was really good in RL. It’s one of the few games where the community stands together and publicly shame Smurfs and freestyler that just ruin the experience for everyone. I had to play worse players here and there and it was no fun for anyone. We could basically just beat them up and they couldn’t defend them selves. No tension, nothing. I don’t get why ppl like to beat up worse players as if they have to compensate for something, it’s just boring, not interesting and in the end you miss out a lot on learning potential.
My guess is that. in games with poor ranked systems the next best way to "flex" to how good you are to your friends and in social media, is with stats. So, some people will just want to dunk on worse players to pad the stats. Then they can post and be like "look at my numbers, I'm so good" for clout.
Why would they diversify when they could have better workers? Better workers means better productivity. I get they want to include everyone but it seems hard to get into the job anyways. I don't really get the point?
ChatGPT response: Government incentives for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in hiring vary across countries and regions, but they often include financial benefits, grants, or public recognition for companies that meet DEI goals.
These were interesting questions definitely please keep doing these questions with devs I’m always interested in learning more about the dialogue between devs and gamers and what their whole process is like when creating these games
As someone who's practiced both Godot and Unity, I feel like Godot is just as good if not better due to it's accessibility and being open source. I don't really know what he means by "not recommended for advancing programming skills," as both Godot and Unity have the option to use C#, with Godot having better compatibility with more languages. This is including it's own language, GD Script, which is basically just Python with some new paint to better fit the the Godot engine. (And again, Godot is compatible with multiple languages, so if you're worried about gd script not translating well to other fields or engines, you can just use a different language that does like C# or Python.) It could be because of Godot's node system (pre-built tools such as sprite and animation handlers, screen organization tools, buttons, scroll bars, etc ) but Unity has it's fair share of similar, if not the exact same, tools too. Maybe I'm just not far enough along, but Godot is pretty powerful and quite vast in it's ability to help you learn programing. edit: Godot's accessible by being free to not only use, but export and publish games from too. Being available for multiple platforms, (windows, linux, and Mac) including mobile and in browser support (although it's not as powerful on those platforms) and can be downloaded both on steam and their website, with an official Discord and open forum pages if you have any questions or comments)
most companies have their own engines or use custom tools, so the learning curve is there regardless Edit: Which also, he specifically says “For advancing programing SKILLS” not “learning the way things are programmed in the industry”. Godot will help you improve your programming, just as well, if not better (depending on the person), then Unity due to the things to mentioned above. Not that I don’t like unity, it’s a good engine, just that it doesn’t matter which you start with, just start. You’re progress isn’t tied to a specific engine because they will all teach you basics and pricables. Go learn Renpi or Game Maker, it doesn’t matter. You’ll get better due to dedication, not engine choice.
That comment on texture and game size really peeves me. The dude basically just said, "Get over it. We're not compressing anything." Yeah, sure, that sounds like a Western game dev all right...
I liked the question about how to get into Game Development, but since this person only listed the Artist and Programmer routes, I'd like to propose an add-on: "How does someone get into the narrative side of game development?" I've had multiple story ideas that could work for a video game medium, but I'm currently bound to the novel-side of storytelling.
I've dealt with retail for so long I recognize this way of speaking, this was a supervisor or project lead that reached out, and his answers were all in corporate "over explain" speech that was approved by HR. This is someone who went through the proper chains to reach out. When it comes to how a business operates as long as you aren't sharing the shady sides, corporate is usually pretty cool with explanations. Question 8 is an example of when HR would go "avoid answering this".
I'm understanding why there is a lot of doubt to the legitimacy of the interviewee and the answers, but I think regardless the info given on breaking into the game industry was valuable.
Hella awesome video. I wonder if you could ask what either devs thoughts were on the cheating industry. They have become rampant with cheats being easier to access now more than ever. Where do they see the future of gaming if its always going to be a cat and mouse game, they catch them cheating one way, and devs patch it and then they cheat another way and they patch it.
Can't say I am surprised by the answer about SBMM. As a business game devs will generally speaking always aim for the most players possible with as little sacrifice of their vision as they can. For PvP games that will simply almost always be a situation where people can engage with others at their own level. The reality is that a fun, casual game mode means two very different things for the casual, the CC, and the Pro, as well as several other groups, and it is very hard to satisfy all those different viewpoints. So the best option is to try and satisfy as many of them as you can, and that will generally be the casual player base by a large margin. This however leads me to another train of thought, why wasn't this as big of an issue back before online games took center stage? Idk about y'all, but in couch coop situations very rarely did anyone walk away bitter and frustrated. Why is that? It's because you and your friends were all at a level of understanding to adapt to the situation. Whether you were planning to tourney with each other or just play some casual smack around. This scenario simply cannot be found online in a standard game mode, as there will almost always be someone who is sweating and someone just chilling in most lobbies. This is why custom games with friends are different, is you control the people you play with, which isn't something you can do online. It's the same reason that TDT's custom lobbies in D2 always performed so well! Everyone was on the same page about what mood the lobby was in. Even if you try this in an online unfiltered lobby, there will always be someone who tries to sneak in and reap their personal fun at your expense. This is a big part of why things like WC3 and Halo Forge custom games were MASSIVE success stories in gaming. It's allowed players to set unbendable rules that create casual environments for the player base to sit back and enjoy, and why I personally believe any game will find huge success in such endeavors.
It is, I mean the dev said compression would lead to the game looking worse. Game files are decompressed before being loaded in to memory. So they were even talking out their ass or literally incompetent.
@@Druark How about this... DONT FRAKING HAVE THEM THAT BIG! Compresion my ass just Keep them Low res. the blood splotch on the ground doesnt need to be 4K.
Activision isn't banning AI because of the art of the process. It's because there are ambiguities about IP law and the risk of competitors having access to AI tools that have had their proprietary data fed into them.
That isn´t a gamedev talking to you. Looks like someone of the higher-ups saw your video of the last dev leak and decided to "Right some Wrongs". Pretending to be another leaking dev.
Saving 10-20 seconds was referring to tools, i.e. what devs use to author the game, prepare updates for various platforms, run tests etc. The dev did not mean to make any statement about how easy it is to propose changes to the level loading code or other parts of the customer facing side of the game. (The stakes are lower for internal tools.) A.I. may also lead into grey waters when it comes to copyright. We may remember the A.I. generated images that still had shutterstock watermarks all over them.
As a game dev who worked in AAA myself, I'd like to highlight what this anonymous dev said at the end. They quite literally acknowledged that "diversity" is prioritised over skill in an effort to increase types of people who are not even applying. Note that they didn't say the number of people chosen / hired wasn't diverse, rather the ones APPLYING, meaning if you are not included in the types of people they want to hire, you are definitely being de-prioritised in favour of others. Additional note, I don't think all of these answers were 100% truthful, especially involving the workplace politics element, the fact is that these workplaces require you to go through "training" and other forms of document that are politically biased and you're effectively required to agree with a specific political bias in order to keep your job.
A question I would have, if you ever do this q&a with devs is: Where and when in the stage of creating the game do the game devs (the position it is), realize the fact that the game is gonna be a fail on the release day due to some issues (examples could be the way Cyberpunk was released and received by the community, GTA Definitive Edition the Trilogy) and what could the company do to remediate a situation like this. And what impact does it have on the company, a bad release of a videogame, made by a completely different studio in a similar genre, if this company (the dev you talk with is employed to) has taken additional precautionary steps before releasing a game, because of the mishap from other companies
Sbmm and eomm is something no one wants. The good old days of like Black Ops 2 where every lobby was a mixed bag, some games you'd stomp, some you'd get stomped others down to the wire, that unpredictable environment and experience WAS the replayability draw underneath it all. How hard is it to listen to the people literally giving them money to play the games. I'm as good as I am at games because of these varied lobby experience, I qas Timmy no thumbs when i started, I watched killcams and learned from watching how the top fraggers played and I became a top fragger. Connection should always be the top priority, and ranked should be where the sbmm experience should be, it's kinda the point. I'm sick and tired of my pubs matches unconsentially being ranked without a ranking to show for it. If I want to play ranked, I'll play ranked. The current system serves no purpose but to frustrate players, to the point that you can't play with friends of varied skill level anymore. TL:DR - modern gen gamers are the participation medal generation, advocating for sbmm / eomm in unranked proves this. In summary git gud just like I did in 09'. My experience is stressful to my detriment actively being punished for being good. It needs to stop. If people are two boxing or resorting to VPNs to ensure a good connection or to goof off with mates and chill out (respectively) for pubs, it's clear we have a f**kin problem.
CoD doesn't even use SBMM. It uses EBMM, Engagement Based MatchMaking. It's literally designed to give you a hit of that good dopamine-rich, "I'M A GOD AND NOBODY CAN STOP ME!!!" gameplay just often enough that you will stick around and suffer through as many matches of "HE'S HACKING BRO!!! I WAS AROUND THE FUCKING CORNER!!!one!!!" as they can sucker you into enduring. He even admits it with his answer.
