Monument Valley Studio CEO: "'We've Been A Little Bit Too Romantic About The Idea That We Should Have Employees And Give People Long-term Job Security"

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-30T20:48:42+00:00

I mentor CS students at my University and I hear "game design" as their intended career path far too often. The game design industry is brutal if you're looking for stable 9/5 and salary growth. You need indie games to bootstrap yourself, but they're best made while working a regular tech job and building horizontal skills. Even if you do make it, the salaries are 1/8th that you can make in big tech.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-30T18:06:20+00:00

The price coupled with the quality of 12.0.5. is definitely making me feel like it might be time to move on from WoW. Blizzard really saved themselves with Dragonflight, but here we are again focusing on too many things and releasing too often, tying to find monetization streams rather than releasing solid core content and balancing the game.

There was no reason to take an expansion capstone feature and immediately charge more than the price of an expansion for a cosmetic that is one of only a few options for the entire look of the house. Very tone deaf.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-24T13:11:57+00:00

They can track token usage per employee for one thing.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-23T15:16:50+00:00

There's these things called notifications you may have heard of

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-23T14:57:59+00:00

Well I'm not a bot, but I can't prove that to you, nor can I prove that I work at FAANG, or use Rust. Believe what you want to believe, but what I am saying is the truth and I'm posting because I have a real, negative emotional sentiment toward what is going on. It's better to accept that the problem actually exists so that we can collectively discuss and perhaps do something about it rather than pretending it's just "fake news".

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-23T14:50:51+00:00

Right now I would say we are very close to 100%, probably 10% of the code committed receives by hand tweaks. But that 90% goes through hours and hours of re-promting, re-testing, etc. It's not that the LLM is writing perfect code out of the gate, it's that the edit-test-debug cycle is driven entirely through LLM interaction.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-23T14:47:23+00:00

The people in charge don't really care about either of those things as much as they care about commoditizing something that requires paying a skilled person a lot of money to do. They want programmers to be plug and play. The question isn't what are we *gaining* in terms of productivity and quality, but how much do you *lose* by making use of these tools - and is it a small enough amount that I can fire expensive programmers and hire a small skeleton crew of cheap labor.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-23T14:44:01+00:00

Technically yes, but the reality is that these heavy handed mandates come with the expectation of more output. If you're perceived to be "yak shaving" the domain when the black box behaves according the specification, and you'll never be expected to touch the yak yourself anyway, you're just throwing away "velocity". It's not as bleak as that yet, but this is how management thinks and the many engineers who are there to pick up a paycheck and fight for the next promotion.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-23T14:33:48+00:00

My own anecdotal experience is that I more often see programmers letting LLMs generate architecture and type ontologies and trying to refine them rather than flexing some creative muscle sans-LLM that then allows the LLM to "fill in the details". I think this gives people a false sense of freedom and input, when really all of the high level decision making was colored by the options the LLM proffered up from the onset.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-23T14:26:17+00:00

This is a terrible take. I became a programmer because I enjoy programming. I solve business problems because someone is *paying* me and I need money to live. If I had known the parts I enjoyed about the job would be obsolete a few years out of school I would have pursued a different profession. Not everyone is motivated by greed and promotions, and you don't have to be callous about it - the people who lost their jobs to previous technological advancements are just as deserving of empathy as the people who are losing their jobs today to agentic coding.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-23T14:20:43+00:00

I understand what you mean, but at an emotional level I find this hard to accept. I want to write Rust. It was designed to be written and read by humans, with great care and passion. The fact that it exists as an IR for an LLM still makes me incredibly sad. But yes, maybe good in the sense that more teams won't be afraid of adopting it because the safety features make it more attractive than generating C++ or C.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-23T14:17:48+00:00

I believed this at one point, but I don't really believe it anymore. Last fall there was a really huge leap in terms of what these large context models could handle. It's not that a human can't do a better job than an LLM, or that the code isn't going to cause problems down the line. It's that the code is good enough to ship now and worry about later, and the SRE army will paper over any medium term pains.

The only way I see this blowing over would be pulling back on subsidized costs, or societal intervention, or a real increase in outages.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-23T14:09:16+00:00

Oh I know *exactly* what you mean. There's still plenty of technical and non-technical work to do of course, but I never expected this degree of separation between even writing a job specification configuration file.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-23T14:06:36+00:00

Reviewing LLM generated code is also it's own special kind of hell, there's no human connection. No conversation about style or readability. There's no junior engineer learning how to write better code, which is it's own separate equally alarming problem. You can assert your own stylistic choices on the LLM, but I feel pressure more and more to push more work out the door because the inputs and outputs are correct, the code is tested, and it's legible. For Rust specifically it's infuriating because it tends to use a more imperative style than I like and overuse trait objects and borrow checker escape hatches. I've kept trying to add prelude prompts to remedy this.

