I worked in the games industry for 12 years and I know a lot of designers that fit this criteria. They had no programming or art skills so they became testers, after that it seems the career path for a tester is either QA lead, or designer.

Probably 75% of the designers I know had a background in QA. Some of them were good designers, most were not. The ones who did have an art or tech background tended to be more grounded in their designs because they had a better idea of what is really achievable with the current tech.

It's sort of true. If you get your foot in the door (almost always test), and you don't have the relevant skills for tech or art, you're pretty much left with design and production as career paths. This leaves both those disciplines with a number of career-minded individuals who don't really have much passion for game design or product management, respectively.

Honestly, though, I don't think it's that bad. Design is kind of hard to get in, so most testers that aren't passionate about it end in production, and most designers spend their time implementing content. endianswap's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5408304 mirrors my own experience in the industry.

I don't believe its true, I believe it should have ended with, "you become a player, enjoy the game". People that believe otherwise are just deluding themselves. I believe that good designers can be good programmers and/or good artists. They may not be the best in those categories but to design what they want they have to know how it can be accomplished.

The number of water cooler game designers is immeasurable.

I would agree on his assessment of Chris Roberts though, of himself I do think he was truly innovative when the media was young but I am not so sure now.

It is true.

That's because the management have tricked people into getting the game design jobs - the easiest (in terms of stress and problem solving) job there is with most often the highest pay check.

Lotta' ass kissin'.

That depends a lot on the company. I've seen game-designers which took it easy, but I've also worked with good ones which took their job extremely serious.

The good ones are able to catch problems before stuff is coded or modeled. A good designer manages to describe every object needed (including rough sketches what they should look like and describing needed animations), every mission condition (which is very close to coding and needs good understanding what is technically possible). A good designer can describe the GUI pretty much ahead in a way that coders don't have to rework it over and over until it fits (including describing stuff like left-click/right-click/drag&drop/selection box behavior which can get very tricky pretty fast in games). A really good designer might even know excel good enough to calculate all kind of stuff through before even approaching any coders.

A bad designer thinks it's all just about some great idea and throwing in lots of stuff and the team will do the rest. A good designer knows it's 90% about describing details and about removing as much stuff as possible.

It's 70% Software and Graphics. Don't kid yourself.

EDIT: decreased from 90 to 70 - need some space for voice acting, sounds and music.

Yes, around 10%-20% time for design looks correct to me - which is why you have maybe 1-2 designers in a team of 10 people. But the designer still has to work 100% to get stuff done and it can get very stressful as well. And his work is important - because design-errors are early errors which means they are the most expensive ones you can have.

But it's really as in all jobs - the difference between good and bad designers is so absolutely unbelievable huge that if you worked with some bad ones and then meet good ones you hardly believe they are doing even similar jobs.