Not 200 Percent Better
“We’re 30 percent better, but 200 percent more expensive.”
Can you imagine a software developer saying that about US-based developers? Well, Fantastic Pixel Castle’s Greg Street went there.
Is this the wake up call we need? The sticker shock companies feel when hiring staff to develop software.
In my opinion people aren’t paying for quality anymore. Not in their clothes, not in their food choices and not in their choice of developers. Because people are satisfied with good enough if it means getting most of the experience for half the price.
Good Enough
American studios, and US tech more generally, have long coasted on a myth. The best in the world, better tools, better processes, better people.
In 2025 your competition as a software developer isn’t some scrappy European shop, but it’s a hyper-optimized company out of Vietnamese using ASI to pump out code 100% faster at 20% of your burn rate.
They’ll hit 80% of your quality, sure. But the question is whether 80% is good enough? In video games we are seeing software shipped in a poor state and patched later, and that’s considered “good enough” by publishers who want to hit an arbitrary date. That’s so familiar to anybody who works in software development that it doesn’t matter if you have experience in the video games industry or not, that’s the way the whole industry seems to work. Shipping “mostly fine” (even if it makes it to that bar) is seen as enough to pocket the savings and run. It’s the new normal, and it sucks for customers, clients, gamers and software developers alike.
Damage to the Process
Software developers are often under deadline pressure, and that’s part of the job.
The thing is that while some deadlines are real and need to be met (Christmas for a retailer springs to mind) others are completely are arbitrary. That’s when the shadowy figures of “the business” decide that your feature needs to be released next sprint. That’s happened to me when my work needs to be complete, even though it won’t be released to customers until some time afterwards.
“We want to be ready to go at the end of this sprint”
Why, though? There’s no financial imperative, it won’t please customers. Yet still I need to work super hard to get the work in and get everything finished.
Quality is Dead, Long Live Efficiency
In my own experience (anonymized for plausible deniability, naturally), I’ve seen the same pattern play out in banks, fintechs, and unicorn wannabes. Everyone talks about quality including the classics “We want maintainable code,” “We care about the user,” “We’re building something robust” yet in reality it all means nothing.
A code review might be blocked because someone wants imports in alphabetical order. Your boss might have seen a new architecture on Twitter and decide that is the best way to create your features. Or that time DevOps decided all code now needs two approvals instead of one… to speed up delivery.
Those “quality improvements” might mean that delivery is delayed, but you need to resolve that as the developer. You are responsible for those quality wrinkles. Yet quality that matters, tech debt is left to you to solve “in your own time”. Nobody cares about the future, it’s today’s delivery that matters and you’d better get that right. So we shouldn’t be shocked when someone offshore builds something that kinda works, looks good enough, and comes in $10 million cheaper.
Let’s Talk Value
Math doesn’t lie. If you’re only 30% better, but you cost 200% more, you’re not worth it.
Yet we all think “we’ll innovate our way out of this”. Yeah, AI is going to save us all rather than destroy us all. Either that or launch a TikTok campaign that means we’ll all be more productive than ever before.
Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to stop believing that we’re all irreplaceable.
It’s Not Just Games
This isn’t just a games industry problem. It’s a tech industry problem. It’s an American industry problem.
I’ve worked on features that got canned halfway through development because someone upstairs suddenly decided “everything must be revenue-positive this quarter”. I’ve worked with developers who refuse to leave their remote jobs because they’d rather save on daycare and not commute than grow their careers. I’ve seen whole engineering teams laid off and replaced with “vendors” from a cheaper country. Because math.
When the margins shrink and the talent pool globalizes, you don’t get to be more expensive and slightly better. You either reinvent what “better” means, or you lose.
Conclusion
You know what. 200% more expensive is probably a radical understatement. 30% better depends on the measurement metric, and the problem is most people are not measuring and when they are they’re measuring the wrong thing.
Street is being polite. 200% more expensive is probably an understatement. And 30% better? Depends on what you’re measuring — or if you’re measuring anything at all.
If US studios want to win in 2025, they need to stop relying on legacy clout and start delivering value that can’t be replicated. That means more than flashy LinkedIn posts and better HR swag. It means asking: what do we offer that nobody else can?
Because right now, the only thing you’re offering is a higher invoice.
About The Author
Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper.
The Secret Developer has had their work cancelled halfway through before. Not because the idea was bad, but because someone in finance noticed the invoices.