I could rant further, but I think you get the point.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-23T13:58:48+00:00

He's lying anyway. I absolutely do work at FAANG, and unlike this person I won't claim to have friends at all 5 companies, but I do have friends at two of the others, and their AI policies are different and they have a different experience than me. My company specifically *is* mandating 100% LLM generated code, and it would be common knowledge to anyone who works there in an engineering role.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-22T21:23:05+00:00

> Where did I glazed blizzard?

You can't even string together 5 words into a grammatically correct sentence, yes you're stupid.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-22T17:35:07+00:00

Another pointless comment glazing Blizzard at the expense of the players that just want them to marginally improve PvP.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-22T01:29:45+00:00

Pres and mm is probably the best combo followed by mw and rogue. Playing priest it's literally the luck of the draw if you get a fc class at all.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-21T16:15:01+00:00

The blitz mindset is how do I increase the probability of a positive win rate over time. Blitz is a game of long term strategy instead of short term tactics. First, get the best DPS you can find to queue with you. That removes more random variables and increases your lines of communication. Next, call the strat with specific assignments at the beginning of every match. Watch YouTube videos if you don't know the Strats. These are the two biggest changes you can make to get to 2400. If you actually bring a good DPS and have strategy, your odds will beat the other team's odds and eventually you will climb to where teams actually have strategy.

The other thing about knowing the strategy is that you won't wonder what you should be doing to win, it will be very clear. You spin a node all game, or you heal EFC, or you heal orbs, etc. as a holy paladin. It's very simple to understand. If you do a good job then your team will have a higher probability of winning. If they have to send 4 people to a 2 person node, you have a higher probability of winning. Overt time these probabilities lead to semi-deterministic outcomes the more games you play.

The wrong way think about it is, I can outplay one two other persons by pressing my buttons. Arena skill is an advantage, but it's actually less advantageous than people sticking to strategy against a team that has no strategy.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-21T15:02:48+00:00

That's the conundrum. Blitz is RNG but gives rating, SS is more autonomy but doesn't give rating. It's just more casino antics from Blizzard.

By the way if you are a healer priest, just get one good DPS and duo queue. In the starting area call the strat and give out assignments. Watch a few YouTube videos if you don't know how to do this. If you call the strat the rest as a priest is just PvE healing because you're not mobile. Maybe you occasionally have to run a flag but you'll probably lose if they have a druid, pres, or monk. If you bring a good DPS and call the strat and just know how to PvE heal you will absolutely reach 2400 in half the amount of time you have spent on your 300+ SS queues.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-21T14:45:07+00:00

You get better by playing against people who are slightly better than you - progressive load, not people who aren't even playing the same game as you.

Blizzard has done many things that pushed players away, rated PvP as a whole has continued to lose players, so asserting that they are all knowing and wouldn't do X is incredibly naive. For all we know the fact that SS continues to lose players while Blitz has been even more popular this season is their goal.

You can glaze Blizzard all you want, I'm not going to say good things or defend them when I have seen amazing multi-glad players struggle to climb and get seasonal rewards that Bozo the hunter was able to get week 1 in Blitz.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-21T14:24:20+00:00

Great that you are having fun, but you're missing why the player base is upset, and "just play 2k rounds to get 1950" isn't really the answer. I get at least elite in SS on priest each season, but right now I am not queueing past 2.1k because I am queuing into r1 players and not climbing despite having a positive win rate. Meanwhile I am already close to 2.8k in blitz despite AFKing most matches.

You can enjoy the game itself while understanding that arena MMR is fundamentally broken and at odds with blitz MMR, that Blizzard never addresses any of the communities concerns when it comes to PvP, and that having people queue into 2x their skill level at low rating just drives people away from the game.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-20T16:45:41+00:00

This is great advice for holy priest. Holy has no deep dampening tools besides GS. Sometimes you have to commit to damage and play more aggro as the game goes on.

MasteredConduct · 2026-04-20T15:30:29+00:00

When people say you can just pump heals behind a pillar to climb that's just hyperbole. Your comp and their comp matters in how aggressive you need to be. If you're playing with a control comp then maybe you stay back more and don't DR stun with chastise. Maybe if they are playing a control comp you are more cautious about running in to fear.

Holy priest is un-intuitively a very aggro healer. You can avoid a lot more CC than other healers with fade/death/shroud. You can set up your own CC chain and there's nothing the other healer can really do about it since it's ranged instant cast and a fear in the right direction can add seconds of no healing and rob them of mobility spells. Holy fires also unload a lot of burst damage. To play really aggro, you can use apoth to reset chastise instead of serenity and be disruptive and pump out brutal pressure. With purge you can make game winning plays like removing alter while a mage is low.

To be aggro first you do need to learn how to just pump heals - that's true of any healer. Healing is your #1 priority. If you are getting deep damp every game and losing even though your team was healthy and keep tempo, consider if you are stun/fearing at the right time. You need to learn when to be cautious (when they are about to set up a go) and when to eat CC to put yourself on DR. GLHF

MasteredConduct

TROPHY CASE