The truth about game dev

what is your say on this?
I say keep it as a hobby and get a real job

Dont get me wrong, cause I had to learn freakin linear algebra, physics and trigo just to make my car look right
and what I don’t get about this reality is even though game devs have more math knowledge than other devs in software industry they still earn less

Game development is a real job though. The $40,000 figure that was given to him sounds very much like an entry-level position rather than someone with experience. According to Gamasutra, the average game developer position in the US in 2013 was $83,060. Figures for each division (programmer, artist, etc) are given in the article.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/221533/Game_Developer_Salary_Survey_2014_The_results_are_in.php

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I agree! Especially when you live in an undeveloped country where you are treated like living crap and earning online or from your hobbies actually makes a more feasible option for you then real job. Becoming successful is not for everyone, only the people who choose to believe in their dreams will get there. He wouldn’t say the same thing if he’d work a crappy job for 8 hours a day and 200$ a month! That’s what I’d say! But of course that was meant for people who are at an entirely different level.

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I can see that. What he’s saying in the video I mean. It makes perfect sense, right? Supply and demand.

“Everybody” wants to be a game developer. So naturally companies have no need to pay $80k, $100k or more per year because there are so many people who want to be game developers and so many people who have experience with things like Unity that basically game devs are becoming like cashiers or stock boys. Not exactly the same but you get the point I am sure.

Generally speaking the more common something is the less valuable it is. The more rare something is the more valuable it is. It’s what has happened to the games market itself.

Years ago you’d see games on mobile even selling quite often for $5 maybe even $10. Games were not so common then. They had more value because there were not hundreds of thousands of them readily available. Not that way now, right? Now there are so many games they are basically seen as disposable items on mobile.

And ultimately game devs will be seen as disposable too. More or less anyway. If there are less than 1 million game dev jobs and more than 50 million game devs available then yeah they are pretty disposable.

Those are just example numbers. The point is if there is a need for x game devs and there are x x 50 (or 100 or more) game devs available they won’t be seen as being all that valuable. Flip those numbers around where there are 50 to 100 jobs available for every game dev available and yes game devs would be worth a lot of money.

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@GarBenjamin can you please work on adding paragraph breaks to your comments? I’d like to read what you have to say but I get lost in all that every time!!! :slight_smile:

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Ha ha. Sorry about that. I generally do a brain / thoughts dump and then come back later and edit to clean it up. I will work on that. But see I was just “getting things done”. lol

EDIT: Alright @ I just cleaned it up and fleshed it out a bit more.

I don’t think it is that black and white, case in point I know some folks who are not well-known, just good at their jobs, who make 6 figures in gamedev at AAA companies.

I think what you are describing is essentially the low-end game making business where there is lots of available labor to do simple things/games. Granted I think the lower end of gamedev pays worse than the lower end of general IT, and I agree 100% with you that it is due to working on games being sexy and everyone wants to do it.

At the end of the day though, if you are not just average, but actually good and experienced, I think you’ll have no issue finding gainful employment. Look at corporate IT, they have been outsourcing for years(from the USA) to cheaper countries and continue to do so, yet we have job openings for senior positions that go unfilled for long periods of time due to a shortage of qualified applicants. Make sure you build up your skills so you are experienced and senior and you won’t have to struggle so much, no cutting corners when you are learning.

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Agree completely. I meant from a general outlook approach. In general, if a game company finds they have 500 good applicants for every position they offer that will make the bean counters (sooner or later) think “why are we offering so much when there are so many good candidates available?” So I wouldn’t be surprised to see prices on the average drop as time passes. And certainly all of the new game development companies springing up will likely be offering much lower rates from the start.

Of course, not in every case. Like you said nothing is black and white. However, as a trend I think that is just reasonable to expect.

Yeah, but that is how it’s always been as long as I can remember. I remember when I was in college in the 90’s(dating myself) I looked at gigs at game companies and then “normal” programming gigs and they paid less even back then. If I can make 100k at Origin I can probably make 130k+ at some other non-gaming corporate giant. I think that discount will always apply to the gaming industry outside of the superstars.

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Totally agree with the video guy. If you want high wages pick a profession with low supply, high demand, and a high entrance barrier.

Game dev has none of these. There are tons of people wanting to make games. There is no intrinsic underlying demand for game makers. And with Unity and Unreal these days anyone can get into it.

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Fantastic! This is an extremely effective summary of the points I was trying to make in my long-winded post.

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In the interest of long windedness I can talk more :wink:

I used to focus only on the high entrance barrier. Because normally that drives supply and demand. It basically translates to “Do the most difficult degree that interests you”.

But I’ve just moved to a different country. Government policies here have created a situation where there is an a andante of degreed professionals and a shortage of trades workers. Currently that means the traditionally “easier” professions are getting paid significantly more, due to market demand.

