Common misconception - Games Developers play their own games.
Reality: Beyond testing this is rarely true.
Developers rarely play their own games, even when they do they won't play them nearly as much as any of their fans. The thing is developing a game is rather like writing a novel. When you spend so much time working on it and fine tuning the details of the story and the events that occur etc the "map" of the story becomes second nature. When you spend that much time on something it becomes rather like riding a bicycle, something which you don't really forget. Going back to things you did years ago, looking at the code it may seem like it is written in another language but the moment you start playing the game the storyline comes back to you. No matter how much depth you add, the reality is that once you know the inner workings and how it ends there's little enjoyment to be found.
The fun and the challenge for a developer is perpetuated by the development process. For a Game developer playing the product is not the game, coding the product is the real game, the source of all challenges and obstacles to be overcome. Looking back at code and adapting it, adding in new features and changing the world of a game, that is where the fun is to be had as a developer when it comes to old games. Consumers for a long time never got to experience this but more and more there are titles that open up development albeit in and incredibly simplified manner through editors and tools like the steam workshop etc - these store the potential to turn a gamer into a developer and in my view they should be encouraged.
Now there will be those that will argue, citing the "Myspace effect" where essentially people who really shouldn't venture into these fields will do so, resulting in some sub standard games being produced, akin to the wannabe web designers aplenty that pimped out their profiles when Myspace decided to allow full HTML. To them I argue that this is a necessary evil. If youtube was a closed platform we would not have half of the quality content that it contains today. Youtube does have a lot of crap on it and finding the gold can be a challenge in itself, if you will youtube is the modern day equivalent of prospecting, you set out to find something worthwhile in a myriad of garbage.
The problem here is not the fact that people can try, the problem is the way we rank their efforts and if you can find a solution to that problem then you will be worth a fortune, you will be the next Google, which in many ways achieved this with their search engine for finding websites, but even Google can't tell you what is interesting and what is crap. Google relies on many things but it has not achieved the ability to judge quality. Google+ and a number of other services run by Google have been aimed at finding ways to achieve this but they rely on people and their collective judgement and the sad reality is that we can be victims of our judgement. Popularity often ends up succumbing to a positive feedback loop and many websites over the years have become popular simply for being popular. Facebook is a prime example, it was once a useful service, but today the validity of its popularity is questionable.
I don't say this as a desire to appear in any way a hipster I simply state the truth that a lot of people have realised: when you step back and look at the services we use, are they really the best of what is on offer or are we using them simply because they are what is popular? A social network by its nature has to be popular to be successful if it's not popular you can't really use it, which makes it incredibly hard, almost impossible to choose an alternative.
