I've certainly played the retail versions of some of the games I worked on. If I'm only working on some portion of it and the game's scope is sufficiently large, there's still interesting things to learn by playing through the parts I didn't work on. Game designers play a lot of games in order to learn, including games that we don't necessarily like playing for pleasure.

That said, everybody has types of games they like and types that are not to their taste. The projects that I work on aren't always the kind of games I like to play for pleasure, but I still do the work because I have bills to pay and enjoy solving design problems even in games that aren't my preferred cup of tea.

Occasionally the game just isn't engaging for me anymore because I got so good at playing the game during development that I didn't feel like playing it again afterwards, or I've already seen all of the story elements in the game so there's only optimizing gameplay left for me. Short form narrative-driven games tend to be like this for me - I'm not a speed runner so there isn't much interest in repeating an experience where I already know what will happen.

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