Video Game Developers Are Leaving The Industry And Doing Something, Anything Else - Aftermath
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From line cooks to bike repairs, people who used to be video game developers are being forced to try something new
  • TechSquidTV@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    It’s wildly underpaid and the developers are highly highly skilled devs. They work in game dev because they want to, but the money isn’t there. Most game developers are working at tiny studios hoping for a break.

    • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      The shame of it is this kinda the way she goes for passion jobs like game dev. Similarly, EMS is a chronically underpaid career. Not for lack of difficulty or skills required, but because people want to do it. That desire to help others only translates into an ability to underpay people for the privilege. There’s a nobility to wanting to dedicate your life to helping people despite the lack of pay. A nobility that is happily exploited by private equity.

  • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    24 years ago, I decided that instead of going into video game development like I had always dreamt of in school, I’ll go into business software because at the time there was only one nearby game studio (Blue Byte), they weren’t looking to hire in the next few years and I wasn’t really willing to move very far at the time.

    Looking back, that decision was one of the best branching-path decisions I’ve ever made in my life.

    Thanks, Blue Byte! Indirectly you got me an amazing job! 🥂

  • Wotan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    This has a side effect of the people who went through the full game development cycle and can help to improve the process of developing of future games with actions based on their experience do not stay in the industry and thus the industry is bound to repeat the same mistakes again and again. I mean, I started working in the gaming 22 years ago, worked there for 7 years, then took 12 years of break elsewhere and now I am back for 3 years. After I returned I was surprised how almost nothing changed. It is still the demo-to-demo sprinting without proper planning or building the technical layers in advance. So the publishers/management is getting more or less faked demos and are always surprised that at some point they get a very badly made piece of software full of bugs and architectural flaws.

    • Valmond@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Me:

      Shows a demo function just to show how it could be done.

      Manager: (looking in his manager book)

      -“So it’s already implemented!”

      Me: no it needs to be programmed first

      Manager: but it already is, i can see it on screen!

      Me: it has to be implemented correctly.

      Manager (looking in book again)

      -“How much time if you implement quickly as quick as possible?”

      Me: it will take X time.

      Manager: Starts to call tech-lead and chief boot-licker to “convince” me it doesn’t need that much time.

      After 3 hours of painful meeting I say okay okay okay and pushes ‘best I could do’ to production in the same evening. Reinforcing the idea that I’m a lying bad programmer and that Manager, tech-lead and chief boot-licker are correct.

      Source: 10 years of gamedev

  • Draconic NEO@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Ah I remember when people would tell me that working in the video game industry is a dream, then those same people would complain to me about working long hours for no extra pay (crunch) to finish a game before the deadline.

    Yeah that totally sounds like a dream job, it’s so great you have to sleep in the office and you don’t get paid for that extra work /s