I also work as a developer for an FPS and the company banned usage of 3rd party AIs. They trained their own models that can help new devs get into new codebases easier without having to ask a senior (because they are always gone because of the massiv amount of holidays in germany). Other usage of AI is not allowed, mainly because of the law and that because AI is not a real person, either the company that did the code for the AI has all rights for the assets or nobody. Training a model is easy, training a model those not give the rights to the content it produces, creating AI from scratch is not as easy, IF you want it to be as good as ChatGPT. Even a small gray area is a big problem for a big company. Matchmaking could be enhanced with AI but due to privacy protiection laws and data collection laws in germany and other countries, this is currently not an option, tho tests with active players that agreed where held and showed a massiv improvement not only in the rating of a players skill level but also in the players active observation of the skill levels of others in multiplayer lobbies. Sad story is that many devs in the EU got laid of and replaced with devs from India. Communication is SO hard with those and not only because of the time shift and the language but because they seem to have like double the work load for like 1/4 of the money. But IDK if they actually work double as much. All I know is, they earn less for the same hours, because this number is not a global number but a local number based on the country.
first time I tried Warzone and I downloaded 100GB of files, which is extremely large for my stupidly expensive and low quality internet in the South East Asia. even after downloading 100GB, I still have to download another 15GB to be able to play the same game mode as my friends does. at this point, I kinda see Activision is basically telling people "uhm, fuck you, I guess? get a better PC and better internet! we don't care about reducing the size of our game"
This entire conversation with the “dev” was semantic. They never really answered a question or even if they did there seemed to be no real opinion at all. They didn’t even answer the last question and even brought up diversity bullshit when that wasn’t even the question. This whole video was a nothing burger of replies. I felt there should have been more thought put into making this video on the replies you were getting and maybe pressing them more or something because they played it so safe to the point that I could have taken a shit and that would have had more meaning than what they had to say. As much as it seems I’m just being disrespectful about it, I just think it’s good to be critical of the things being told here.
My take to this is that some of these are just common sense , but here's my top counters: Pre: to the people saying he outed the dev, this was likely done through proper channels with information being redacted to stop the gaming community from harassing them, the community is a psychotic mess when timmy needs to go 2-16 to validate death threats 1: While it may be optimised as much as you can, there should still be the option so that it's on the player if their experience is affected. 2: This question depends entirely on you ask, it is a loaded question, so the community has a rallying call, while not knowing what is actually happening or the nuances. 3: Gaming is far more popular now than it was "In the good old days" so this increases the pool size, not only that but the younger generation want to win at all times, no matter what, gaming has long stopped being about casual fun and become more akin to sports with competitiveness, the only casual games you can control are single player games now. Every game has a loser and people will go to any length to not lose, read as, it's not about fun but winning no matter the mode. 4: I like this, the only time I would accept AI use is to get a design choice visual, everything else is better done and has better references done by humans. 5: MTXs, scourge of the gaming community, many people see this greed but there's so much behind the scenes costs such as overheads, liscences, wages, billsand game dev has no real security, those MTXs not only help fund the next game but they offer devs that security to create their best work. 6: Question could have been worded better, would have been better to ask if any bugs had sparked the idea for a feature. 7: not much to add, as a former software dev student, if you wanted to update something remove any that could affect the update. 8: this is what makes me believe this is done through proper channels, this is a minefield of a question that I would have dismissed it. 9: As previously said, former soft dev student before being diagnosed with extreme depression and PTSD that I can't work, many people see "Experience " as working in a company, for dev it's more asking how long you've coded for, your portfolio will show the quality, the time will show the commitment. 10: Another question laced in poison, while I would avoid this, here and now, I hate that the gaming community assumes they know how the process goes cause they are almost always wrong. Edit: Clarified my point on SBMM as looking back, yeah What I thought I said and what I did say were different, for clarity, all I added was "You can control" the rest of my post remain untouched
Your take on SBMM is close minded. Singleplayer games aren’t the only games for casuals and if it is then we’ve lost sight of what games are about. The reason people have a problem with SBMM is because no one wants a dying simulator nor do they want to feel every match is for all the prize money. This SBMM now is heavily manipulative in ping and possible damage as well which makes skill disingenuous. SBMM has been forced everywhere because of data and not listening to consumers, no one asked for it everywhere yet it showed up everywhere.
@MrJerrytheSlime I'm not an advocate or a dissident to SBMM. The point I was trying to make is that it's only a part of the problem. If SBMM were to go away, in my honest opinion, the number of cases of "Sweat lobbies" might go down a bit but ultimately they will still be the majority of the experience and my comment on single player games was one to say "This the only way to guarentee an experience you want" otherwise you're rolling the dice.
i don't get it, are they still running in circles about the download size on purpose, or do they genuinely not understand the question LET. ME. NOT. DOWNLOAD. 4K TEXTURES. "There is no such need on pc" YES THERE IS, believe it or not but even if you can buy more storage for pc, people won't be doing that just to fit warzone on it, for crying out loud
Exactly how im feeling. There is ALWAYS room for improvement, and the improvement we would love is to not spend $100 or more on storage and to spend hours, or God forbid days, on downloading the files needed to play. Why is it so hard to understand, "Can we opt out of 4k textures?"
Biggest problem with game size anymore is tha fact that console storage sizes dont keep up. I have close to 40 games on my gears of war xbox 1 while i have 11 games with no storage left on my series x.
After both of these videos, I’m confident in saying the COD devs have no spine. They (up to this point) have done so very little for the player base of the game. They have been in lock step with ATVI executives since all of this BS started with supply drops in AW in 2014. Micro transactions, weapon variants, unfinished releases. And that’s only AW to IW, Vanguard was easily the WORST fps experience I’ve ever had. It is utterly astounding how these companies made a winning formula basically 2 decades ago, and yet here we are, and they can’t even make that properly anymore. I await with bated breath the demise of Call of Duty, it’s time to let it rest.
about high res textures being optional: blozzard does it. when I recently reinstalled WoW, i had the option to not download the hogh res textures, and it reduced the game size by about a half
2:39 I'd actually be okay with it looking like it was made in 2015. 90 GB is just too demanding for me. Wanted to download fallout 4 recently after having uninstalled it LONG ago. Steam was asked an upfront of 95.7 GB. I would have to on, no other option, upgrade me SSD drives: all of them, to fit fallout 4 into them, as I've saved a lot of invaluable data over the years.
I'm calling bullshit on the SBMM answer, I'm not some top player, not low skill either, just your average Joe trying to play a game casually, and under SBMM I get DUNKED on ALL FUCKING DAY. I stopped playing cod because I couldn't get a single good match because of SBMM from a combination of how bad SBMM is at matchmaking, and the amount of ping I got from being sent to a server across the ocean due to SBMM being so strict. I'm in the US and set my games to the US region, yet I've been connected to servers in Scotland, Germany, China, Russia; never once was I sent to a US server.
CoD doesn't even use SBMM. It uses EBMM, Engagement Based MatchMaking. It's literally designed to give you a hit of that good dopamine-rich, "I'M A GOD AND NOBODY CAN STOP ME!!!" gameplay just often enough that you will stick around and suffer through as many matches of "HE'S HACKING BRO!!! I WAS AROUND THE FUCKING CORNER!!!one!!!" as they can sucker you into enduring. He even admits it with his answer.
I do not believe that response to the AI question one bit because they explicitly name Generative AI in some of their job applications, and to be totally honest these BO6 maps play like they were initially designed with a layout created by ChatGPT and then cleaned up by people. Like, they just straight up LIED about the maps being "classic, 3-lane maps".
The real reason why they keep getting bigger and bigger is because the executives would see a number go down. Can't have that. Number needs to go up. More gbs is better!
Better question would be why their anti cheat is so bad (feels like ricochet is just logo not a real AC) that every game almost you play on cheater or just bot farming accounts that run the same path with software and aimbots everyone.
I wonder if they can split SBMM up into RBMM for Ranked modes, which is closer to the 360 era ranked MM, where you matched based on your current rank in the playlist, and then for social they use TBMM or "Time based Matchmaking" which instead matches you based on your profile level, which is exp based, goes up every match towards an eventual cap, never resets, progresses faster for higher skilled players, and in a game like COD also serves as unlock progression so you'll mainly also play people with the same loadout options as you. That gives us the best of all worlds IMO. In Ranked players will likely have a pretty easy time until they reach a rank where the other players are more or less on your level, then matches in that playlist with start to get sweaty. Then for unranked skill is taken out of the equasion, and instead your personal experience is factored, so the more you have played the game, the more your enemies will have also played. And while playtime =/= skill level, it does help keep newer players in the same bracket while they get used to the game.
Pretty interesting video with lots of insight. It does feel like he's giving the safe corporate answers, although that could just be the professional language used. I would like to see if they think money as well as other resources are being distributed correctly between projects as well as different teams (like marketing, development, artists, management, etc.) I also thing there is some bias here, with them actively choosing to work at Activision, my guess is they don't feel to much spite towards the company or its practices as a whole. It's hard to tell when someone has it good if these are actually good practices, or if they just roll with it because it doesn't negatively effect them to much.
I could have answered all of these questions in the same way and I don't even work in the industry. And honestly, I think ChatGPT also could have answered all of these questions in the same way.
@TDT i have a question of my own if you do another video like this. Why are there no more pre-game lobbies? Also, why do we get matched with different people after a game ends, as opposed to letting us stick with the same people in a session?
Hey uhm i didnt watch the video yet, but you mentioned that this guy sent his E-Mail through his account. The activision IT team can track this. I would suggest removing that statement for this guys security.
Games in 2015 look just as good as games now some even look better lmao. That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. Why did we go from 50gb at most to 300gb games in a span of 10 years? We didn't advance in computer science that much lmao. Games used to run amazing now they all run like youre walking through a swamp.
