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Game dev here, have worked on AAA and indie. First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the e

• cheeze 4mo ago
  I'm the opposite. BigCorp distributed systems guy. I'd agree with all of this from what I've seen though. The problems that some of my buddies solved straight out of college, while very different than 'hard problems' at bigcorp, are... hard. One buddy ended up moving to the worst of both worlds... backend infra for a large video game and ended up getting video game salary for bigcorp distributed systems problems.
• RobRivera 4mo ago
  What was your route to teaching like? I kinda am considering putting my hat in a similar ring on a part time, evening class type basis if I can get away with it.
  • sonzohan 4mo ago
    I graduated in 2011, went straight to work at Blizzard entertainment. At the same time I had gotten accepted into graduate school so I opted for an internship at Blizzard to try both. I went back to Blizzard in 2012, but quickly realized I wanted to do my PhD. So I left Blizzard and went full-time as a student. I didn't have funding so I TAd classes. Eventually my advisor and I scored a big NSF grant, so she used the funds to buy out a course and have me teach it as the instructor. From there, I wound up at a community college running a bachelor's level degree. They hired me because I was the only candidate with NSF experience. They proceeded to fire their grant manager and have me manage the whole grant without extra pay. Actually used to hire people for exactly what you want to do: be an adjunct for night classes in tech. If you want to go that route you need to make friends with the Dean and the head of program. It's rare that we hire someone from the general application process, because most people who work in tech do not make good instructors.
    • dylan604 4mo ago
      > They proceeded to fire their grant manager and have me manage the whole grant without extra pay. This is such a bullshit thing to experience. I had a version of this where I took on extra work that I was interested in which became a new revenue stream but was told "let's see how you do and then we'll see about salary bumps". Never saw an extra dime from it. I used the experience learned to land a new job six months later with a salary bump while dumping the other job responsibilities. It's truly the only way to get that bump you deserve.
    • RobRivera 4mo ago
      I'll prospect that way, thank you for the insight. I have a unique background AND teaching experience (military leadership for my first career, and then taught as a full time visiting professor for 2 years) but having spent a decade in industry as a software engineer, yes I concur, teaching is not a common skill among the labor force (anecdotal ofc). I hope after I launch my first indie game I could knock on the doors of say Digipen or similar. Will see tho, thats more a 2027 thing. What kind of PhD research did you do? I considered going back for a PhD program focusing on simulation as it relates to discoverability within AI research, but kept ruling out it was a bad career decision and should be left as a retirement thing
• al_borland 4mo ago
  Do you tend to see a high drop out rate or general dissatisfaction from graduates when they come to the realization that making a game is a very different experience than playing the games?
  • Scaled 4mo ago
    My first AAA game industry boss said to me only 10% of people make it 10 years in games. This has been, if anything, optimistic, with there being a sharp drop-off at 2~5 years. (And in indie it's way worse, it's more like 1% making it one year)
    • deaddodo 4mo ago
      I mean, when you're getting paid 40-60% for doing more complex work than app/web development...yeah, the drop-off is almost inevitable. Eventually people (unless they just really love making games) just go "f this, my career is more important". If you wanna do low-level code, you can go into embedded, sponsored OSI-companies, Microsoft, etc and get paid the same to more than gamedev with 10% of the stress and no crunch. If you wanna get paid much more and do more "vibe"/fun coding, you can go into app/web dev. If you want stability, you go into fintech/medtech/onsite/etc. Gamedev offers the worst of all worlds and then constantly posits "why is there so much turn over?"...because you made the industry suck to work in.
      • avadodin 4mo ago
        Why write a line of code for a car's fuel injection and go back home at 5pm to your wife and kids when you could stay overnight and be hacking on an ill-designed networking protocol for an AAA game while eating 5% discount cheetos?
      • ranguna 4mo ago
        > because you made the industry suck to work in. What do you mean they "made" the industry suck to work in?
        • 4mo ago
• varispeed 4mo ago
  I'd say it has nothing to do with supply and demand, but more to do with captive labour market (e.g. in the UK ability to quit and run own business are limited) and C-suite greed levels and classism. Working class person being exceptional at low latency game development, will unlikely get a chance in finance and earning 10x for very much the same level of competence, because their accent might not be good enough and parents don't frequent members' clubs.
