I will reiterate again that, on top of everything else wrong with games, for a programmer at least it is an absolutely terrible way to make money. A few data points in favor of this argument:
- if you exclude the salary we paid ourselves during CE's development, I have made less money from Gaslamp's thirteen years of existence than I have made at my day job for a FAANG-esque entity in the past three months. Even if you include it, it's probably less than I have made at the last six. (That salary got pretty damned non-existent towards the end of CE's development, too.) This argument could use some mild adjusting for inflation, but even still.
- Moving from game development to working for Google in 2017 basically quadrupled my total compensation, and that was after negotiating a role at Activision that was a low six-figure salary.
- Moving to my current employer after four years at Google tripled my salary, lets me do graphics research which I love, and our stock performance hasn't been bad at all.
So, if you're a programmer, and a good programmer, you can work in a labor market where the following things are true:
- you are probably making at least 50% less than you could make in non-games
- even with the recent layoffs at Google and a few other places, it's still less widespread than the recent game industry pandemic
- you can actively enjoy worse work-life balance
- you can, depending on your role in industry, race, and gender, also actively enjoy being openly despised, shouted at online, and occasionally even stalked and threatened in person, by your customers. also bomb threats
- and, harping back on this again, the major awards programs for indies actually refuse to acknowledge your existence because nobody knows what "technical excellence" is and has never bothered to define it; so it's not like I can receive the accolades of my peers either.
Or, you know, you could literally do anything else and have a nice life.
The thing that keeps folks in games is that they are rewarding to create. It is rewarding to make art! It is rewarding to make interactive media! The people in the business, in the trenches, are some of the greatest! The technology, the mathematics, the algorithms behind games are fascinating and wonderful and tremendous fun to work with and on. But, at some point, that simply isn't enough. And that's why we have no senior talent in games programming, except for a few crotchety oddballs who have already largely opted out of the system.
Again, I don't know what to do about this. I really don't.
even with the recent layoffs at Google and a few other places, it's still less widespread than the recent game industry pandemic
not only is this true, but the severity in scale between the two is fucking terrifying. you'll see a lot in Unity circles that UT's layoffs "aren't that bad" because the entire tech industry is going through this" and you'll see similar sentiments whenever you discuss games industry layoffs in general, but it's so much more precarious in games that it's absurd. couple that with the massive wage disparity and it's just like... what are we even doing?
you'll see people show up in indie dev spaces a bunch and talk about how they want to go full-time indie or ask questions about how they can make super successful indie games and like... if we had the answers to these questions, indie devs wouldn't be fuckin' starving a bunch of the time. we would all be successful and never worry about rent and never worry about food and not have to do the world's most delicate budgeting
and you can't just go "get a job at a studio" because the layoffs from QA all the way up to basically just below the C-suit show that those jobs are completely unreliable long-term. you can't even say "do this to make money" because entry level pay is basically dogshit and will often require relocating to a place where your rent on that pay will be completely unsustainable. when people talk about wanting to make money in games, the best advice still tends to be "get literally any other job and make games in your spare time"
like shit, if you've got the skills and can show it? you might as well try and get a programming job pretty much anywhere where you know the language they're working in because that'll do you far better than anything else and you're probably not going to be subject to near the same labour conditions that exist in games. the whole situation sucks shit but it especially sucks shit that some of the best advice is "don't"
