Anime is booming, so why are animators living in poverty?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This quote is the most telling to me: “I want to work in the anime industry for the rest of my life,” Mr. Akutsu, 29, said during a telephone interview. But as he prepares to start a family, he feels intense financial pressure to leave. “I know it’s impossible to get married and to raise a child.”
He knows it's impossible to get what he wants in life, as an animator, but he still wants to do it for the rest of his life.
This isn't the case for most of the "jobs" that people are mentioning in the comments here, like people don't dream of being "cleaners" for the rest of their life, but there are other reasons why that might seem like their only reasonable choice. Lack of other marketable skills, probably being the most common. For cleaners, it doesn't even require that they can speak English, just that they can do the job they say the can.
My personal theory on anime, as that's the specific subject of the article, is that if there were a much lower supply of competent animators and the animations were more expensive to purchase, they wouldn't be so popular, people would find other things to do/watch, etc. Which really boils back down to supply and demand. It's not as simple as "people demand anime", but more something like "people are willing to pay $x for y hours of time watching anime", where services like Netflix (or more specific to the subject of anime, Crunchyroll) charge some small amount per month and give access to hundreds of seasons and full movies. If the masses had to purchase each season or episode individually, I'd suppose people would be watching a lot less or pirating a lot more.
This is a simple function of supply and demand, not naive developers too weak minded to resist executives. Developers interested in gaming are in high supply, while gaming pales economically in comparison to the fields where most of us work (presumably tech and fintech).
Either way, I certainly meant no disrespect.
Markets actually rarely function very well on their own because participants often don't have enough information to make decent decisions or there are huge power asymmetries. An Artists Guild would, in the long run, probably make everyone better off.
It boggles my mind that an anime as popular as One Punch Man got awarded to a bottom-of-the-barrel anime studio for S2. I mean, you can see the stark contrast between seasons 1 and 2. Season 2 has very sparse action scenes, and heavily utilizes off-screen talking (i.e. the camera is panning some static background while a conversation is taking place so the animators don't have to animate). That leads me to believe the money/profits generated by the success of a season is getting eaten by ip owners and middlemen, and that the studio itself is fighting for the scraps. If so, that incentive structure needs to change if you want to increase the quality of the anime. Can anyone who knows more about the anime business model in Japan chime in? Is this a case of IP owners holding an iron grip on the rights and profits and being stingy with anime studios?
At any rate, I'm surprised more American-based anime studios aren't springing up to poach Japan's top animation talent with top pay.
The incentive is that if the anime is low quality, people won't watch anymore.
But your other comment[1] seems to suggest that executives love money and want to make more, so they would definitely be affected by that decision.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26275488
>It's not like executives are ever punished for poorly running a company.
Their bonuses are linked to company performance, and they can be fired just like any other job.
So they get fired, then what? They get hired by another company for more money because now they have experience. That's what I mean about not being punished.
No executive ever ends up destitute and on the streets. We should strive for all workers to have the same safety net as executives.
As history shows this isn't really true.
Or at least it was, when I was a kid watching it on a CRT. I have no idea what it's like now.
Also Gundam. The whole franchise was initially a way to promote model kit :D
I also got a couple of digivices from Digimon, from the second and fourth(?) season. I remember they had story modes and contacts at the top for multiplayer gameplay, as well as a walking sensor for story advancement which you could cheat by just shaking the device for hours. My friend with whom I battled it out never had a chance because he actually tried walking the distance. That's until he noticed the gap between our digimon was getting too big despite all the walking he did, and I ended up telling him the trick. Quite a facepalm moment right there. Those were neat little devices for our ages back then.
The pokedex itself is a pokemon now. It hosts a Rotom.
Fun time to be nostalgic since tomorrow is the 25th anniversary too.
I would, perhaps naively, Assume the latter.
“That you’d better be in it for the music, because you sure as hell aren’t going to make any money from being in a metal band, certainly in this day and age.”
https://www.loudersound.com/features/peripherys-spencer-sote...
OPM went to JC for S2 because the very expensive S1 from Madhouse had already satisfied the goal of bringing tons of new fans to the franchise.
This is changing though, as anime is getting cheaper to produce and international viewers are increasing.
IIRC it was also scheduling. Madhouse was booked up for a while.
If anyone knows the 'mechanism' as to why so many disparate measures end up as Power Laws, I'd love to read more on it, as I;m sure other HNers would too.
