My thoughts about this. Not sure if that’s just confirmation bias, as I’ve always been a generalist, but I found, in a professional environment, it’s difficult to survive and find a place. The flexibility was removed by optimization and workload division. Not sure who’s to blame, as a lot of this is happening naturally. Most big companies become soulless, simply because of shire the size of them. Too many processes going on to have a single human brain able to fully understand. You’ll need to split up work to not lose the overview.

One thing I’ve noticed is, that companies have a hard time figuring out how to attract generalists, as there is only that one vacancy and it’s open to fit the role of a specialist. Generalists are hard to gasp for the HR, as all they rely on is working by protocol and checking how many certificates one aquired. For instance, I’ve done and learned so many things by doing, but hardly a boring course certificate to prove it.

Generalists show how good games really can be if they work in small indie teams. I’m a personal fan of companies like Coffee Stain Studio or Paradox, as they feel more grounded and healthy. I don’t think that’s rosa glasses, as the way they interact with their communities, has shown there’s a fire of dedication behind them. You have more people work on similar things because of the lack of manpower.

Now is it the way to maximize profit and creative games at the same time? Probably not, else they’d create 100 indie studios for the price of one AAA studio, right? On the other hand, on average, 9 of 10 games I buy nowadays are from some indie company.

This also leads to another current issue: games becoming too big for AAA producers, but that’s another can of worms.