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You are a Developer (Creator) if you; Play some indie devs games and give feedback (Game build, producers essentially when you give ideas and feedback) = (Quality Assurance and playtesters unpaid, volunteer). If you are a Voice Actor, you're developing a part of the games sound (Audio and such), 

Your word definition is wrong. What you are talking about is contributing. Not developing. Yes some measly feedback of aplayer can contribute to a game. But that  is not developing the game. 

A voiceactor is not "developing part of the games sound". They are voicing what they are told to voice.

There is literally no difference between those that develop games through coding and programming, long, undocumented and unconfirmed hours by choice, for free.
 And those that develop the final product, unpaid, through interaction and giving the product attention, advertsing, and  by choice, for free.

Rephrased:  There is literally no difference between developers and  interaction contributors  such as players of   the game.

Ahm. No. That is wrong. There are lots of differences. this is one of them fallacies. equating stuff, just because they share one aspect. Devs contribute to a game, reviewers contribute to a game, hence they are same. and literally, on top of course. That is  a formally wrong argument.

And it is still wrong, if you exchange developer for creator as you did with the ().   reviewing something is not creating it. To put it bluntly, if i  were present at your conception and cheered your parents on, i am not equal to your father or mother ;-) what they did for your creation is fundamentally different from my contribution. or the person that rented them the appartment or the sales guy selling them the bed or even the people introducing them  to each other. while they all played a minor or even major   part in that conception, they did not (pro)create.

That said, you could make an argument that many indie games need interaction with fans in development and are acting like they do not need input. But the thing is, player input is to be taken with sceptisicm.   Many players do not bother with feedback. So you never know, if what the loudest players tell you, is actually good for your game or jsut what those loudest players rant about. Just look at your rant. you obviously got emotional about something. but do you represent the playerbase of all games you played? I dare say, not. not for all of them. for some or many you might be a fringe target group. listening to your input might make those  games worse.

Actually I often hear the word developer be applied to voice actors and other artists. Still applies less, if at all, to reviewers.

Never encountered this.  Is there a context were it really is used as such? (or is this a translation issue?)

The roots of developer is literal code writing. Hence only Software Developer, Web Developer, Videogame Developer  are called developer. That is not a descriptive usage, like creator would be. If you create other stuff, you use other words. Like movie producer, painter, singer or even voice actors. Even if a voice actor develops a nice voice for a character, I would not call the person developer in the descriptive meaning. If I need a noun, I already have "voice actor".

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It’s not wrong if you use the word developer to mean someone who gets something “developed”, and that etymology goes way further back than computers. The people who write code are then both programmers and developers.

According to etymonline.com, “the modern uses are figurative and emerged in English 18c. and after: Transitive meaning “unfold more fully, bring out the potential in” is by 1750;”

In the context of video games, developer has a specific meaning. Even if you do something that can be considered literally development of some kind, in the context of video games you are not a developer. You develop an opinion about a game and tell it?  That is called reviewer. You develop a funny voice for a game character? That is called voice acting. You develop a marketing strategy to sell the game?  That is marketing and advertising and such. But not developer.

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Deny if you want, but the term is used that way.

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I asked you where and you cited a  descriptive meaning from a dictionary.An entry that does not even deal with the usage of the word after 1960. The modern usage is maybe 30 years old.

I ask again: where? "is used". By    whom?  What context?

Would you call a Software Engineer an Engineer? I would not.  Context matters. If you call a Game Developer an Engineer, it is as wrong as the    usage of Developer for Voice Actors. The usage of developer emerged for  people that create software  in the broadest sense, like web, games, and of course, apps, as programms are called nowadays.

If you can cite a meaningful usage, be sure to update wikipedia disambiguation page for developer , so more people can know about the usage of that word. Because they only know software, land and photo for developer (and that is the chemical and not the person).

The term "Game Developer" is quite abstract and have different meanings for referring to a single person or a team.

If the context is a team or a studio, then yes, everybody working in a Game development studio can be considered a game developer.

If the context is within that studio, then when we say developer we refer to an engineer, and yes, in a professional game company it's very common to refer programmers as engineers or developers, so this  is  wrong: "Would you call a Software Engineer an Engineer? I would not" in that context. We do that quite often in the company.

You can call the studio itself a developer, that is correct. But parts of the whole are not automatically named the same as the whole. 

I want to give you an analogy. A car manufacturer. The company is a car manufacturer. The janitor working there is not. The people assembling cars there are on a trivial hair splitting level "car manufaturers", but they would go by their job description.

Or would you call the janitor in a big game studio a game developer? Where do you draw the line? You said, everybody working there... ;-)

And calling a software engineer only by the term engineer sounds wrong, because engineer alone refers to other activities. This is like air taxi and taxi. Both are taxis on a trivial level. But if you say taxi, people understand ground vehicle, not an airplane. If you are talking in established context, you could get away with dropping the qualifier software or air.

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Even though it's not accurate (after all that's why we have terms like Game designer, artist, developer and so on), but I don't find it wrong when someone working in a game development (not as a programmer) call him/herself a Game Developer, as I said it can be associated as a broader term as well.

Edit: These are just semantics, and they tend to change over time

They can't handle the truth. Even opinions and publications, forums, feedback, all develop games, how? they open debates and dialogue about mechanics, a games direction and or theme and tone, opinions, etc. All mental factors that can effect as far as to if a game even GETS made.


Modern society has just went crazy on confusing compartmentalizing and segregation as the same thing.