That should finally put arguments that Blender would not be "production ready" to rest.
Although to be fair, Blender did awesome jumps in capability in recent time. Love the tool, I wish them the best. Certainly a deserved success.
For a gaming company it should also be the tool of choice because user content still is part of the most successful games. There are many arguments to revisit your toolchain if you do not yet use Blender.
It’s been production ready for ages but that’s a nebulous distinction.
Different studios have very different needs for scaling their production. Blenders suitability varies greatly by the project and needs. For example, it’s used on Spiderverse for specific things but cannot scale to do the entire animation production yet.
Your second point about user generated content makes no sense imho. Games don’t use DCC files for runtime. They will have their own runtime formats that are generated during the build. Blender is just an unsuitable or suitable as any other DCC in that regard.
Yes, you need the game specific runtime formats and for user generated content the toolchain used is relevant. Some of the most popular games with modding support had model and animation import locked behind proprietary solutions that were used when the games were created. Nothing wrong here, but if this toolchain used more open tools, the entry barrier is lowered and import/export would be much easier.
Sure, at some point people created specific plugins for Blender as well, but it creates additional hurdles. And the middleware used is also important. Havok did pose problems for import/export of models in Blender. Of course these are other licensing constraints again that are not only affecting Blender.
Have a look at NextGen and Maya And The Three on Netflix. Both were produced with Blender as the central 3D tool by my old employer, Tangent Animation. We delivered Maya in 2021; Blender has been in production for years.
Tangent produced feature animation, but also was working on an asset manager product, which is now owned by Autodesk after Tangent went under. Our animators doubled as dog food tasters. I mention this because the execs were 100% very much out to make a profit from this enterprise - I myself was living my wet dream because I am Free Software zealot, but they were looking to turn a profit from it all, and even these fiscally-motivated folks were frequently heard to say that "Blender is the future" because everyone there understood that that is the case.
That should be restated as "Production Ready" for the average user that's not Linux Neck-beard Class for Graphics driver Dark Arts! And Blender 3D(3.0/Later) has a definite eWaste component for Older Hardware ever since OpenCL was dropped as the iGPU/dGPU compute acceleration API in favor of PTX/Nvidia and Apple Metal!
Any Movie Production may have the ability to hire some consultant to get past some of the issues that pop up so it's more and issue of is Blender 3D actually Turn-Key for the average end user?
Although to be fair, Blender did awesome jumps in capability in recent time. Love the tool, I wish them the best. Certainly a deserved success.
For a gaming company it should also be the tool of choice because user content still is part of the most successful games. There are many arguments to revisit your toolchain if you do not yet use Blender.