Video Game Developers Are Leaving The Industry And Doing Something, Anything Else
From line cooks to bike repairs, people who used to be video game developers are being forced to try something new
Yeah. Rebecca Ford (Creative Director of Warframe at Digital Extremes) recently did a follow up interview with NoClip where she outright said she was done with video games once Warframe was over. It has basically been her entire adult life to work at DE but she is under no illusions over how messed up the industry is and is basically just sticking on because she loves what she makes and who she makes it with.
And from talking to a few friends who went the game dev route after college? That is more or less where they are at. Layoffs are inevitable and you can look forward to endless abuse if you get noticed before that. So the ones who still love the games they are making put up with it. The rest either already left or are actively putting out feelers for other jobs. Because it isn't like any of them are getting paid what they are worth.
And quite frankly, there are (or were, before layoffs), too many developers making games for how many releases the market can bear.
I’m going to agree with you, but only in the sense they hired more people than they should’ve, not that they should be firing people.
I really blame Telltale Games as one studio that demonstrated this issue in a microcosm. They had some successful games. Then they hired enough extra hands that they MUST make excellent games. Their next few games were not excellent. Then, everybody gets fired.
Quick query to chatgpt says that video games generated 187.7 billion USD in 2023 vs film which was 87.4.
And the vast majority of companies doing mass layoffs (like Microsoft) are still turning profits. They just want to turn larger profits or throw some labor on the sword to protect whoever thought it was a good idea to make Marathon of all IPs into an extraction shooter.
And the rest? It is studios like Strange Scaffold who are actually doing everything right (complete games at launch, no DLC, innovative gameplay, cool narrative and art style) but can't secure any publisher funding and are basically constantly on the verge of ruin.
There are going to be massive knock on effects when the only major releases are the massive tentpole games and everything else is "janky indie games". At which point we'll have even more Gamers talking about how we should fire anyone who worked on The Last Of Us 3 and spend more money making those quirky B games like HiFi Rush.
But hey. Tell me more about how all these mass layoffs are actually a good thing.
I mean, yeah. It's an industry that has a near-unlimited supply of starry-eyed fresh college grads to throw into the meat grinder, and the executives of these companies absolutely love to take advantage of that. Maybe if enough devs leave the industry they might finally have to start respecting the people who work for them out of necessity.
24 years ago, I decided that instead of going into video game development like I had always dreamt of in school, I'll go into business software because at the time there was only one nearby game studio (Blue Byte), they weren't looking to hire in the next few years and I wasn't really willing to move very far at the time.
Looking back, that decision was one of the best branching-path decisions I've ever made in my life.
Thanks, Blue Byte! Indirectly you got me an amazing job! 🥂
Mainzer wissen Bescheid.
Ah I remember when people would tell me that working in the video game industry is a dream, then those same people would complain to me about working long hours for no extra pay (crunch) to finish a game before the deadline.
Yeah that totally sounds like a dream job, it's so great you have to sleep in the office and you don't get paid for that extra work /s
Nightmares are still dreams
True, I guess one could say that in a way they were correct in that it is technically still a dream to work at a company like EA, just a very bad, very hellish dream. Possibly made much worse by the self-gaslighting (and regular gaslighting) making them think it's actually a good dream, makes it even worse because you don't try to escape it because you convince yourself and are convinced by others you have it good when in reality, you don't.
This has a side effect of the people who went through the full game development cycle and can help to improve the process of developing of future games with actions based on their experience do not stay in the industry and thus the industry is bound to repeat the same mistakes again and again. I mean, I started working in the gaming 22 years ago, worked there for 7 years, then took 12 years of break elsewhere and now I am back for 3 years. After I returned I was surprised how almost nothing changed. It is still the demo-to-demo sprinting without proper planning or building the technical layers in advance. So the publishers/management is getting more or less faked demos and are always surprised that at some point they get a very badly made piece of software full of bugs and architectural flaws.
Me:
Shows a demo function just to show how it could be done.
Manager: (looking in his manager book)
-"So it's already implemented!"
Me: no it needs to be programmed first
Manager: but it already is, i can see it on screen!
Me: it has to be implemented correctly.
Manager (looking in book again)
-"How much time if you implement quickly as quick as possible?"
Me: it will take X time.
Manager: Starts to call tech-lead and chief boot-licker to "convince" me it doesn't need that much time.
After 3 hours of painful meeting I say okay okay okay and pushes 'best I could do' to production in the same evening. Reinforcing the idea that I'm a lying bad programmer and that Manager, tech-lead and chief boot-licker are correct.
Source: 10 years of gamedev
This is familiar to all devs, not just game devs
20 year industry vet here. When I started, it was in a company that was hiring nothing but people that have never worked in games before (and they did not tell us this, like some bad reality show). Of the ~200+ people I worked with there when I started, I would very generously estimate maybe only 10-15 of us still in the industry. To be fair, conditions in the industry have gotten a lot better since most of those people left it. The days of doing 80+ hours a week are long gone for most of us as far as I can tell.
It's really all about loving who you are working with. Even if you hate the project or the hours, just enjoying being around the right people makes a huge difference. Writing that is making me realize just how many of my favorite people and closest friends are now elsewhere and damn, I miss them.
Guy I know worked for a pretty big video game studio or two. (You've definitely heard of some games he worked on). Then he realized it sucked. Took a job in FinTech, made like double the money for half the work.
When I was leaving college a quarter of a century ago I briefly considered going into game dev...even back then everyone said it was low paid and gruelling work, so I passed.
It's shocking that people still go into it.
It's wildly underpaid and the developers are highly highly skilled devs. They work in game dev because they want to, but the money isn't there. Most game developers are working at tiny studios hoping for a break.
The shame of it is this kinda the way she goes for passion jobs like game dev. Similarly, EMS is a chronically underpaid career. Not for lack of difficulty or skills required, but because people want to do it. That desire to help others only translates into an ability to underpay people for the privilege. There’s a nobility to wanting to dedicate your life to helping people despite the lack of pay. A nobility that is happily exploited by private equity.
Quit your job, start gardening.
Personal opinion: This is actually excellent because we could actually use developers who have worked these jobs and thus are familiar with how they work, and then they can develop actually useful code for small businesses.
For example: restaurants often have the ability to order online, but they have zero rate limiting, so you can end up with 30 different orders made within 30 seconds of each other and all those people will expect their orders ready at the same time and in the meantime you've got exactly three cooks and each meal takes at least five to seven minutes to get out. Someone could design a rate limiter, no one has. Because there aren't developers working those jobs realizing that workers are being worked to the bone because of businesses refusing to add limits to how much demand can come through their door.
Yeah... that is nonsense.
Also, the good online ordering software DO provide those features. Restaraunt owners just tend to license the cheapest one (or pay their girlfriend's kid to write an even cheaper one) for obvious reasons.
Because there aren’t developers working those jobs realizing that workers are being worked to the bone because of businesses refusing to add limits to how much demand can come through their door.
I'm not sure why you believe game developers would be better suited to this than people who actually do business software development. And it's less about what the developers want to do with software than it is about what the people to are buying the software want to do with that software.
That's due to decisions by the money bags (or lack of funds) and not the competence of the engineers.
