Yeah, and that is why it is pointless to cling to named developers. Chances are that most key people are replaced between two consecutive projects. Also ground work on the next title starts long before the last one is out the door, so the people working on two games from the same studio might not be the same anyway.
It depends. As projects start the development teams aren't at full strength. When they wind down, people often get reassigned to other projects. Developers rarely stay at studios for too long either. There are lots of reasons for this. Namely, the transitory nature of the business. As you finish one project, there is no guarantee you will be assigned to another. Most employees are contractors and thus, they have to always be on the look out for other projects with any studio they can find or risk being out of work.
Even worse, Dallas used to be the hub of AAA game development. Few studios are left in the DFW area as everything transitioned to other parts of the country and a ton of development went to Canada. I think Id has one here and that's about all I can think of. As a result, almost no one I knew in the game industry is still in it. Not everyone was willing to move across the country to work in a grueling industry like that.
Also, a lot of game developers only work in the business a few years and get out of it. The hours are long, pay isn't great and they aren't treated particularly well. Thus, I see little to no point in even bothering to remember developers names or give a **** when they go anywhere else. Sometimes people get excited about developers leaving a studio and starting another one, but even that rarely goes well. Respawn has some solid work under their belt, but it's nothing like the Call of Duty juggernaut that those developers created while at Infinity Ward.
Many developers and teams that left one studio or another to start one often create mediocre titles or fail in a few short years. Ion Storm/Daikatana and Flagship Studios/Hellgate London are good examples of this. Either horrible failure or mediocre titles at best. Even if you have the same creative people, lightning doesn't necessarily strike twice. Even if you have the necessary creative team and they've got another great idea, you need focused leadership and project management that can get stuff done. That's not always the case. Look at Star Citizen as an example of this. Chris Roberts got a lot of credit for Wing Commander, but without someone to hold him accountable, the project has been stalled by feature creep, overspending and general mismanagement.
I could go on and on about this but the fact of the matter is that there really is no reason to get attached to developers and monitor where they go. Sometimes its mildly interesting, but that's it as far as I am concerned. I can't think of any developers who have been consistent enough in their projects and execution of those projects to get excited when they announce something new, start a studio or change jobs.
Let's take this guy for example. He's responsible for the combat for Cyberpunk 2077. That's not an ultra impressive feat in my mind. The fact is the combat is horribly unbalanced to the point of being unfinished, broken and just lazy to a degree. Gear mods and some cyberware don't work. Hell even the interface that tells you how much a mod is going to do are still broken to this day 8 months after the game's release.
I'm not excited about jack **** this guy does. While I think Cyberpunk 2077 is a great game at its core, the execution is unfinished if I'm being honest. That may not be this guy's fault, but if he was the lead, the buck should stop with him on that. His management could have short changed him on time and that's probably the case but they haven't exactly fixed things too much since release. It's mostly quest bugs that were being fixed. That tells us Pawel Sasko (I'm not checking the spelling of his last name) is on the ball while Pawel Kapala may not be. His area is largely unchanged since release.
Anyway, I hope I've made my point. Of course, people are free to be fans of whomever for whatever reason.