The 2015 comment Wither 3 Blood Borne Metal Gear Soldid V and just to add im putting in 2014 as well Alien Isolation Dragon Age Inquisition Destiny (minus the world resources .pngs) These games still look fantastic to this day so who cares if it looks like 2015, 2015 looked amazing SBMM comment wonder if anyone looked into sort of a time based matchmaking, were you're matched based on how many hours spent on average per week, stand alone this would be a horrible idea good players can warm up pretty quickly but as something that could supplement how skill is determined it should reduce the frustrations a little bit MTX comment dang when activision properly distributes money from mtx better than microsoft ever did you know somethings wrong with the company, I've also been saying this for a while know, even in the early 2000s the only games to recieve frequent updates were membership games like Runescape or WoW because they had a consistent stream of funds, this isn't new at all it's just been expanded to games that didn't receive constant major updates and even then thats exactly what map packs were, I'd much rather cosmetics be overpriced than actual content like maps and modes be over priced, gamers seriously forgot the $20 for 4 maps CoD was notorious with especially with advanced warfare I think that and blops 3 had the most dlc map packs and a lot of them were remakes Jobs comment College for coding but experience and a highlight reel of your work for art, makes sense but I want to add it's best for programmers and designers to at least dip their toes in the others job (easily can be done for free if you know what to look up online) to get a better understanding of what's required of the other, honestly this is the case for a lot of jobs that have different requirements but need to work together the amount of bullshit that ends up stalling over miscommunication or false assumptions are just obnoxious
"the graphics would technically look worse and make the game look like it was made in 2015". Yes. That's the fucking point. Also he said that like we care about graphics, I'm still playing games from the 2010s and 00s😂
Omg the unplanned meetings comment. F'n mood. As a dev (not game dev), this has happened to me so often in the past. Especially where there are awkward breaks between meetings so that you can't just get into the zone and get shit done.
My brother, that's not a dev you are talking to. Using an official Activision account to validate them (which would be easily tracked by Activision) while wanting anonymity for fear of being fired. That makes no sense. Plus the corporate responses, nah.
Honestly yeah. I understand fully why SBMM exists. I ain't exactly a MLG level player and I don't have god like skills. I find it better when I am playing against my skill level or lower. When I get matched against people who clearly have more time playing that anything else in their week, it is frustrating and does make me wanna stop
Then you're going to have a tough time explaining how CoD felt better for everyone, at all skill-levels, a decade ago, and the passion for the game was infinitely higher. SBMM solely has to exist in a ranked playlist, in public ones it makes no sense. You don't get better at anything by constantly rolling around in mud with fellow shitters, you get better by playing a mix of fellow shitters and better players (at different ranges) over time.
CoD doesn't even use SBMM. It uses EBMM, Engagement Based MatchMaking. It's literally designed to give you a hit of that good dopamine-rich, "I'M A GOD AND NOBODY CAN STOP ME!!!" gameplay just often enough that you will stick around and suffer through as many matches of "HE'S HACKING BRO!!! I WAS AROUND THE FUCKING CORNER!!!one!!!" as they can sucker you into enduring. He even admits it with his answer.
@@ThatFalloutGod because back then COD was new and the climate of gaming was very different back then people didn't care about having a bad game, the novelty of COD was enough to keep them playing and the climate of gaming focused more on pulling off cool stuff like trickshots, then it focused on high skill play but now? COD is 20 years old, that novelty is gone and never coming back, COD will never feel fresh, its the McDonalds of FPS games, and the climate in gaming today is A LOT more focused on things like Esports and streaming, 2 areas that promote sweaty gameplay
@ I don't disagree with anything here, it's just not the entirety of the problem with CoD in particular. A big part of the problems still lies with SBMM, and similar things in other games (like DDA with Madden and CFB). If we had shit like SBMM removed, we'd still have the problem of everyone playing like sweaty losers, but at least we wouldn't be forced into shitty lobbies, or punished for being better than others, etc.
is there a second channel? I stumbled across a "TdTwo", it appears at first glance to be different, with no videos cross-uploaded between these two channels, but I thought I would just ask to make sure this isn't a content thief of some sort.
SBMM is some of the most annoying stuff ever, I get punished for having honed skills from speedrunning doom for years, and most PvP games become a sweatfest after the SBMM picks up on me, it made me completely stop playing PvP, especially CoD quickly becomes more stressful then a speedrun because I get matched with ppl who leave their basement like once a quarter
I got a question. Why on console do you have to get the Call of Duty game separately from any other COD. For example, you need to purchase Call of Duty and COD MW2 2022 separately from each other. If you search MW2 2022 on the playstation store, it brings up Call of Duty and not MW2. I’m not sure if this is a marketing decision or whatever but I would just like some insight. I had another question but its a bit of a personal gripe with security and people who handle banning on COD.
This person either works at HR or had someone at HR direct them what to write. None of these answers are satisfactory on a technical level. None. In comparison, I had previously watched a bunch of dev interviews from Retro Studios, who worked on Metroid Prime Series. These guys explained in great detail every little design decision of their game. I understand that the CoD developers cannot leak things in as much detail about a freshly released game as Retro Studios can about a 2 decades old game, but this "dev" goes into no detail at all and only gave us surface level answers that are actually worse than the answers that we've had before. At least the "SBMM Manifesto" proved with numbers and statistics that SBMM makes most people quit their game less, and also said that it doesn't try to achieve a specific sequence of wins and losses to manipulate your emotions but only tries to rank you as quickly and as accurately as possible. Their answer on the other hand, starts off with the completely incorrect statement that people's complaints stem from the disparity of skill and not the SBMM system itself, even though everyone is clearly complaining about the game feeling too competitive because of SBMM. This feels like someone caught wind of the last video and is trying to undo the damage it caused. To the "dev": Please never reach out again. Tell your coworkers to not reach out again. It is painfully obvious that everyone except the first dev is going to be an Activision plant. We don't need to hear your public statements twice, even if they are masquerading as "honest private conversations".
Activision is definitely going full AI-friendly. BO6 shows. Treyarch is following up. Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer need to keep pushing human creativity over generic indignity.
Justified but since he sent you an email from an official Activision Channel if they really wanted to find this guy they could because the fact that they sent you an email
I really only play something like COD to have fun and whether my team wins or looses is a much smaller factor of my amount of enjoyment than how I felt I was doing. If were playing domination and my team always had 1 base secured to the opponents 2 so we loose, I could have still had a good time defending our one point. Conversely if my team won a TDM but it was because we had 1 guy carrying the team but I was just getting rocked the whole time, that still wouldn't be a good time just because my team won.
It sounds like he is missing a lot of context for knowing how to filter developer responses. They are not really people people and usually talk with machines and/or in a very direct way so it does not get translated wrong when going between languages with another developer team. So verbose is usually preferred over being short and sweet. Not to hide the answer but to commutate it in the way you understand the meaning of what they intend to say which when you talk to marketing is why marketing hates how developers talk. Whenever you get something very sort it is either 1 the guy doesn't work in that area 2 he doesn't have time so he wrote it up quickly or 3 he was told what to say. So how TDT condense pages down to a few sentences for a youtube video is missing a lot of context assuming we have it already instead of explaining it to us. Yes that is a thing developers do of explaining it each and every time to make sure that who is reading it understands what they are saying. More so when out of company commutations as they will not know what the commonly used acronyms mean. For a youtube channel he most likely also had to cut out a lot of coding language stuff too.
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FYI Mesome, i know your sponsored but Raycons are NOT good earbuds for the price, compared to other earbuds in the same price range raycon's features are average and there audio quality is poor.
However, I respect you not lying about the product like many other youtubers, so thanks for that. :)
The second question was about saving time for developers, not for players.
ok, I was like "wtf" when people were saying in the comments that it feels like the dude got the boss on his back, then came the SBMM question... It wasn't just a professional response, that was a corporate response, something you'd hear at an investors Q&A
This developer feels very sterilized with their responses. It feels like they have management breathing down their neck as they type.
This should of been obvious, a majority of employers when providing an email disclose that they can retrieving any message your account has sent. Activision would definitely be one of those employers. The second I saw the email I knew either this video was a hoax or the employee is a plant. To keep it a secret from Activision but use your business email was a stupid move if that is the case.
As a developer, I can assure you this guy is NOT a developer.
It's probably some upper suit from Activision with intentions to make Activision look good.
That or HR tempered with all responses beyond recognition.
@@TheSensei88 100% agree. Im also a software dev and this guys answers and word usage doesnt give me dev vibes at all. Sounds like a suit
Why does this second Dev sound like an Activision plant
Because he is, it should be immediately obvious from the first answer that they are running PR damage control.
he even used an official email address to communicate with the youtuber lmao
plant?
The answer about texture sizes is unintentionally so funny. They had to send you a text document because EVEN THE MESSAGE was too large
It was basically a non-answer too. In their mind compressing texture sizes would make the game look like it's from 2015? Any dev knows that compressed textures get uncompressed and loaded in to memory, they don't stay compressed in the game when running.
There is no excuse for the game to be 300gb when a game like Warframe with unique textures for every weapon, frame, effect, multiple enemy factions and literally 11 years of content still manages to be under 100gb by far. It sounds a lot more like Acti simply do not have the knowledge/skill/competence to fix the issue.
@ ok, I work game textures on a daily basis, yes. Yes it would look like 2015
Theres stylistic reasons to go lower or higher.
With how close the cameras usually get to assets and characters, it justified higher res textures.
@@TACKO3D You're missing the point, most people would gladly take the hit to quality if it could reduce the size, provided they were given the option, I mean many Switch games barely look better than PS3/360 titles and it's still by far the best selling console on the market.
@@TACKO3D I want my potatoe to play the game at a stable framerate please. 4k Textures dont let even the TOP OF THE LINE COMPUTERS PLAY AT STABLE FRAME RATES. Screw your Bigger numbers i want Consistant Numbers.