  • hnlmorg 4mo ago
    I’ve worked in pretty much every domain of IT in the UK (FinTech, gaming, broadcasting, Hollywood, public sector, etc) and I’ve not experienced any class bias in FinTech. I will say that different industries have different formalities (generally speaking). But that just means you have to interview with smarter attire in FinTech vs interviewing for a job in gambling. As a hiring manager, I can say that companies will recruit for as little as they think candidates will accept. Fintech gets a bit of a pass on this one but only because they rake in so much money that they can generally afford to attract higher salaries. But it does also mean that gaming can get away with paying people peanuts in comparison and that is literally due to supply and demand. In places where the C-suite have set unrealistic thresholds on tech salaries, I’ve had to get creative to attract candidates. And that often meant contributing back to open source and basically using that as advertising. Anyway, this is already a verbose reply but the crux of it is: 1. you shouldn’t underestimate the power of supply and demand in the work space 2. The profitability of a sector also plays heavily into the equation 3. You don’t need to be posh to get a job in FinTech.
    • varispeed 4mo ago
      It didn't affect me, therefore it doesn't exist. Come on.
      • hnlmorg 4mo ago
        I obviously cannot speak for every company that has ever existed in the FinTech industry. And you haven’t given any more details beyond vague comments which makes it hard to comment on your specific claims. So I can only talk about my experiences hiring and beyond hired in the industry. But who’s to say your experiences aren’t the anomaly? Or that other factors weren’t to play that lead those hiring managers offering to other candidates? I also tried researching your point online (just in case I was an anomaly) and the results I got suggested that FinTech scored lower in benchmarks for bias during hiring. So at this point in time, given what I’ve experienced, read online and the information you’ve shared, there simply isn’t enough data to support your claim. Anecdotal nor otherwise.
• deleted 4mo ago
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• miiiiiike 4mo ago
  > engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. I always roll my eyes when I hear this from game developers. And my eyes hurt from rolling I've heard it so many times. I've done game dev, systems, backend, frontend, all of it. It's all the same. Maybe you developed low complexity "big tech" projects but, c'mon, you're really going to argue that games are categorically MORE complex than what Google, Apple, etc develop? They're not. It's all the same. Same complexity ceiling, same prerequisite levels of creativity. Most frontends that I develop use the same patterns as games and the backends that I've developed recently look like game servers. Same patterns, same techniques, same level of complexity. Game development is just development.
  • tayo42 4mo ago
    It probably depends on the level in the stack your at. At a high level the engines and frameworks don't feel any different. Work with graphics and models feels more difficult though then most networked application work I've done.
  • michaelsalim 4mo ago
    Not a game dev but I used to dabble in it. Quite surprised by this take honestly. Sure, each domain has its own complex things to solve. But on average, I think it's quite safe to say that game development consistently demands more creative solutions to problems compared to many other fields.
    • miiiiiike 4mo ago
      All development requires creativity. Different types of creativity for different types of problems. Creativity isn’t narrowly defined to exclude everything but art, game mechanisms, and narrative. You think the creation of GMail didn’t take creativity? I’m suspicious of anyone who tries to lay a special claim to creativity for their class or type of work. Creates a false creative vs cog narrative that always seems to benefit the speaker.
      • Thaxll 4mo ago
• forgetfreeman 4mo ago
  "You trade good salary for your name in the credits" When did that become a thing? When Gears of War bonus checks started hitting Epic's parking lot went from a random collection of reasonable vehicles to looking like an exotic car show. I'm fairly certain every dev that worked on Gears or Unreal could have retired off the bonus payouts.
  • Sharlin 4mo ago
    That’s a tiny and decidedly nonrepresentative sample of gamedevs.
    • forgetfreeman 4mo ago
      Fair enough. That community is a hell of a lot larger now than it used to be.
  • bananaboy 4mo ago
    If you’re working for one of the big studios making blockbusters the bonuses can still be pretty good.
