There’s absolutely no need to call QAs, product owners, HR, finance personnel, or janitors “devs” because they work in or for a gaming company. They have roles and it’s completely fine for them not to be devs.

Make random comparisons from other industries all you want

I thought it would help with understanding and provide perspective, but it seems like the shutters are down and bolted. Understanding cannot penetrate the fortress of “everybody in a gaming company is a developer”.

This ancient attitude is the same upper management position where cutting swathes of knowledgable established QA will bring short term profits only to later hire even more fresh QAs, often contractors or outsourced.

What does this have anything to do with definition of developers? Diddly squat. Upper management will fire anybody with little to no understanding of their function because they consider everybody below them to be a number on a sheet; a replaceable cog in the machine.

You think QA has never seen a line of code?

What are you on about? Seeing a line of code doesn’t make you a developer. Reading memes about coding doesn’t make you a developer, shocker.

What’s the imaginary line to being part of game dev to you?

Being part of the game development process does not make you a developer. How many times do I have to repeat this? If you write the game, you’re a developer, otherwise you have another role on the team that is not game development. It’s that easy.

You design a character? Not a developer. You test the game? Not a developer? You develop the story and draw the art? Not a developer. None of that is writing the game’s code.

You can be both a developer and an artist, for sure, if you write the game’s code.