@ god forbid nuance exist.
I'm a small time dev that's previously worked AAA, and the guy you interviewed is either the most limp-dicked dev in the studio or actually working with comms.
Nobody worth their paycheck talks like that and expects anybody to buy what they're selling.
Clearly the dev was approved to make these comments he literally contacted TDT through his work email.
I mean, the dev contacted them through their tracked email account, which Acti would know about immediately as they had a previous dev speak on this channel already. It's clearly pre-planned otherwise he'd be out of a job within days.
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I actually proposed to my Girlfriend using Raycons. Im not even joking
Bro, I’ve been in the corporate world for 20 years. I could’ve answered these questions for you as well 😂
You can answer other questions ❤
Player: "Why can't we reduce the texture size? We don't care about the graphics, we just wanna buy the game!"
Dev: "It would look bad!"
Player: "but... we just said...."
And then,
P : "Did upper executives ever hold back a riskier feature"
Dev : "Those with more experience in the industry give the greenlight"
Me: ..."But... what industry? corporate side? dev side? and we were asking about DENIALS not green lights..... and we weren't asking about the general, but if exceptions were made"
These answers felt surprisingly disingenuous from a dev that wanted to "leak". This feels like hiding issues he has been a part of. This was lawyer speak, or very, very poor communication. Since it's a dev, could honestly be either though. Not his job to communicate well.
Except he said his role let him in on a lot of inter company communication. Which makes me think he isn't a dev, but instead someone paid to communicate well in corporate speak, and who used his official email to "leak" to a youtuber. It's a stretch, but My mind sees a pattern, and I just think either an honest dev or a internal spokesperson could have answered like this. But their actual business decisions seem to imply a spokesperson to me.
yep, it felt tooo..... corporate i guess.... and he said 2015 graphics like it was a bad thing, but call of duty black ops 3 doesn't look that bad at all, and if games looked like that, it wouldn't even be an issue, so his point was dumb.... unless we are refering to the awful xbox 360 versh, that was just 90% blur and 3 polygon textures the game. BUT the studio didn't even try with it, and it clearly showed.
@@vyrv6719 I made a comment earlier that reflects this, I think Activision put him up to this
Claiming that players just want the game and don't care about high-end visuals is plain wrong. A lot of players do not care, as proven by the statistics that most games bought and played these days are older and not new releases.
Games get shit on for not being visually high end. There are people claiming Elden Ring is a shitty looking last-gen game, there are people downvoting and review-trashing 2D games because in an age of advanced 3D "those should not exist" (a quote) and millions of players are buying 2000$ GPUs and those 6000$ gamer PCs and they do that because they want the absolute best possible. It's a huge part of the games industry and it has been like that for decades now.
Not all gamers agree on that. I don't. But if you want to sell a new game at day-1 for the max price you need to target people who want the best and newest now and are willing to pay max price for it.
Feels like its a plant to give good PR. Even worded like good PR. Its worse than disingenuous its a worthless talking head.
@@Honed- at this point 2011 Graphics look better than "Modern" Graphics.
Im not buying this.
This seems like a way to fave face and defend the company.
@@theshellderinslowbrostail5422 you can feel that all the answers were HR approved 😭
them sending an e-mail from an official activision account is probably enough information for activision to find out the leak LMAO
It was planned. No Leak its a corpo. Instead of taking pics of the worspace or some actual Info they used a monitored channel.
Those answers straight up were filtered through HR ans god knows how many suits. 😂😂
You should have asked these "devs" 2 questions.
1. How many of you "devs" are brand new?
2. Why do you remove every QoL change when you release a "new" game?
This developer sounded like they used ChatGPT to get the most middle of the road answer.
because it wasnt a developer. This content creator wrote this stuff himself and is lying about talking to a dev.
Activision devs do video interviews all the time and dont need to hide their identity.
CoD doesn't even use SBMM. It uses EBMM, Engagement Based MatchMaking. It's literally designed to give you a hit of that good dopamine-rich, "I'M A GOD AND NOBODY CAN STOP ME!!!" gameplay just often enough that you will stick around and suffer through as many matches of "HE'S HACKING BRO!!! I WAS AROUND THE FUCKING CORNER!!!one!!!" as they can sucker you into enduring.
He even admits it with his answer.
thats just wrong
tell me, why would they WANT you to have those frustrating matches if they could ALWAYS give you good matches, the answer is simple, they wouldn't, those type of frustrating matches will always, without question, HARM engagement, but its impossible to have a perfect matchmaking system so you have to go for "good enough" which is what cod does, its not perfect, you will have frustrating matches, but if you have a better idea, go apply for a job at activision
@flamingscar5263 they do so because you as a good player will think your just bad and will try to put more time in to get better and when you do get that throw away match, they think you'll try to buy something from the shop, they are praying on your want and need to get better at something.
@flamingscar5263 the best way to have a good match making system is to go back to CBMM connection based match making. Why? Bad players will get rolled find a good player to team up with and learn how to play the game faster then alone, thus making the games about community then anything else.
@@flamingscar5263 No hes actually right. Alot of the big games thate are made of microtransactions (cod, lol, fifa etc.) to generate revenue are using a engagement based matchmaking system cause the first hours in a game are usually the hours were people decide if they spend money in this game. There are even patents about these matchmaking systems that try to predict the player behavior based on their behavior in the past and make sure they keep the engagement by giving them a freewin for their last game of the session so their mind is still positive about the game and they will come again and spend money again. There are also studies that state that a 100% winrate isnt the most statisfying for the human brain. The highest engagement was recorded at around 70-80% winrate so losing 1 out of 5 games when the losing game was the 3. or 4. game of these 5
@@flamingscar5263 It's actually really funny that you suggest getting continuous "good matches" will result in better engagement than maybe sometimes giving you a "good match" because, while that feels like a good enough answer, science as well as certain industries has proven the opposite.
Let me explain. To start off, if you want to google this instead of just take my word for it, look up "Skinner Box" and "Intermittent reinforcement psychology".
It's actually really simple, you get more dopamine from when something that might gives a reward does give a reward than if something is guaranteed to give a reward. If you pull the lever and it's always a jackpot, it's not as exciting as when you do finally manage to get that jackpot. Finally getting that Ultra Super Exclusive Rare YOU ROCK Supreme Mega SWAWS skin isn't as epic if you didn't have to open hundreds or thousands of loot boxes before it.
While yes, TOO MANY bad and frustrating matches will cause engagement to fall off a cliff, Activision has data from what, billions of hours of gameplay sessions at this point that by analyzing your gameplay patterns, the algorithm they have can guess pretty well when you're feeling frustrated enough to quit after one or two more matches. That's when they give you that "good match" where you're one of the players at the top of the skill bracket and you keep going because that last match was pretty great. Repeat that enough times and now you're looking for that next hit, that next spot of dopamine, that next time the slots line up, that next "good match". Now you're addicted.
__________
To put it another way CBMM is rolling the dice, you might get rolled, you might do the rolling, or you might barely eek out a win or suffer a tragic last second defeat. It's "truly" random, about as random as you could ask for. Depending on the circumstances one of those outcomes might never happen with CBMM. EBMM is not random, it's algorithmic, it's designed to give you as few of those matches you're looking for as possible to keep you playing as long as possible. Engagement for CoD is a metric of how long a player is interacting with the game. As engagement goes up, the probability of a microtransaction being purchased goes up. Longer play sessions therefore lead to increased revenue.
TL;DR - If you put an animal in a box with a lever that always dispenses food, it'll pull the lever when it's hungry. If you put that same animal in a box with a lever that *sometimes* dispenses food, it'll pull that lever all god damned day even after it has all the food it needs. Congratulations, you're the animal in the box and the lever is the matchmaking and the food are the "good matches".
15:41 This is so helpful, enormous thanks to both the Dev and Mesome.
I think last person was genuine but this was def a Corpo plant
100% agree its PR speak 101 never give a straight answer and use BIG WORDS while talking up and pumping up who they are talking to.
ew this dev sounds like he's got a boss behind his back.... booo
REPLY FROM THE DEV:
"Hey everyone,
This is the dev here! I took some time to read your comments, and I truly appreciate your energy and passion for the gaming community. I also respect the strong opinions many of you have about certain practices in the industry, like monetization or decisions around textures and features. (Also, please remember that I’m not the right person to provide a precise answer about the textures, as I didn’t work on them, which I’ve mentioned before. )
You might see this as an advertisement for Activision, but honestly, when you work for a company or at least a team you truly love, why wouldn’t you share your happiness with friends and family? I’m genuinely proud to be part of Call of Duty and Activision.
My goal in life is to genuinely help more people enter the gaming industry. It’s an amazing field!
It’s worth remembering that human nature often leans toward focusing on the negatives rather than the positives.
Also remember, most decisions about what gets accepted into the game are led by seniors and directors. I completely understand this, as it often involves a high-risk, high-reward. At this point in my career, I don’t have enough experience to take on that level of responsibility or even fully understand the challenges of managing over 5,000 employees and making critical decisions. It takes a tremendous amount of courage and energy.
I think we, as gamers, have become a bit tough on games these days.
I absolutely love my job and enjoy working at Activision. From my perspective and the team I work with, I haven’t encountered anything that’s gone wrong on my end, so I feel the need to share my experience. I understand the frustrations you’ve expressed, but I aim to remain professional both online and offline.
I’m incredibly grateful for this opportunity, and I genuinely hope that everyone striving to achieve their goals in game development, gets the career of their dreams.