Doesn't matter. Even if profit sharing were implemented, the boss gets to choose the percentage of the profit that animators get. Due to supply and demand, they'll still get the short end of the stick. Definitely better than nothing, but the problem will continue to exist in another form.
- Anime production committees (https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2017/05/02/what-is-an-animes-pr...) take a large portion of the profit from a show, and studios often see very little (they're often not on the production committees).
- If the studio doesn't own the IP, they'll likely have to pay a hefty amount for it.
- There's not much actual revenue from anime: historically studios have tried to monetize via extraordinarily expensive DVDs of the episodes (such that only die-hard fans would buy them), and merchandise, but apparently the studios don't even get all of the revenue from these sources. Streaming is becoming more popular but I'm not sure how much revenue Crunchyroll/Netflix/etc. shares with the studios.
- Anime is often seen as an advertisement for the original source material (usually manga), so there's less incentive for certain parties on the production committee to monetize.
I find video game programming to be the most difficult of all, just because you have to account for so many things, yet game programmers make the least.
It's the problem of every dream job, no one dreams of working on software for waste treatment facilities. So the people willing to do that job can do much better than the new grads trying to work on the next battlefield or whatever
Can you give some examples? How many things does a VG programming have to account for compared to, for examples, a ML programmer, or a programmer in the HFT space?
Sure, video game programming is not a game, but I don't know why it would be "the most difficult" compared to other fields.
Forza heavily uses ML. You have Network programming, in there. Well I'm sure some specialties exist which are more difficult, it doesn't change the fact of video game programmer can make half as less as a normal business programer.
I've seen video game studios which essentially have a single wunderkind who has to dabble in everything because no one else reaches his or her skill level. No other industry has low pay and crunch
> No other industry has low pay and crunch
I wasn't talking about the workload or low salaries. I was talking about the statement that "video game programming" as a discipline is the most difficult of all.
And plus I started my statement with "I find" , if you happen to program quantum systems and that's 10 times as difficult compared to writing a game engine in CPP, that's cool
> I'm sure some specialties exist which are more difficult
OK, so we agree. Video game programming can definitely be very tricky, but it's like any other specialties once you reach a certain threshold of sophistication/scale/whatever.
An average game dev would have much deeper knowledge on the stuff they do than the average dev that build corporate software since the game devs would de bespoke work every time. Sure, they also have assets etc. but in the gaming the originality is much more important since the product itself is meant to be enjoyable, not simply a medium to accomplish something else(like ordering pizza or keep track of payments).
Yep, like NPM and various dependency hells. Maybe that's where the compensation difference comes from?
Video game programmers often need to be very deep generalists. It's a combination of 1) the reality of small teams working on ambitious games, 2) increased expectations for what a videogame can do by default ("what do you mean I can't join a party with my friends?!"), and 3) video games are deeply, deeply bespoke software, and to implement one feature means you need to know the limitations of many subsystems.
A good friend of mine works on the World of Warcraft gameplay development team. They have ~50 engineers, and they're almost all full-stack to some degree. He said that when he was an intern on the team, to build a feature he needed working knowledge of:
1. Blizzard's battle.net network layer
2. The way textures were rendered onto character models, pixel-by-pixel
3. The intricacies of their in-house Lua engine and parser
4. The way that NPC AI was written
None of these requirements, by themselves, are too crazy; but he was using all of these, every day, as a junior in college!
And that was for a three-sprint project! As an intern!
Large breadth of content with lots of esoteric and domain specific knowledge sprinkled throughout. The higher level abstractions available are very limited in scope in comparison to say GUI toolkits, most of the success has come from people drilling down and putting in a ton of work.
The question is whether we can build such a platform with opensource tooling and make it scale down to microcontrollers (KB of RAM), medium sized MCUs (MB of RAM) and SBCs (100s of MBs to 1 GB of RAM). The support burden is very high so whatever distro/RTOS would have to make it possible to run every binary on any architecture without recompilation.
Lots of people say that the JVM is that platform but the garbage collector makes it insufficient in my opinion. We also need the ability to run existing C code to reduce the porting burden. I think WASM could fit the bill.
If someone doesn't call this cool then I don't know. Of course in practice nobody cares and people just dig out ancient C compilers.
A growing portion are using ROS with their linux
Not too many teens choose a career in programming because they want to build a robust framework that allows construction of large-scale analytical queries on unstructured data.
