New Survey Reveals That Many Game Developers Consider Their Career Unsustainable
New Survey Reveals That Many Game Developers Consider Their Career Unsustainable
IGN can exclusively reveal the details from IATSE's 2023 Gameworkers.org Rates and Conditions Survey, where the organization asked hundreds of video game developers about their pay, benefits, and working conditions.
IGN can exclusively reveal the details from IATSE's 2023 Gameworkers.org Rates and Conditions Survey, where the organization asked hundreds of video game developers about their pay, benefits, and working conditions.
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"Oh? You hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called 'Everybody', we meet at the bar!"
- Drew Carey
Video games devs have it much worse than other developers though
Cant blame game devs at all. Their working conditions take the absolute piss. It's sweatshop conditions compared to other types of tech work.
Crunch culture stories are horrifying to read
A 100%, some of the things that you hear from the industry are crazy. If you offered me twice my current salary to be a developer in the AAA videogame industry, I wouldn't take it.
And no employer out of the industry will take you seriously once you've worked.
Do you know why is that so?
Not a game developer, but one aspect is that developers outside of the gaming industry function VERY differently to the point where there is little in the way of transferable knowledge.
For example, most games are made in C/C++ because performance is a serious concern, but management will absolutely shit themselves if you try to make a web service in that language due to security concerns. The only language with any serious overlap is C#, as that is the scripting language used in Unreal Engine and Unity.
Some app developers use game engines for non-game apps (eg: Duolingo uses Unity) but that's about it.
I understand that video games dev and Web dev does not overlap but the developer field is more vast than just Web. For example embedded development uses a lot of C/C++ so knowledge would be transferable there.
I would also say that even though the engines or framework is not the same, surely there are human skills that can be transferred like managing a project, solving problems, algorithms, performance analytics and debugging.
But that's only my theory and I have no experience on switching field like that
You've got a very valid point with embedded devices. Although there are some big differences in that software for embedded devices typically also act as the operating system, something games stopped doing years ago.
For everything else you mentioned, you're mostly correct but there are complications. The problem is, it can be hard to sell those skills at an interview.
Yeah, embedded is exactly where I'm trying to transfer to, but good luck getting embedded jobs in Los Angeles that aren't military or otherwise require a background check.
Man, the Drew Carey show was great.
I heard it from George Carlin.