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I disagree with the notion that there is a large supply of game developers. Well, let me rephrase that, I disagree with the notion that there is a large supply of employable game developers. As someone who earns a living doing this and often fantasizes of a day when I can actually hire people, I’m not even the slightest bit interested in hiring any of the “game developers” who throw shovel ware up on Steam. I want the best. And I’m willing to pay for the best (in this fictional world where I have the money). It is not in my best interest to hire anything less if I want to grow a company into something that I can be proud of. Nor is it in my best interest if I want to grow a company that makes me boatloads of cash, if that is your motivation. For both of those things, you need top talent. Or at least well above average talent.

There are probably just as many guitar players as there are game developers. Very few of them have any chance at all of being hired even by a local cover band because they simply aren’t good enough. Their chances are even worse for musical companies that have the ongoing expenses that a development studio does, like rent, electricity, etc. Supply and employable supply, are two different things.

@Ryiah posted the average salary for a game developer, and it isn’t a bad living. And by definition of the word ‘average’ it isn’t even the highest point to which you could take your career. Of course, all of this is predicated on the notion that you are treating it as an actual career. Very few developers, even those who shuck off the label of hobbyist and put out products for sale, even those who delude themselves into thinking otherwise, are doing that. The supply of those types of developers isn’t that much higher than in other high paying careers.

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@HemiMG_1 I can definitely see there would be a much smaller number of employable game developers than there are people calling themselves a game developer. Definitely. At the same time I think there have to be a lot of employable game developers these days. Just from all of the people putting out quality work on these forums alone there seems to be a good number of them.

The ads that I have seen for game developers mainly want one thing. That one thing is the candidate worked on a game that was released. And these days how many people are making & releasing games? A lot of them. Now clearly I don’t think these companies are really talking about Flappy Bird clones but who knows that kind of thing may well count for some of them. I mean it does show completing and releasing a game.

All I know is I just did a quick search for game jobs, clicked on one at random (this one) and after a few seconds a pop-up appeared saying “there are currently 867 people viewing this position right now”. Granted a couple of those may be people like me who were just looking at it as a reference for their post on some forum. lol And some may be inexperienced dreamers. Still nearly 900 people and just at that point in time. Granted there were only 62 people or so who had applied. But still a lot of people seem are checking it out.

I think people are not realizing just how many people are into game development. There are so many people who continually pop into these forums saying they have been working with Unity for the past 3 to 5 years. There are over 4 million registered Unity users. And this is all just for Unity alone. Sure 3.9 million of those registered users may not be employable. But the remaining 100,000 may be very experienced and skilled in Unity game development. And then there is Construct 2, UE, GMS and all of the other game dev kits out there.

How many of those are web crawlers? :stuck_out_tongue:

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LOL! Well that is a great point. I definitely could be wrong. All I am saying is I see people making some pretty impressive looking games all over the Internet these days. YouTube is filled with experienced people doing video tutorials. There are websites all over with experienced people doing text tutorials. I might be misreading it all but to me these things are a clear indication there are a lot of people who do have the experience and skills necessary to get a job in game dev. I mean these people seem to be just about everywhere online these days. Writing books. Writing articles. Making videos. Creating assets. And yes of course building and releasing games.

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@GarBenjamin Oh I don’t doubt that there are millions of game developers (in the loose sense of the word) out there, or that there are 100s of thousands of developers that could be hired. But how many of those developers are looking for a job, and how many of them are looking for a job in the cities that are hiring? Many of the ones trying to make a career of it are probably idiots like me that are trying to build their own company. Many more of the talented ones are probably people like you or @Kiwasi who have perfectly fulfilling day jobs and don’t care to do it professionally.

There’s certainly an explosion of game developers since tools like Unity and Unreal came along. But tools like pen and paper have been around forever, yet not everyone who writes a story is trying to get a job as a staff writer for .

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If manufacturing keeps going the same way it is in this country I just might have to make this more of a professional endeavour. :frowning:

In the U.S, in 2012, there were over a half a million manufacturing jobs unfilled. Companies have a really hard time finding people because there is either a skills gap, or because manufacturing is considered a “dirty job” (that phrase blatantly stolen from Mike Rowe, who has talked at length about such things)
The thing is, those half a million unfilled jobs don’t stop conservative politicians and pundits from saying that the Chinese are taking all of our manufacturing jobs, or liberal politicians and pundits from saying that evil greedy corporations are exporting all of our manufacturing jobs. So most of the population thinks the opposite is true. Manufacturing may be shrinking here, but not having a supply of workers for the jobs we do have either makes that irrelevant, or makes the problem worse.

Manufacturing jobs are always more complex then a politician can understand. :wink:

Australia’s problem is a genuine one. Over the past decade there has been a significant mining boom. That’s over now, and so the workers at all levels are pushing back to the cities. Currently there are more manufacturing workers then jobs. But it will all balance out soon enough.

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