Did Gamers forget there is a pandemic going on?

[Baconeggcheese]

I completely missed this outrage, what are people mad about?

I think my biggest complaint about blizzcon was that they for no apparent reason decided to have 1 Q&A per franchise despite them having 2-3 games to talk about. I have no idea why they thought it a good idea to lump TBC and shadowlands Q&A together or D4, D2R, and immortal together. I don't really understand how when they had all the time in the world to pre-record this stuff they put out less information about these games than when they rent out a convention center and have those little sit downs where they're scrambling to fit everything in.

[pacotaco]

I don't know how you are organized but we have meetings all the time, just not in person but remote. We have chillout rooms where people can just hang out and talk and all kind of remote social events.
I see no reason not to get fresh inputs aside from actually touching the other person.

It could be done, but it's harder. Physically, you just take a break, go to the toilet, go to the coffemachine and join some conversation or start one with a coworker.
On remote we have Slack, we do a scrum every morning and we have meetings when something urgen needs to be discused, but if we have a problem we have to write or call someone, etc.
It's not the same, it's not just the physical contact. The way we socialice is not the same.

So while you gain some preformance from not getting distractions, you also lose it because, as humans, we also need that from time to time. In the end the performance would be more or less the same as before

[Easo]

Funny you should ask, since I am one. Your internet connection isn't relevant to anything other than uploading images and forwarding sheets to clients/employer. No graphical design software is unusable without internet that I know of, and custom design engines (such a 3d software for lighting/modeling/texture baking) can be given home copies and probably already require a security key to use, which many professionals keep on a USB drive that is on their person. The tablets are almost always provided by the company (if it's a large one like Blizzard, Riot, etc. who have deals with Wacom), but I don't think a single graphical professional on the planet doesn't have their own tablet at home. If there's any issues with working from home, the art team sees the least of them. i'd be more curious about the systems designers and network engineers working from home.

I specifically asked this because of internet. It is very relevant, maybe you live in somewhere with 5mbit upload, good luck doing anything with that, unless you love sitting and waiting.

[francisbaud]

[...] Did gamers (to be clear not all) realize that the pandemic really fucked things up and delayed a lot of stuff. Yes lots was able to start working at home but that in itself still makes developing content take much longer.

I would be interested in seeing statistics/studies about the drop of productivity caused by the transition to work-from-home in video game studios.

I'm pretty sure it's significant but without concrete numbers I can only guess.

Maybe a large proportion of developers are really disciplined and it didn't impact that much at all...

[Struggle]

Serious question, Did Gamers (not all just the loud minority) forget there is a pandemic going on?

All I have been seeing lately is people mad about the Nintendo Direct, Blizzcon ect.... Did gamers (to be clear not all) realize that the pandemic really fucked things up and delayed a lot of stuff. Yes lots was able to start working at home but that in itself still makes developing content take much longer.

I honestly expected releases to be much lighter than it already is, so I'm impressed we are getting the games we are getting.

Maybe those people should sit back and clear some of their backlog or find something else to play for a bit.

How could I forget? Blizzcon spent about an hour of air-time reminding me.