Fungible Employees – YouTube
Cain illustrates the point with practical examples about project files and simple asset management. He recalls being contacted by teams after he left, asking how certain systems had worked — then describes a scenario he hopes is only hypothetical: work left untouched and stored on someone’s device for years, slowly degrading because assets weren’t regularly migrated or maintained.
He also warns about another common problem: teams finding old assets but lacking the context to use them. “Sometimes they have the assets, but they don’t know anything about them,” he explains. “Even when the data is intact, people don’t know how to restore or integrate it. That makes the situation worse. There are billion-dollar companies that should understand this, but the experts who held that knowledge are gone.”
Cain closes with a straightforward observation: the essential expertise behind a game’s feel and execution lives in the people making it. It’s not contained in a design doc or a handful of pillars, nor is it captured by corporate values — it’s embedded in the developers themselves. Replace those people, and you change the character of the work.
Tim Cain once described a decade where he did nothing but make games, to the point he once joked to a colleague that Britney Spears might be treated as a “new weapon” in their RPG.
Source: gamesradar.com
