"In the non-game development world, almost all of the best tools for development are free and open source."
I think part of the equation is that in that space most of the hard problems have been solved for the past 50 years - so while computing at whole is young, some common expectations have started to crystallize and this is apparent in the expected quality of open source tools.
However, in general IMO the software engineering -quality of an open source offering is inverse proportional to it's innovation and novelty. The more niche the domain, the likelier it is the open source there is sub-par per expectations - and not to fault the open source enthusiasts there! It just seems high quality open source either needs some diamond-level craftmanship from few contributors, OR a massive, massive userbase with professional interest aligned with the project.
In open source, another way to view this, is that in popular domains there are hundreds of competing teams creating similarish solutions to similarish well understood problem-solution domains, and then word-of-mouth quickly drives community to contribute those perceived as "highest standard".
From another point of view.
You still need fairly esoteric skillset to contribute to game tech. There are lots of things that simply are not taught that well together, and everyone needs to do lots of hard work to enmesh these concepts in their head to a whole. The work is not magical or rocket-science-hard, just something esoteric that manages to combine stuff from super hard or poorly defined domains like numerical computing and art into what is basically a frivolity. The implied hard work means you need same competence basically to contribute to game tech meaningfully where you could be curing cancer, doing actual rocket science or something of actual impact. As a field, games have an abysmal reputation of abusing talent and naivety. Anyone in their right mind absolutely not driven to develop games will choose any other field. Hence it's no wonder game tech is kind of ... random often.
I think part of the equation is that in that space most of the hard problems have been solved for the past 50 years - so while computing at whole is young, some common expectations have started to crystallize and this is apparent in the expected quality of open source tools.
However, in general IMO the software engineering -quality of an open source offering is inverse proportional to it's innovation and novelty. The more niche the domain, the likelier it is the open source there is sub-par per expectations - and not to fault the open source enthusiasts there! It just seems high quality open source either needs some diamond-level craftmanship from few contributors, OR a massive, massive userbase with professional interest aligned with the project.
In open source, another way to view this, is that in popular domains there are hundreds of competing teams creating similarish solutions to similarish well understood problem-solution domains, and then word-of-mouth quickly drives community to contribute those perceived as "highest standard".
From another point of view.
You still need fairly esoteric skillset to contribute to game tech. There are lots of things that simply are not taught that well together, and everyone needs to do lots of hard work to enmesh these concepts in their head to a whole. The work is not magical or rocket-science-hard, just something esoteric that manages to combine stuff from super hard or poorly defined domains like numerical computing and art into what is basically a frivolity. The implied hard work means you need same competence basically to contribute to game tech meaningfully where you could be curing cancer, doing actual rocket science or something of actual impact. As a field, games have an abysmal reputation of abusing talent and naivety. Anyone in their right mind absolutely not driven to develop games will choose any other field. Hence it's no wonder game tech is kind of ... random often.