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Comment by Paul_S | Hacker News Reader

"Video game developer is considered to be one of the most rewarding jobs in a software industry."

I would not agree with that. Unless you insert 'mistakenly' into that sentence or replace 'rewarding' with 'underpaid and overworked'.

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I've been lucky in my career in games and have worked for some great people. Now I'm my own boss and try to treat my employees fairly. It makes me sad to hear about mistreatment in games.

I think working in games can absolutely be incredibly rewarding if you love the medium and delighting players. On huge teams individual effort can be hard to connect to player enjoyment but I've found it super fun to work on and lead smaller teams where everyone can directly impact players and get concrete immediate feedback on how your work is affecting player experience.

Unlike many other areas of software development most game features immediately impact how players perceive your game. I love the immediacy of that connection.

That's good to hear you're baulking the trend. Do you develop your mobile games in C++?

I would love to do game development / programming. The horror stories about long hours, low pay, lots of crunch all have driven me away from it so far. Gamasutra[0] did a nice article about how crunch makes games less likely to succeed (among other things); I hope this kind of stuff changes the mindset of the industry.

[0]http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PaulTozour/20150120/234443/Th...

Only if you're really into games.

I used to work on physics engines, but I was into physics engines, not games or Hollywood. Dealing with Hollywood sucks. Either they're in development and their credit cards bounce, or they're in production and they want a new feature yesterday.

I generally agree. This isn't always the case, but I'd guess on average across the entire industry from large to small across the world it is.

Seconded. I thought that video game developer was a badly-paid, over-worked, permanent crunch situation with poor job security. It has a reputation for paying people in perceived glamour rather than actual money, and crunching through naive youngsters who don't realise how badly they're being treated.

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