Thank you"
"high risk high reward" like putting $30 packs in a already $70 game? I see what you're saying but if Activision actually cared for the gamers instead of blatantly coping other games and following in their footsteps the game would be much better off. Like SBMM, while a lot of new players are used to it there's tonnes of people that work and only play a few hours a day being put with chronic sweats cause the last game they played last night they went 10-0. I'm not a dev nor would I ever work for such a greedy company like Activision you have got to look from the eyes of the players. We know we're just a number on the board, there's other games made by single Devs that are more community driven than Activision. We know Activision silences it's dev team, it's obvious how two Devs have had to keep their IDs hidden just to talk out. It's a disgusting thing but you seem to love it so you do you.
I think we, as gamers, have every right to be a bit tough on games these days. If games are going to be implemented with as many ways to pull as much money from us as possible, and in the case of bo6, on top of a $70 price tag, we have every right to expect a great product.
Kind of comes across as out of touch because they work behind the scenes from what the average consumer sees. Sure, people do have a tendency to be harsh but good games are appreciated massively too, Armored Core 6 and Baldurs Gate 3 both released to practically nothing but love and support for their devs. Gamer's aren't stupid (unless they're from Twitter).
Meanwhile, their comments seem to try and defend a company which is notorious for nickel n diming everyone in every franchise they own. This dev clearly doesn't see the perspective of average customers any longer, which is often the case when your position changes, e.g. how you can't relate to children much when you're 30+. It's why getting community feedback is important rather than living in echo chambers within a business which shield you from honest responses.
Yeah this guy is 100% an industry plant
This guy says he loves activision, Meanwhile I just got my 50th Warframe skin for free, Warframe has like 9million free expansions, AND it's not like 200gigs for all of that. This dev is so cooked in the head.
Hate to tell you bud, but you just straight outed the dev even with redacting the email - they'll be able to look at IT logs and find that message by date and time. Best edit that and hide all of the message details.
This
Just like the last dev, they cleared it before we hit publish. I assume the dev knows far more about what they are doing than we do
@@TDTProductions As someone who has worked in an IT department for a bit. The moment that email was sent the IT department had a log of it on their internal server. Literally all it would take to figure out who it was, even if you blocked everything out, would be to search for TDT and they'd have 1 of 1 matches to search through.
Unless your guy is in the IT department, he can't cover his tracks. And if he *is*, then they'd have to look at the administrative logs to see who was deleting messages and still narrow down who it could be.
I'm sorry, but this is clearly a sanctioned 'leak'.
@@TDTProductions
I’ll describe the timeline and consequences in steps:
1. TDT reach out to leaker for identity verification.
(a little sus but IT don’t manually examine every incoming email)
2. the leaker sent email using company account.
(this is where the leaker’s identity is exposed to the company but no one is actively looking, yet.)
3. TDT mention that the leaker verified their identity with the email “in a publicly accessible video on the internet”.
(this is where the company has all the information they need to hunt down the leaker. I say hunt but it’s more likey just looking up TDT’s email address followed by a log query to find out who sent the email.)
note:
every email is logged and stored on the email servers. Deleting it from your own inbox doesn’t impact the a company’s access to it. the leakers might not be aware of this themselves because the tech industry is so complex that no one knows every little details.
moral of the story:
you should not have said the method leakers used to validate their identity. Yes, it makes the video more credible but it also exposes the leaker’s identity indirectly.
what’s done is done. the only way to protect the leaker now is to take down the video immediately and pray the company never caught wind of this.
Clearly this dev was put up to it, he isn't going to get in trouble because the company undoubtedly already knew/were the ones giving him these PR answers lmao
I feel like this whole thing read as a calculated response to downplay all the issues people have with games, not a genuine person reaching out but instead someone trying to "wrong" all of us "hateful gamers"
I will say it again: You are a CUSTOMER, not JUST a "gamer". You are, in fact, entitled to a proper product. That's why we pay for it.
I work as a game dev and also spent a few years in AAA.
The texture resolution thing was a bit of a cop out, there could easily be a limited resolution copy of the assets released with games to keep downloaded file sizes more appropriate.
The idea that the costs are covered by micro-transactions is almost pretty disingenuous, these teams are incredibly bloated, they could easily half the size of the workforce on any given big project and they would still produce the same quality result, in fact from my perspective I've seen much much faster work being completed by far smaller teams including the one I currently work with.
@@threemoo how do you become a dev? More specifically what do you do and what if any qualifications/ education do you need?
The microtransaction answer is bullshit. They can absolutely fund game development with revenues from *selling the game*. They just choose not to, because making content for whales is very, very profitable. ATVI posts net profit margins of over 20%, where the oft pilloried health care industries would be incredibly lucky to reach 10% net margin.
sure they COULD fund the next game based on the current games sales, but it wouldn't leave a lot of room for profit, and you can't expect companies to operate near margin, because what happens if 1 COD game bombs like MW2022 did, then you start losing money for an entire year, which would lead to job cuts which would lower the quality further and spiral downwards
MTXs gives a nice safety blanket if a game fails, the whales will still keep you going and it can keep the boat floating while you cook up a really good game, like black ops 6, black ops 6 would not have happened if MTXs were not here, after the bombshell that was MW2022 activision, if it wasn't for MTXs would have had to rush BO6 out the door ASAP, and even with MTXs they had to rush MW2023 out the door, but MTXs gave enough of a blanket to fund at least MW2023, without them BO6 would have launched way to early and been really undercooked
@AaronMichaelLong I think k bot are true im.not against microtransactions when they are fair and fund future development like new maps guns and stuff like that but many game just charge to much for what they sell especially when full price games sell skins that are 1/3 if not half the games price for skins that's just no
@@flamingscar5263 then dont budget SO LARGE that a single failure would destroy the company.
God it feels like everyone here is being a Negative-Nancy. I loved the questions that were presented this time around and I have a lot of appreciation for how thorough and informative the devs answers were. Their answers didn’t sound like they had a gun to their head at all. Great stuff @TDT
"so long as I keep their details anonymous" Immediately after using their work account to send an email? Ok, sure. Either this person is really, REALLY stupid, or is doing this with the full knowledge of activision. EDIT: Just watched the vid, YEP this person is an absolute activision PR plant. What a scummy move. F-CK activision.
"The game itself is pretty optimal already, and if they did reduce the texture sizes, the graphics would technically look worse and the amount of compression would make the game look like it's made in 2015."
Do... they think we give a shit about reduced graphics quality in favor of performance...? I'd rather play a game with lower graphics settings and be able to ACTUALLY PLAY THE GODDAMN GAME than have 10/10 graphics and never be able to play the game. The cost of tech/consoles is prohibitive to many players, and having an option to play with reduced settings, reduced game size, and increased performance, is critical. As the cost of tech produced in other countries increases over the next 4 years, it's going to be more difficult for American folks to purchase new tech to play newer AAA games. A lack of options for players to run a game outside of the "standard" graphics designed for PS5 and XBSS/X is crap for the consumer. It's cost prohibitive, and it's internet-cost prohibitive too.
Video games should be built for the maximum available audience, not just the maximum available console and GPU.
I think the question about game size needs to be more closed ended. Ask directly about how the game size affects the CPU, graphics card and the RAM.
And maybe a good follow up question, “Are they planning on zipping up the game files for faster remote download times?”
I might be late to the party, but regarding the first question about the game size:
A prime example is Watch Dogs: Legion. Currently, it’s listed on Steam as requiring 115GB of storage space on disk.
In the "recent" leak of the WD: Legion source code, it provided some insight into why it takes up so much storage.
The whole archive (game source and all the assets) is around 560GB packed as a 7z file.
Unzipped, it is around 1.1-1.2TB in size!
That’s not unheard of in game development for AAA studios.
To break it down: in the source code, there is a "data" directory.
It includes all the assets needed for the game.
In itself, it’s around 1TB of storage space. So we can safely assume the game code and everything unrelated to assets takes up only 200GB.
From that 1TB, there are 207GB of animations (which also include textures in .png format)...
And another 227GB of graphics, where most of the storage is taken up by .png files-4K, 2K, 1K textures all over the place, ranging from 2MB to 100MB per image file.
However, textures are difficult to compress even if they used DXT/S3TC/DDS (which they already do, as far as I know), so we end up with that amount of storage usage just for some beautiful .png images (to be fair, they are crisp and beautiful even if compressed).
What’s not surprising, though, is that the "Sound" folder takes up 523GB of storage space. But they do actually compress it down far more effectively than they can with textures. The voice languages in the original are around 87GB per language (e.g., English 87GB, German 87GB, and so on).
In my opinion, they’re not optimizing due to either time constraints, laziness, or straight-up ignorance. I wish they would just ship the textures at 1-2K by default and offer 4K textures as additional downloads.
That would already help massively. But yes, textures are large, and even DXT/S3TC/DDS at that size won’t help much compared to the sound compression they can achieve.
The game code is tiny in comparison to that.
Just to mention, I think when they spoke about tools saving 10-20 seconds I believe they were on about Dev Tools not things that would be player facing. The time saving they were on about probably referred to things like Compile improvements, fast shader rebuilds, better swarm review tools etc... Things that save time for the Devs day to day and task to task, so the 6 month investment is then worthwhile as over the course of a 4 year dev cycle the whole team (or company) can shave time off their tasks.
yes that's why his answer said "saves developers 10-20 seconds"
@@sQuaTsiFieD His answer did but TDT said for things like saving time on load screens when you have so many players and so many load screens you can see how it adds up. So I was just letting TDT know they were referring to Dev Time
I was really good in RL. It’s one of the few games where the community stands together and publicly shame Smurfs and freestyler that just ruin the experience for everyone. I had to play worse players here and there and it was no fun for anyone. We could basically just beat them up and they couldn’t defend them selves. No tension, nothing.
