I've worked in games for close to 15 years, and every studio I've worked on we've played the game very regularly. My current team every person plays the game at least once a week, and more often as we get closer to builds.

In my last project, the gameplay team played every single day.

> Games would be much better if all people making them were forced to spend a few days each month playing the game on middle-of-the-road hardware

How would playing on middle of the road hardware have caught this? The fix to this was to benchmark the load time on the absolute bottom end of hardware, with and without the duplicated logic. Which you'd only do once you have a suspicion that it's going to be faster if you change it...

People literally play the games they work on all the time, it's more or less what most do.

Pay 2000$ for indie games so studios could grow up without being beholden to shareholders and we could perhaps get that "perfect" QA,etc.

It's a fucking market economy and people aren't making pong level games that can be simply tuned, you really get what you pay for.

They could have been lying I guess but I listened to a great podcast about the development of Helldivers 2 (I think it was gamemakers notebook) and one thing that was constantly brought up was as they iterated they forced a huge chunk of the team to sit down and play it. That’s how things like diving from a little bit too high ended up with you faceplanting and rag-dolling, tripping when jet packing over a boulder that you get a little too close to, etc. They found that making it comically realistic in some areas led to more unexpected/emergent gameplay that was way more entertaining. Turrets and such not caring if you’re in the line of fire was brought up I believe.

That’s how we wound up with this game where your friends are as much of a liability as your enemies.