A good number of that is 3D artists. Try making a highly detailed 3D model in Blender. Now imagine a game like GTA V has thousands of those, but even more detailed. This is one of the major reasons why AAA are taking longer and longer to produce. At the same time, game systems and mechanics are simplified to cut costs.
I’ve worked in the video game industry for a couple years and have been credited in several games. This number may actually be higher.
It may sound crazy, but there’s a lot of people working on AAA games, usually most of them completely unrelated to game dev. Marketing, public relations, translators, 3D graphics artists, sound designers, orchestra performers, motion capture stuntmen, voice actors. Probably a few dozen managers, who have never even seen the game. Hell, some companies even credit IT staff in the game’s credits.
That’s already a whole bunch of teams. It’s also important to mention that many third-party contractors will often be skipped from the credits. QA is very commonly outsourced (to poorer countries like Romania or Serbia) and rarely gets into the credits. You may only see 5-10 names, while in reality it was at least 100. This is true for several other fields, though mostly non-game-related, e.g., localization, promotial material, merchandise.
I won’t disclose in what capacity, but in the past I have worked on several of Blizzard’s titles for a few months and I’m not credited anywhere. Just like at least a couple hundred other people. Not necessarily saying I should be - it was never mentioned or promised. Just highlighting that the real number of staff that worked on the game (or adjacent to the game) may be above 10k.
(…) it was all avoidable.
It really wasn’t. Everything in American politics for long years has been leading to this point. It was always bound to happen, sooner or later. Sure, by choosing another president you could have potentially delayed it by a few years. But later it would have happened anyway. This is not a ‘Trump issue’. This is a ‘USA issue’.
I think Americans are the only ones who haven’t seen this coming. And I don’t mean that in a hostile way. Your education system has been sabotaged for decades, so it’s no wonder the people are uninformed and ignorant to what’s going on. The only ones to blame are the psychopathic politicians and billionaires who deliberately made this happen over the last 200 years.
There have been at least 2 more CEO killings recently. But mainstream media is deliberately not reporting on it, because it’d likely lead to even more. Don’t forget everything is owned and managed by the same groups of people.