While it's true that many game developers are tech savvy, there's more to IT than just keeping a workstation running. IT at game companies does the same thing that IT does at any tech company - they set up, maintain, and make decisions about tech solutions for an organization. That might mean choosing whether to use Discord or Slack, Jira or Trello, Zoom or Teams, and integrating all of the various elements into each other, like being able to launch Zoom from Slack, or integrating Slack bots to pull data from Jira to post it in the chat channel. They are also key in operational security by setting up software solutions for protecting against (and taking care of) viruses and malware.

Basically, having some experts to give direction helps free up the rest of us from having to think about IT and able to focus on our own work. We might be able to do some of this, but it's better to have it set up for us consistently across the studio than leaving us to each try our hand at countless inconsistent versions of the same workflow, especially since screwing it up could sacrifice a lot of productivity while the IT issues get ironed out.

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I don't think there's a term called "memory loss", but you're probably thinking of a "memory leak". A memory leak is when a program grabs more memory for use while looping than it releases. This results in the machine using more and more memory over time, thus having less and less available memory to use. This causes slowdown and eventually crashing once all of the available memory has been used. When you reboot, all of that claimed memory gets released and becomes available for use again. That's why your games run faster after rebooting, the games have access to more memory after the reboot.

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I suspect you're asking from a technical perspective, since the "business" answer is that the easiest game to translate is the one that stands to make a good profit, and the hardest game to adapt is the one that won't sell. The number of active objects don't really matter all that much, we've got tech like the Dynasty Warriors games where we can have hundreds and thousands of moving dudes at once. Difficulty to adapt is also dependent on how much abstraction we're doing - today's Madden NFL 24 is an entirely different beast than 1988's John Madden Football was, even though both games are ostensibly translations of the same sport. Back in 1988, the biggest roadblock for the game was Madden himself insisting each football team needed to have 11 players on it and the hardware couldn't support that many.

From a technical perspective, I think the hardest sports to adapt have core features that are (currently) extremely expensive. Features such as:

• Physical deformation - physical bodies contorting and deforming accurately when hitting each other
• Signature movements and likenesses from well-known and familiar real life players
• Real time environmental changes - rain causes players to get wet and changing their characteristics and animations, but also certain patches of the ground turn to mud, resulting in players getting muddy and difficulty traversing those areas

Thus, I think Rugby is probably the most technically difficult sport to chase after. American Football and Football/Soccer are probably close contenders as well.

Easy games to adapt tend to be the ones that need the fewest resources. Most games that are easy to adapt show up in compilation games like the Olympic type games. A 100m run or swim, for example, could take advantage of reusing a lot of resources (environments, animations, etc.) and don't have a high bar. Weight lifting games would be similarly low-effort for feasibility.

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