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.
I work in architecture, a field that is also notorious for long hours, excessive crunch time, and mediocre pay. Real-time 3D graphics have started to become important to the design process over the last several years, and at a previous firm I met a 3D vis guy who’d transitioned into my industry from a job at a game developer, “because the hours and pay are so much better.” It boggled my mind that conditions could be so much worse in game dev that my own field would be an improvement.
Seems like any career that is commonly seen as a passion comes with an additional level of exploitation. Game developers and animators get a raw deal.
It’s also, imo, because it’s a relatively newer career. Nurses, teachers, mechanics all existed as industries before he decline of labor. I work in biotech, and people have these oblivious conversations on reddit that are like, “I have a masters but can’t find a job with any stability or a living wage in my city. What am I doing wrong?”
And each time I explain that what they’re doing wrong is trying to get paid under late stage capitalism in a high risk-high reward casino industry filled with foreign visa-holding indentured servants and no one who has ever heard of collective bargaining.
Not to diminish your point because all fields should be unionized, but nurses and teachers are drastically underpaid and overworked, despite many of them having unions.
But those unions are negotiating against employers who have immense market power. State governments essentially have the last word on teachers’ salaries, and a lot of the country has consolidated to the point where there are only 1-3 major hospital networks in any area.
Without the ability to switch employers for better pay, the unions are the only way that those professions have to improve their pay and working conditions. (This may explain why travel nurses get much better pay than most nurses.)
Travel nurses are often used as scabs or to avoid hiring a full-time unionized employee.
All those professions are badly in need of strong unions for sure.
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Yeah, lab work has the cultural cachet of STEM and knowledge work, but looks a lot more like manual labor in practice. One of the lab planners at my current employer switched careers after getting her master’s because pipetting thousands upon thousands of well plates for her research gave her severe repetitive stress injuries that made it unbearable to continue working in the lab.
Biotech has another problem, in that the VC money --and therefore the job market – is concentrated in a small number of HCOL metros. A friend of mine founded a startup out here in the Midwest, and he struggles to attract enough funding to retain staff who are constantly being lured away to the coasts by better-funded firms offering better pay, even though that money wouldn’t go nearly as far in a place like SF or Boston compared to Kansas City.
The Missouri state government is a crucial piece of the puzzle there.
He’s on the Kansas side, which for all its own foibles is at least not Missouri.
“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.
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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.
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Man, the Drew Carey show was great.
I heard it from George Carlin.
Is any career sustainable anymore?
I was considering making the jump from film and television to the video game industry until a year or two ago. I am really passionate about video games, and I really think there’s a lane for me. Unfortunately, after reading so many horrible stories about crunch culture and learning just how demanding the industry can be (even as somebody who worked on some pretty grueling Hollywood sets) I decided not to go that route. It still makes me upset to think about. I just feel like the industry is so terrible it’d be irresponsible and unfair to my family to go down that route. Reading Significant Zero really put the last nail in the coffin for me on that dream, even though it wasn’t the intention of the book. 
I know it’s not much, but I hope that if you don’t already, you find some time for yourself to just make games for the fun of it.
Not if you’re already dealing with overwork stress, but if you have free time that you’d like to spend on something. No one has to play them or you could do game jams (even though that’s inherently crunch, it’s the choice of the dev rather than their boss and more of a self-imposed limitation) or do otherwise random stuff and just let people muck about with whatever you’ve created. No pressure, no deadlines, no expectations.
And since you know already know how production in general works, you’re well aware of the iterative process and won’t fall into the trap of “why is this taking so long and why can’t my graphics be as good as GTA V” or whatever, which a lot of new developers (and programmers and pretty much everyone) encounter.
It would be nice. I just need structure and it’s hard to find structure when I can only do it during my little free time i have around my toddlers :/
It would need to at least partially pay the bills to be viable.
I really appreciate the encouragement, by the way. It’s tempting!
I’m 10 years into my games career and one of the main reasons I’m still in it is that I’ve worked for indie studios for most of my career.
I’ve worked rarely for AAA studios and they are soulless and long hours. It’s not fun, it’s not creative, it’s not about creating personal art. It’s about creating a product to make profits. They’re really fun games a lot of the time but they get there by limiting who can contribute to what.
An engineer trying to give feedback on design gets shut down. A lot of smaller studios are the opposite and people wear multiple hats daily. I love wearing multiple hats and it helps me understand my own art creation process.
Some folks in the industry as well only see this like a job not an expression of themselves through art. That’s fine but limits them to studios who only want workers not artists.
That said, the average has came up. About 10 years ago that average time in the industry was 5 years. Now it’s 7. People are finding the industry more and more stable but the industry does have a problem keeping juniors. I almost left the industry several times but as I got over 5 years I started to see a change in job offers. Lots more recruiters contacting me. At 10 years I’ve started to see a lot more people wanting to pay me for an hour talk. It becomes easier to stay in the industry as you gain experience but those first 5 years are really rough.