I don’t get why ppl like to beat up worse players as if they have to compensate for something, it’s just boring, not interesting and in the end you miss out a lot on learning potential.
My guess is that. in games with poor ranked systems the next best way to "flex" to how good you are to your friends and in social media, is with stats. So, some people will just want to dunk on worse players to pad the stats. Then they can post and be like "look at my numbers, I'm so good" for clout.
Why would they diversify when they could have better workers? Better workers means better productivity. I get they want to include everyone but it seems hard to get into the job anyways. I don't really get the point?
ChatGPT response:
Government incentives for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in hiring vary across countries and regions, but they often include financial benefits, grants, or public recognition for companies that meet DEI goals.
These were interesting questions definitely please keep doing these questions with devs I’m always interested in learning more about the dialogue between devs and gamers and what their whole process is like when creating these games
As someone who's practiced both Godot and Unity, I feel like Godot is just as good if not better due to it's accessibility and being open source. I don't really know what he means by "not recommended for advancing programming skills," as both Godot and Unity have the option to use C#, with Godot having better compatibility with more languages. This is including it's own language, GD Script, which is basically just Python with some new paint to better fit the the Godot engine. (And again, Godot is compatible with multiple languages, so if you're worried about gd script not translating well to other fields or engines, you can just use a different language that does like C# or Python.) It could be because of Godot's node system (pre-built tools such as sprite and animation handlers, screen organization tools, buttons, scroll bars, etc ) but Unity has it's fair share of similar, if not the exact same, tools too. Maybe I'm just not far enough along, but Godot is pretty powerful and quite vast in it's ability to help you learn programing.
edit: Godot's accessible by being free to not only use, but export and publish games from too. Being available for multiple platforms, (windows, linux, and Mac) including mobile and in browser support (although it's not as powerful on those platforms) and can be downloaded both on steam and their website, with an official Discord and open forum pages if you have any questions or comments)
most companies have their own engines or use custom tools, so the learning curve is there regardless
Edit: Which also, he specifically says “For advancing programing SKILLS” not “learning the way things are programmed in the industry”. Godot will help you improve your programming, just as well, if not better (depending on the person), then Unity due to the things to mentioned above. Not that I don’t like unity, it’s a good engine, just that it doesn’t matter which you start with, just start. You’re progress isn’t tied to a specific engine because they will all teach you basics and pricables. Go learn Renpi or Game Maker, it doesn’t matter. You’ll get better due to dedication, not engine choice.
That comment on texture and game size really peeves me.
The dude basically just said, "Get over it. We're not compressing anything."
Yeah, sure, that sounds like a Western game dev all right...
I liked the question about how to get into Game Development, but since this person only listed the Artist and Programmer routes, I'd like to propose an add-on:
"How does someone get into the narrative side of game development?"
I've had multiple story ideas that could work for a video game medium, but I'm currently bound to the novel-side of storytelling.
They are banning AI tools internally because you can not trademark and or copyright AI work. And it's a black box
I've dealt with retail for so long I recognize this way of speaking, this was a supervisor or project lead that reached out, and his answers were all in corporate "over explain" speech that was approved by HR. This is someone who went through the proper chains to reach out. When it comes to how a business operates as long as you aren't sharing the shady sides, corporate is usually pretty cool with explanations. Question 8 is an example of when HR would go "avoid answering this".
I'm understanding why there is a lot of doubt to the legitimacy of the interviewee and the answers, but I think regardless the info given on breaking into the game industry was valuable.
Hella awesome video. I wonder if you could ask what either devs thoughts were on the cheating industry. They have become rampant with cheats being easier to access now more than ever. Where do they see the future of gaming if its always going to be a cat and mouse game, they catch them cheating one way, and devs patch it and then they cheat another way and they patch it.
Can't say I am surprised by the answer about SBMM. As a business game devs will generally speaking always aim for the most players possible with as little sacrifice of their vision as they can. For PvP games that will simply almost always be a situation where people can engage with others at their own level. The reality is that a fun, casual game mode means two very different things for the casual, the CC, and the Pro, as well as several other groups, and it is very hard to satisfy all those different viewpoints. So the best option is to try and satisfy as many of them as you can, and that will generally be the casual player base by a large margin.
This however leads me to another train of thought, why wasn't this as big of an issue back before online games took center stage? Idk about y'all, but in couch coop situations very rarely did anyone walk away bitter and frustrated. Why is that? It's because you and your friends were all at a level of understanding to adapt to the situation. Whether you were planning to tourney with each other or just play some casual smack around. This scenario simply cannot be found online in a standard game mode, as there will almost always be someone who is sweating and someone just chilling in most lobbies. This is why custom games with friends are different, is you control the people you play with, which isn't something you can do online. It's the same reason that TDT's custom lobbies in D2 always performed so well! Everyone was on the same page about what mood the lobby was in. Even if you try this in an online unfiltered lobby, there will always be someone who tries to sneak in and reap their personal fun at your expense.
This is a big part of why things like WC3 and Halo Forge custom games were MASSIVE success stories in gaming. It's allowed players to set unbendable rules that create casual environments for the player base to sit back and enjoy, and why I personally believe any game will find huge success in such endeavors.
YES MORE TDT
nice. please do more videos like these. the dev perspectives are always interesting.
Games have looked exactly the same since 2015-2018 already. I do not see how they can say this. I think the game size is completely arbitrary.
It is, I mean the dev said compression would lead to the game looking worse. Game files are decompressed before being loaded in to memory. So they were even talking out their ass or literally incompetent.
@@Druark How about this... DONT FRAKING HAVE THEM THAT BIG! Compresion my ass just Keep them Low res. the blood splotch on the ground doesnt need to be 4K.
Activision isn't banning AI because of the art of the process. It's because there are ambiguities about IP law and the risk of competitors having access to AI tools that have had their proprietary data fed into them.
That isn´t a gamedev talking to you. Looks like someone of the higher-ups saw your video of the last dev leak and decided to "Right some Wrongs". Pretending to be another leaking dev.
Yoooo youtube says im in the top 0.1% of TDT viewers
His answers are definitely written by AI, just look at this one at 7:51
EDIT: I just got a 100% on the Skribbr Ai detection test
Saving 10-20 seconds was referring to tools, i.e. what devs use to author the game, prepare updates for various platforms, run tests etc. The dev did not mean to make any statement about how easy it is to propose changes to the level loading code or other parts of the customer facing side of the game. (The stakes are lower for internal tools.)
A.I. may also lead into grey waters when it comes to copyright. We may remember the A.I. generated images that still had shutterstock watermarks all over them.
As a game dev who worked in AAA myself, I'd like to highlight what this anonymous dev said at the end.
They quite literally acknowledged that "diversity" is prioritised over skill in an effort to increase types of people who are not even applying.
Note that they didn't say the number of people chosen / hired wasn't diverse, rather the ones APPLYING, meaning if you are not included in the types of people they want to hire, you are definitely being de-prioritised in favour of others.
Additional note, I don't think all of these answers were 100% truthful, especially involving the workplace politics element, the fact is that these workplaces require you to go through "training" and other forms of document that are politically biased and you're effectively required to agree with a specific political bias in order to keep your job.
A question I would have, if you ever do this q&a with devs is:
Where and when in the stage of creating the game do the game devs (the position it is), realize the fact that the game is gonna be a fail on the release day due to some issues (examples could be the way Cyberpunk was released and received by the community, GTA Definitive Edition the Trilogy) and what could the company do to remediate a situation like this. And what impact does it have on the company, a bad release of a videogame, made by a completely different studio in a similar genre, if this company (the dev you talk with is employed to) has taken additional precautionary steps before releasing a game, because of the mishap from other companies
Sbmm and eomm is something no one wants. The good old days of like Black Ops 2 where every lobby was a mixed bag, some games you'd stomp, some you'd get stomped others down to the wire, that unpredictable environment and experience WAS the replayability draw underneath it all. How hard is it to listen to the people literally giving them money to play the games. I'm as good as I am at games because of these varied lobby experience, I qas Timmy no thumbs when i started, I watched killcams and learned from watching how the top fraggers played and I became a top fragger. Connection should always be the top priority, and ranked should be where the sbmm experience should be, it's kinda the point. I'm sick and tired of my pubs matches unconsentially being ranked without a ranking to show for it. If I want to play ranked, I'll play ranked. The current system serves no purpose but to frustrate players, to the point that you can't play with friends of varied skill level anymore.
TL:DR - modern gen gamers are the participation medal generation, advocating for sbmm / eomm in unranked proves this. In summary git gud just like I did in 09'. My experience is stressful to my detriment actively being punished for being good. It needs to stop. If people are two boxing or resorting to VPNs to ensure a good connection or to goof off with mates and chill out (respectively) for pubs, it's clear we have a f**kin problem.
CoD doesn't even use SBMM. It uses EBMM, Engagement Based MatchMaking. It's literally designed to give you a hit of that good dopamine-rich, "I'M A GOD AND NOBODY CAN STOP ME!!!" gameplay just often enough that you will stick around and suffer through as many matches of "HE'S HACKING BRO!!! I WAS AROUND THE FUCKING CORNER!!!one!!!" as they can sucker you into enduring.
