Do you need to have designers on staff to run a design-focused company? Not necessarily. In fact, there are some circumstances in which handing a few key designers ultimate power over a project can be worse than having no designers on staff at all.

Last week, Halfbrick Studios, the Australian game company responsible for Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride, fired its entire design department. A report by Kotaku Australia characterized the change as one that would see Halfbrick Studios stop designing games. But Halfbrick Studio’s CEO Shainiel Deo denied the report, telling Kotaku that “Halfbrick remains a design-focused company…” despite the fact it had just gotten rid of its entire design department.

Fruit Ninja Halfbrick Studios

Since Kotaku’s report, Halfbrick Studios has gotten a bit of a drubbing in the press over the reorg. The idea that a game design company could be design focused while tying off its design department seems inherently absurd, like an architecture firm firing all its architects. So we asked two developers who work at a couple of the most design-focused game companies in the industry what they thought of Halbrick’s seemingly curious move: one at Bejeweled maker PopCap Games, and one at ustwo, creators of the Escher-esque iPhone puzzler Monument Valley.

Surprisingly? Neither developer thought there was anything controversial about Halfbrick Studios’ decision. In fact, while not speaking directly as representatives of their companies, their personal opinion was that what’s true in most businesses is especially true in game development: Giving design its own silo can be a mistake, because in a design-focused company, everyone should be thinking about design…even if they don’t have the word designer in their title.

“I think the Halfbrick controversy is a big deal mostly because people are very naive about how games are actually made,” says Chris Furniss, a senior UI/UX designer at PopCap Games.

Bejeweled PopCap Games

He says the idea that the games you play are the result of the singular genius of a “monolithic game designer” working in a vacuum within the company doesn’t really exist. And that’s been true since the beginning. Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto, for example, was a pixel artist when he invented Mario as part of Donkey Kong. The arena of game design isn’t unique in this: Norman Foster isn’t the only architect at the firm bearing his name, and Jony Ive is widely praised for his willingness to listen to his staff. Great design ideas can come from anyone.

In game design, having “designer” in your title isn’t the most important thing. Titles are fungible. As Neil McFarland, director of games for ustwo, says: “Every project needs an internal champion within the company, someone who holds the vision and pushes the team in the right direction.” But that person does not necessarily have to be a designer. For Monument Valley, ustwo’s “internal champion” of the project was Ken Wong, an artist by trade who had a vision for the project. He wasn’t a designer, per se, yet he functioned as ustwo’s internal champion for a game commonly regarded as one of the most beautiful and best designed of 2014.