EDIT : I have found this https://www.gpic.nl/producing_animation_in_North_Korea.pdf
"Q:How is the North's animation seen in abroad? A:Compared to North Korea's general image around the world, their animation sector has a remarkably good reputation. The nation has been receiving many orders from abroad for quite some time, including many from France and Italy. The workers usually participate in original drawings and coloring. Some of the well-known foreign animation projects the North has been involved in include "Lion King", "Les Miserables", "Pocahontas" and an Italian production of "Hercules" and "Billy the Cat" from France"
Quotes from this article:
"But even many grown-ups enjoy [animation in North Korea] because it is one of the rare television programs in the North free of political messages"
"Actually most researchers estimate that almost half of the households in the North have television sets. It's just another common misconception about the North to think that only the rich get to watch television. There are also many animated films released in theatres."
It's because:
(a) we don't compensate jobs based on their difficulty or the financial success of the product, but on how hard it is to find people to do them when we need them.
If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.
(b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
However, enforcement is another story. While Japan's prefectural minimum wages range from ¥714 to ¥932 per hour (6.71+$) for all workers, that’s often ignored.
This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No.
Here, I suspect the obvious in the anime industry, like in many entertainment sectors including VFX: salary fixing between studios to keep pays low.
> If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.
Given how opaque the healthcare industry is when it comes to cost for non elective surgeries, I doubt costs would go down even if you multiplied the number of surgeons by 1000. Case points: there are loads of restaurants yet the hospital will steal bill a meal 20 times what it would cost in the nearby restaurant.
Is the fruit worth picking if salaries need to be increased to get workers? In a lot of cases the answer is no.
A lot of work only makes sense at a particular salary. If market salaries are above that, the work just isn't done.
At that point it’s not a question of making money, but minimizing losses.
There is no money in agriculture. The only reason why most farms aren't bankrupt is because of subsidies.
Where farm subsides play a role is dampening the boom bust cycle.
https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/us-heads-for-highe....
15% is absolutely "I will go bankrupt if I don't have this" territory.
Net result fewer workers, a shift in which farms are profitable, and a ripple effect up the supply chain, but most bankruptcy would be from farms that do so sooner. Aka they would have been bankrupt in a 10 years and now it happens in 5.
*Effective price being the sales price plus total subsidies.
This of course is too complex to model is completely ignored. A lot like ignoring the atmosphere when designing air planes.
Good on them.
I guess it was only a matter of time before economists stopped misunderstanding physics and started misunderstanding computer science. I mean there's not much prestige left in physics since the end of the cold war. Are we going to see a Turing prize in economics like the Nobel prize?
But, clearly you’re simply using terms without understanding what they mean.
Food distribution is a complete disaster. Lots of middlemen between farmers and consumers inflate prices
Whenever the milk price is low, we get farmer's protests that they don't get enough for their milk. Turns out they get 9 cents per liter for which I pay more than a euro. You could double their pay, include it in the price, and I wouldn't care.
There are often a lot more factors at play in these sort of things. Some rational, some maybe not so much.
Your example with milk is a very good illustration - something that raises the farmers costs by a few cents is much more important than what it might seem based on the fact that the difference is small compared t owhat the retail buyer pays.
All the leverage that farmers have can't get them more than 9 cents/liter. That's it, there's no hope for them to earn 18 cents/liter - sure, the wholesalers probably could, but why would they gift money to other businesses without any need to do so? So if your milk production process gets 1 cent/liter more expensive (but your competitors, possibly far away, are still willing to keep the same price), you can't get 10 cents/liter, it simply wrecks your profit margin - if your profit margin was 11% (1 cent/liter profit out of 9 cents/liter revenue), you might as well go out of business since you won't be earning anything.
All sorts of narrow specialized skill jobs (e.g. rebuilding electric motors) have gone this way in the west.
Mango farms are a pretty good example. Old farmers have grown their trees very tall and let the fruit grow as big as possible. It is very difficult for pickers to harvest the fruit. If you train the pickers to prune the trees and ensure a consistent size you can often plant more trees, have each tree bear more but smaller fruit with superior yield.
Because of the decreased height fruit pickers can harvest more fruit per shift and the risk of fruit falling to the ground and only being used in food processinng is minimized. Overall it's a net gain for poor farmers and fruit pickers in Africa and consumers benefit from a greater availability mangos.
These techniques are very common in developed countries though.
and at least that option might help fertilize their fields for next season.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_supply
Probably because raising the wages would cost them more than the loss of the harvest since the price per tonne of fruit was already decided by long term contracts and there were no financial penalties for spoilage / mis-harvests in these contracts.