He even admits it with his answer.
I also work as a developer for an FPS and the company banned usage of 3rd party AIs.
They trained their own models that can help new devs get into new codebases easier without having to ask a senior
(because they are always gone because of the massiv amount of holidays in germany).
Other usage of AI is not allowed, mainly because of the law and that because AI is not a real person, either the company that did the code for the AI has all rights for the assets or nobody.
Training a model is easy, training a model those not give the rights to the content it produces, creating AI from scratch is not as easy, IF you want it to be as good as ChatGPT.
Even a small gray area is a big problem for a big company.
Matchmaking could be enhanced with AI but due to privacy protiection laws and data collection laws in germany and other countries, this is currently not an option, tho tests with active players that agreed where held and showed a massiv improvement not only in the rating of a players skill level but also in the players active observation of the skill levels of others in multiplayer lobbies.
Sad story is that many devs in the EU got laid of and replaced with devs from India.
Communication is SO hard with those and not only because of the time shift and the language but because they seem to have like double the work load for like 1/4 of the money.
But IDK if they actually work double as much.
All I know is, they earn less for the same hours, because this number is not a global number but a local number based on the country.
first time I tried Warzone and I downloaded 100GB of files, which is extremely large for my stupidly expensive and low quality internet in the South East Asia. even after downloading 100GB, I still have to download another 15GB to be able to play the same game mode as my friends does.
at this point, I kinda see Activision is basically telling people "uhm, fuck you, I guess? get a better PC and better internet! we don't care about reducing the size of our game"
This entire conversation with the “dev” was semantic. They never really answered a question or even if they did there seemed to be no real opinion at all. They didn’t even answer the last question and even brought up diversity bullshit when that wasn’t even the question. This whole video was a nothing burger of replies. I felt there should have been more thought put into making this video on the replies you were getting and maybe pressing them more or something because they played it so safe to the point that I could have taken a shit and that would have had more meaning than what they had to say. As much as it seems I’m just being disrespectful about it, I just think it’s good to be critical of the things being told here.
It's called LLMs and it's art, smh.
My take to this is that some of these are just common sense , but here's my top counters:
Pre: to the people saying he outed the dev, this was likely done through proper channels with information being redacted to stop the gaming community from harassing them, the community is a psychotic mess when timmy needs to go 2-16 to validate death threats
1: While it may be optimised as much as you can, there should still be the option so that it's on the player if their experience is affected.
2: This question depends entirely on you ask, it is a loaded question, so the community has a rallying call, while not knowing what is actually happening or the nuances.
3: Gaming is far more popular now than it was "In the good old days" so this increases the pool size, not only that but the younger generation want to win at all times, no matter what, gaming has long stopped being about casual fun and become more akin to sports with competitiveness, the only casual games you can control are single player games now. Every game has a loser and people will go to any length to not lose, read as, it's not about fun but winning no matter the mode.
4: I like this, the only time I would accept AI use is to get a design choice visual, everything else is better done and has better references done by humans.
5: MTXs, scourge of the gaming community, many people see this greed but there's so much behind the scenes costs such as overheads, liscences, wages, billsand game dev has no real security, those MTXs not only help fund the next game but they offer devs that security to create their best work.
6: Question could have been worded better, would have been better to ask if any bugs had sparked the idea for a feature.
7: not much to add, as a former software dev student, if you wanted to update something remove any that could affect the update.
8: this is what makes me believe this is done through proper channels, this is a minefield of a question that I would have dismissed it.
9: As previously said, former soft dev student before being diagnosed with extreme depression and PTSD that I can't work, many people see "Experience " as working in a company, for dev it's more asking how long you've coded for, your portfolio will show the quality, the time will show the commitment.
10: Another question laced in poison, while I would avoid this, here and now, I hate that the gaming community assumes they know how the process goes cause they are almost always wrong.
Edit: Clarified my point on SBMM as looking back, yeah What I thought I said and what I did say were different, for clarity, all I added was "You can control" the rest of my post remain untouched
Your take on SBMM is close minded. Singleplayer games aren’t the only games for casuals and if it is then we’ve lost sight of what games are about. The reason people have a problem with SBMM is because no one wants a dying simulator nor do they want to feel every match is for all the prize money. This SBMM now is heavily manipulative in ping and possible damage as well which makes skill disingenuous. SBMM has been forced everywhere because of data and not listening to consumers, no one asked for it everywhere yet it showed up everywhere.
@MrJerrytheSlime I'm not an advocate or a dissident to SBMM. The point I was trying to make is that it's only a part of the problem. If SBMM were to go away, in my honest opinion, the number of cases of "Sweat lobbies" might go down a bit but ultimately they will still be the majority of the experience and my comment on single player games was one to say "This the only way to guarentee an experience you want" otherwise you're rolling the dice.
just went in the industry as an artist recently
question #9s 14:23 answer is 100% true. wish me luck guys.
i don't get it, are they still running in circles about the download size on purpose, or do they genuinely not understand the question
LET. ME. NOT. DOWNLOAD. 4K TEXTURES.
"There is no such need on pc"
YES THERE IS, believe it or not but even if you can buy more storage for pc, people won't be doing that just to fit warzone on it, for crying out loud
Exactly how im feeling. There is ALWAYS room for improvement, and the improvement we would love is to not spend $100 or more on storage and to spend hours, or God forbid days, on downloading the files needed to play.
Why is it so hard to understand, "Can we opt out of 4k textures?"
There are games out there with over ten years worth of content that hasn’t gone over 50 gigs yet
@@KarltheBarl There are games with so many mods that a server can crash DLING them all at once but the Game is only 3GB with them all installed.
Biggest problem with game size anymore is tha fact that console storage sizes dont keep up. I have close to 40 games on my gears of war xbox 1 while i have 11 games with no storage left on my series x.
6:13 balatro mentioned
After both of these videos, I’m confident in saying the COD devs have no spine. They (up to this point) have done so very little for the player base of the game. They have been in lock step with ATVI executives since all of this BS started with supply drops in AW in 2014. Micro transactions, weapon variants, unfinished releases. And that’s only AW to IW, Vanguard was easily the WORST fps experience I’ve ever had.
It is utterly astounding how these companies made a winning formula basically 2 decades ago, and yet here we are, and they can’t even make that properly anymore. I await with bated breath the demise of Call of Duty, it’s time to let it rest.
about high res textures being optional: blozzard does it. when I recently reinstalled WoW, i had the option to not download the hogh res textures, and it reduced the game size by about a half
2:39 I'd actually be okay with it looking like it was made in 2015. 90 GB is just too demanding for me. Wanted to download fallout 4 recently after having uninstalled it LONG ago. Steam was asked an upfront of 95.7 GB. I would have to on, no other option, upgrade me SSD drives: all of them, to fit fallout 4 into them, as I've saved a lot of invaluable data over the years.
I'm calling bullshit on the SBMM answer, I'm not some top player, not low skill either, just your average Joe trying to play a game casually, and under SBMM I get DUNKED on ALL FUCKING DAY. I stopped playing cod because I couldn't get a single good match because of SBMM from a combination of how bad SBMM is at matchmaking, and the amount of ping I got from being sent to a server across the ocean due to SBMM being so strict. I'm in the US and set my games to the US region, yet I've been connected to servers in Scotland, Germany, China, Russia; never once was I sent to a US server.
CoD doesn't even use SBMM. It uses EBMM, Engagement Based MatchMaking. It's literally designed to give you a hit of that good dopamine-rich, "I'M A GOD AND NOBODY CAN STOP ME!!!" gameplay just often enough that you will stick around and suffer through as many matches of "HE'S HACKING BRO!!! I WAS AROUND THE FUCKING CORNER!!!one!!!" as they can sucker you into enduring.
He even admits it with his answer.
I do not believe that response to the AI question one bit because they explicitly name Generative AI in some of their job applications, and to be totally honest these BO6 maps play like they were initially designed with a layout created by ChatGPT and then cleaned up by people. Like, they just straight up LIED about the maps being "classic, 3-lane maps".
if the email is real having the time and date stamp could be enough for them to figure out who it is if they are so determined.
The real reason why they keep getting bigger and bigger is because the executives would see a number go down. Can't have that. Number needs to go up. More gbs is better!
Better question would be why their anti cheat is so bad (feels like ricochet is just logo not a real AC) that every game almost you play on cheater or just bot farming accounts that run the same path with software and aimbots everyone.
I wonder if they can split SBMM up into RBMM for Ranked modes, which is closer to the 360 era ranked MM, where you matched based on your current rank in the playlist, and then for social they use TBMM or "Time based Matchmaking" which instead matches you based on your profile level, which is exp based, goes up every match towards an eventual cap, never resets, progresses faster for higher skilled players, and in a game like COD also serves as unlock progression so you'll mainly also play people with the same loadout options as you.
That gives us the best of all worlds IMO. In Ranked players will likely have a pretty easy time until they reach a rank where the other players are more or less on your level, then matches in that playlist with start to get sweaty. Then for unranked skill is taken out of the equasion, and instead your personal experience is factored, so the more you have played the game, the more your enemies will have also played. And while playtime =/= skill level, it does help keep newer players in the same bracket while they get used to the game.
Pretty interesting video with lots of insight. It does feel like he's giving the safe corporate answers, although that could just be the professional language used. I would like to see if they think money as well as other resources are being distributed correctly between projects as well as different teams (like marketing, development, artists, management, etc.) I also thing there is some bias here, with them actively choosing to work at Activision, my guess is they don't feel to much spite towards the company or its practices as a whole. It's hard to tell when someone has it good if these are actually good practices, or if they just roll with it because it doesn't negatively effect them to much.
