Comment by ajmurmann
4 years ago
(disclaimer: I'm not in game development and only read about this)
Usually different staff rolls on and off at different times of product development and post-release lifecycle. I understand that most programmers would have been rolled off a while before launch. You early on have people build or adjust the engine and tooling, but later on you don't need most of them anymore and things come down to creating content.
That's true for all software development. In seven years most of your team is replaced.
In other areas of software development are perpetual. You don't hit some milestone at which 90% of developers are moved to a different project or laid off and folks with a different skill set are added.
Usually in software development you have different people over time, because of individual churn, not because you are changing the role mix