• Animats 4mo ago
  > First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. Yes. Having done everything from mainframe OS internals to proof of correctness to autonomous vehicles, video games are the most difficult. At the beginning, game dev looks easy, because the tools are good and modern hardware is very capable. But as you approach a big, highly detailed, photorealistic world, the easy approaches hit a performance wall. Then the necessary optimizations become insanely complex. That's the tyranny of the frame rate. That's why I've complained about game engines in Rust. Everybody writes My First Game Engine, then hits the wall about two years in. The metaverse problem is even worse. All the problems of game dev, plus the problems of user-created content and large scale. With all the effort and money put into metaverses, none emerged that worked as well and looked as good as an AAA game title from the GTA V era. Roblox, Improbable, and Second Life are as good as it got. You'd think there would be some good examples still around, with small user bases, but there are not. There are a whole range of problems only metaverses have, and some of them are unsolved. For commercial games, much of the work takes place during level building and optimization. Unreal Engine Editor does much of the heavy lifting. Metaverses don't have that option. The total failure of the metaverse industry comes partly from this. It's hard to do, and the problem was underestimated. Mostly by the people who really just wanted to sell their crap NFTs and coins. The people and wage problem comes from too many people wanting to make games. It's like Hollywood. If you've spend any time around there, you've met the actress/model/waitress types. The male version has stand up comedy levels of ego. That pushes wages down.
  • xg15 4mo ago
    > You'd think there would be some good examples still around, with small users bases, but there are not. Wouldn't VRChat qualify?
    • Animats 4mo ago
      VRchat is impressive. It predates the metaverse boom, and it's not a big-world system. The metaverse was supposed to be like Ready Player One, but we didn't get there.
  • 4mo ago
• dzonga 4mo ago
  another thing - games are more like a lottery - you've more misses than hits. so economics takes over. whereas your typical saas, adtech - once the business is proven u print money unless u r doing stupid shit n being driven by ego such as having the biggest org or pursuing passion projects such as "a.i"
  • vitaflo 4mo ago
    Also for every game dev working on GTA6, there's another working on Barbie's Horse Adventure. When positions are limited, you take what you can get and most of them are making games that are not at all interesting.
• nsagent 4mo ago
  As a former game dev who later got a PhD in CS, I can say I definitely did the equivalent of research as part of my job: I had to solve tough new problems that no one else was and verify they worked better than existing approaches. It's definitely more difficult than anything I worked on in industry and was certainly not paid commensurate with the skill required. Now I've branched off on my own as I've been disillusioned with academia as well. Can't win'em all.
• steve_adams_86 4mo ago
  > engineering in video gaming is generally more complex This tracks with my experience. Games present so many unexpected challenges. Or, known and expected challenges that are challenging nonetheless. The other place I've had my ass handed to me was in robotics. Translating digital models to the physical space is how physics tells you it's actually in control and your ideas are cute and all, but other things are going to happen instead. The simulator starts out simple and gradually becomes grotesque as it contacts reality.
• cmpxchg8b 4mo ago
  Former gamedev here. This matches my experience. However, working in the games industry from 2000-2011 did wonders for my ability to thrive in big tech. It is easy mode compared to games.
  • trueno 4mo ago
    i spent 2 years learning c by fucking with carmacks idtech3 engine. game dev is incredible. i found myself even in such an old engine in awe of the incredibly creative ways problems are solved to get things drawn on screen, the event journals and everything that marry it together, the client server architectures... bruh game dev is next level. * this doesnt even include graphics programmers who are also awesome. and are just a different breed than i am, for whatever reason my brain just won't process the world of graphics pipelines
• arsenide 4mo ago
  I work in the slot game industry. Plenty of ex-video game devs in this space. Much better work-life balance, but it's very clearly not the same as making video games.
  • rf15 4mo ago
    There's also the moral factor, but I've definitely considered switching in the past should money ever be a problem for me.
• usefulcat 4mo ago
  This description absolutely checks out, even from ~30 years ago when I graduated. I worked on games for several years early on but quit after going through an EA spouse experience. In some ways it’s too bad, because the great thing about games is that there is such a great variety of different kinds of problems to solve. Even so, I quit cold turkey and never looked back. It is what it is.
• neonstatic 4mo ago
  > There's an absolute over supply of students who want to make video games. To be fair, you don't have to be a teacher / lecturer to notice this. One trip to an AI reddit thread asking what people are working on will reveal that it's either porn, role-play, or game development.
• socalgal2 4mo ago
  That's one frame. Another frame is video games is like movies, music. You start a band and think you're going to be the next hit band and be famous but the reality is only a few bands a year are successful. Movies are closer because most movies require a crew and a budget. How many movies are hits? The issue is not that game companies are evil, the issue is that it's a hit driven industry. I worked on AAA and indie as well. I crunched for years. That crunch was on me because I was being paid to make MY games and like any creator, I wanted my game to be great. GTA6 is an exception in games being the game with the biggest team (AFAIK). The bigger the team the more you're a cog.