I could have answered all of these questions in the same way and I don't even work in the industry. And honestly, I think ChatGPT also could have answered all of these questions in the same way.
Jesus christ people, he's not a "Plant" hes a goddamn PROGRAMMER. HE TALKS LIKE THAT BECAUSE ALL ENGINEERS/TECHNICIANS TALK LIKE THAT.
@TDT i have a question of my own if you do another video like this.
Why are there no more pre-game lobbies? Also, why do we get matched with different people after a game ends, as opposed to letting us stick with the same people in a session?
Hey uhm i didnt watch the video yet, but you mentioned that this guy sent his E-Mail through his account. The activision IT team can track this. I would suggest removing that statement for this guys security.
Games in 2015 look just as good as games now some even look better lmao. That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. Why did we go from 50gb at most to 300gb games in a span of 10 years? We didn't advance in computer science that much lmao. Games used to run amazing now they all run like youre walking through a swamp.
The 2015 comment
Wither 3
Blood Borne
Metal Gear Soldid V
and just to add im putting in 2014 as well
Alien Isolation
Dragon Age Inquisition
Destiny (minus the world resources .pngs)
These games still look fantastic to this day so who cares if it looks like 2015, 2015 looked amazing
SBMM comment
wonder if anyone looked into sort of a time based matchmaking, were you're matched based on how many hours spent on average per week, stand alone this would be a horrible idea good players can warm up pretty quickly but as something that could supplement how skill is determined it should reduce the frustrations a little bit
MTX comment
dang when activision properly distributes money from mtx better than microsoft ever did you know somethings wrong with the company, I've also been saying this for a while know, even in the early 2000s the only games to recieve frequent updates were membership games like Runescape or WoW because they had a consistent stream of funds, this isn't new at all it's just been expanded to games that didn't receive constant major updates and even then thats exactly what map packs were, I'd much rather cosmetics be overpriced than actual content like maps and modes be over priced, gamers seriously forgot the $20 for 4 maps CoD was notorious with especially with advanced warfare I think that and blops 3 had the most dlc map packs and a lot of them were remakes
Jobs comment
College for coding but experience and a highlight reel of your work for art, makes sense but I want to add it's best for programmers and designers to at least dip their toes in the others job (easily can be done for free if you know what to look up online) to get a better understanding of what's required of the other, honestly this is the case for a lot of jobs that have different requirements but need to work together the amount of bullshit that ends up stalling over miscommunication or false assumptions are just obnoxious
Raycon quality sucks. Never buying that trash again in my life. Props on the sponsorship I guess
"the graphics would technically look worse and make the game look like it was made in 2015".
Yes. That's the fucking point.
Also he said that like we care about graphics, I'm still playing games from the 2010s and 00s😂
Omg the unplanned meetings comment. F'n mood. As a dev (not game dev), this has happened to me so often in the past. Especially where there are awkward breaks between meetings so that you can't just get into the zone and get shit done.
My brother, that's not a dev you are talking to. Using an official Activision account to validate them (which would be easily tracked by Activision) while wanting anonymity for fear of being fired. That makes no sense. Plus the corporate responses, nah.
Honestly yeah. I understand fully why SBMM exists. I ain't exactly a MLG level player and I don't have god like skills. I find it better when I am playing against my skill level or lower. When I get matched against people who clearly have more time playing that anything else in their week, it is frustrating and does make me wanna stop
Then you're going to have a tough time explaining how CoD felt better for everyone, at all skill-levels, a decade ago, and the passion for the game was infinitely higher.
SBMM solely has to exist in a ranked playlist, in public ones it makes no sense. You don't get better at anything by constantly rolling around in mud with fellow shitters, you get better by playing a mix of fellow shitters and better players (at different ranges) over time.
The only place SBMM is acceptable is Ranked, cause ya know, it's kinda the point 💁🏻♀️
CoD doesn't even use SBMM. It uses EBMM, Engagement Based MatchMaking. It's literally designed to give you a hit of that good dopamine-rich, "I'M A GOD AND NOBODY CAN STOP ME!!!" gameplay just often enough that you will stick around and suffer through as many matches of "HE'S HACKING BRO!!! I WAS AROUND THE FUCKING CORNER!!!one!!!" as they can sucker you into enduring.
He even admits it with his answer.
@@ThatFalloutGod because back then COD was new and the climate of gaming was very different
back then people didn't care about having a bad game, the novelty of COD was enough to keep them playing and the climate of gaming focused more on pulling off cool stuff like trickshots, then it focused on high skill play
but now? COD is 20 years old, that novelty is gone and never coming back, COD will never feel fresh, its the McDonalds of FPS games, and the climate in gaming today is A LOT more focused on things like Esports and streaming, 2 areas that promote sweaty gameplay
@ I don't disagree with anything here, it's just not the entirety of the problem with CoD in particular. A big part of the problems still lies with SBMM, and similar things in other games (like DDA with Madden and CFB).
If we had shit like SBMM removed, we'd still have the problem of everyone playing like sweaty losers, but at least we wouldn't be forced into shitty lobbies, or punished for being better than others, etc.
The time stamp on the email might be used to find out who it was.
I’d like to ask less broad questions.
Why is the direction of the zombies game mode going so far away from the original cods?
is there a second channel? I stumbled across a "TdTwo", it appears at first glance to be different, with no videos cross-uploaded between these two channels, but I thought I would just ask to make sure this isn't a content thief of some sort.
It’s our second channel yes
@@TDTProductions cool, thanks :D
SBMM is some of the most annoying stuff ever, I get punished for having honed skills from speedrunning doom for years, and most PvP games become a sweatfest after the SBMM picks up on me, it made me completely stop playing PvP, especially CoD quickly becomes more stressful then a speedrun because I get matched with ppl who leave their basement like once a quarter
I got a question. Why on console do you have to get the Call of Duty game separately from any other COD. For example, you need to purchase Call of Duty and COD MW2 2022 separately from each other. If you search MW2 2022 on the playstation store, it brings up Call of Duty and not MW2. I’m not sure if this is a marketing decision or whatever but I would just like some insight. I had another question but its a bit of a personal gripe with security and people who handle banning on COD.
Who believe this, honestly? Dev wants to remain anonym and send an email from an external address, Operations check it in no time who it was. :D
This person either works at HR or had someone at HR direct them what to write. None of these answers are satisfactory on a technical level. None. In comparison, I had previously watched a bunch of dev interviews from Retro Studios, who worked on Metroid Prime Series. These guys explained in great detail every little design decision of their game. I understand that the CoD developers cannot leak things in as much detail about a freshly released game as Retro Studios can about a 2 decades old game, but this "dev" goes into no detail at all and only gave us surface level answers that are actually worse than the answers that we've had before. At least the "SBMM Manifesto" proved with numbers and statistics that SBMM makes most people quit their game less, and also said that it doesn't try to achieve a specific sequence of wins and losses to manipulate your emotions but only tries to rank you as quickly and as accurately as possible.
Their answer on the other hand, starts off with the completely incorrect statement that people's complaints stem from the disparity of skill and not the SBMM system itself, even though everyone is clearly complaining about the game feeling too competitive because of SBMM.
This feels like someone caught wind of the last video and is trying to undo the damage it caused.
To the "dev": Please never reach out again. Tell your coworkers to not reach out again. It is painfully obvious that everyone except the first dev is going to be an Activision plant. We don't need to hear your public statements twice, even if they are masquerading as "honest private conversations".
Activision is definitely going full AI-friendly. BO6 shows. Treyarch is following up. Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer need to keep pushing human creativity over generic indignity.
Justified but since he sent you an email from an official Activision Channel if they really wanted to find this guy they could because the fact that they sent you an email
I really only play something like COD to have fun and whether my team wins or looses is a much smaller factor of my amount of enjoyment than how I felt I was doing.
If were playing domination and my team always had 1 base secured to the opponents 2 so we loose, I could have still had a good time defending our one point.
Conversely if my team won a TDM but it was because we had 1 guy carrying the team but I was just getting rocked the whole time, that still wouldn't be a good time just because my team won.
what a cop out
If any game takes more then 125GB, i WILL never download it. Its completely unnecessary!
I could see a little dodging hard answers but still a lot of great info
This one I’m really curious about especially with the rise in layoffs: Do you see AI as a threat or benefit to the game dev industry?
So why does it feel worse than a game made in 2015.....
This was a boss telling you he was a dev. BOO
If you’re so obsessed with the idea of a modular game why don’t you make the 4k textures an optional download
It sounds like he is missing a lot of context for knowing how to filter developer responses. They are not really people people and usually talk with machines and/or in a very direct way so it does not get translated wrong when going between languages with another developer team. So verbose is usually preferred over being short and sweet. Not to hide the answer but to commutate it in the way you understand the meaning of what they intend to say which when you talk to marketing is why marketing hates how developers talk. Whenever you get something very sort it is either 1 the guy doesn't work in that area 2 he doesn't have time so he wrote it up quickly or 3 he was told what to say.
So how TDT condense pages down to a few sentences for a youtube video is missing a lot of context assuming we have it already instead of explaining it to us. Yes that is a thing developers do of explaining it each and every time to make sure that who is reading it understands what they are saying. More so when out of company commutations as they will not know what the commonly used acronyms mean. For a youtube channel he most likely also had to cut out a lot of coding language stuff too.
Good stuff man!
Please interview the first guy again next time, this guy sounds like an exec sent for PR purposes 😅