Ever since food became a global commodity, the conditions in food manufacturing became a ruthless race to the bottom - with the worst offender being meatpacking. The John Oliver segment last weekend was horrifying to watch, even from an European viewpoint (where we also have a history of exploitation and animal cruelty, but nowhere even close to that).
The worst paid are always the most powerless.
Of course having rare skills that are in high demand also gives you power, but it's one of many kinds of power that can give you more control over your own salary.
It is the case, but leaves some assumptions on the table. Namely that you understand that price exists to be a deterrent, and when price rises too high you will decide that you don't need something anymore.
The fruits rotted in the fields because they weren't worth picking. There was no need to pay anyone to do a job that wasn't deemed worthwhile to do in the first place.
That may be true, but why weren't they worth picking? In agriculture, large buyers often enforce artificially low prices (monopsony). Even if farmers were willing to pay pickers more, there's no point if the buyers refuse to pay a fair price that accounts for increased wages.
The exact same reason. As the price rises in the grocery store, you and I stop buying those fruits. When we stop buying them, there is no need to produce even more of what is already not being purchased.
Sad that this is one of the plot points of The Grapes Of Wrath and is still happening today.
That industry is arguably booming too, making more than it ever has in the past and growing wildly year over year.
And yet game programmers make some of the lowest salaries among all devs, last I checked. Especially at entry level.
To me, that entire industry seems geared towards grabbing fresh faced grads who are loaded up on dreams of making games, putting them in infinite crunch, and discarding them later when they are burned out.
([1] "And don't try to bypass it by building in another country and then come to sell your wares here")
There is a reason this is not what laws look like.
Hollywood is already one step ahead of you [1]. No reason game studios wouldn’t follow suit, given a law like that to incentivize them.
In part, this is because so many people were burned in the past that it's now standard for contracts to include provisions specifying which profits the talents/investors are getting a % of. There's also many A-list talent that simply refuse to work for a studio which uses Hollywood accounting. And finally, the public-trading status of so many studios today basically renders Hollywood accounting impossible at a legal and financial level.
But the primary killer of the Hollywood accounting system is the big switch to streaming, in which royalties/etc are paid upfront (at a time-value discount) rather than over time, which essentially eliminates all of the opportunity to include "costs" (like usurious interest or marketing expenses) that had been used to generate paper losses on otherwise successful films.
And more importantly, unlike Hollywood talent, game developers and anime animators as a group have never been entitled to a share of the profits of the products they helped create.
If not, then it seems like someone else is taking all the risk but the employees are reaping all the rewards.
It would be great for me personally if my employer was forced to share his profits with me during the good times. But the reality is that during the hard times - when there's a global pandemic for example - he's the one who has to remortgage his house and max out his credit cards to make payroll, whereas I'm just a guy who can walk away with a month's notice.
At the moment, the risk/reward equation is unbalanced. For owners, it goes from outsized risk at startup to outsized reward at success; for employees, it goes from outsized risk at startup to moderate risk at success
If a startup fails:
Founder loses two years, his life savings, and gets paid nothing.
Employee loses two years, keeps his life savings, and gets paid salary for that time.
Completely different risk propositions.
What, you mean, like, bailouts? Because we do bailouts. Only difference is that, while the taxpayers pay, they see no return.
Artificially supporting failing businesses has negative consequences upon society, supporting a struggling individual has positive benefits to society.
That's because corporate limited liability shields stakeholders from losses beyond their sunk costs.
As an employee, you probably are close to last in line behind most of the other creditors, and may have to just write off that last (missed) paycheck. But that paycheck you are never going to get is the full extent of your liability for the company's losses, even theoretically.
Not that it encompasses all the risks you're exposed to (time not working, looking for a new job, etc.) But those are the same regardless.
you're simply making things up. stop it.
you can look up the hierarchy of creditors, and see where employee compensation lands. they're fourth priority, after domestic support obligations (probably not relevant to a business), administrative expenses (gotta pay the courts and court-appointed bankruptcy trustee), and claims from involuntary bankruptcy.
employee benefits are in the fifth priority. there are four more priority levels (6 through 10), and then all of the unsecured creditors.
Sure, technically employees are near the top, but that doesn't help if all the cash and assets are long gone.
On the one hand we want to incentivize risk-taking and entrepreneurship. On the other, we recognize that it takes a village to launch a successful company, and we want to share the wealth.
On the one hand we recognize that all work is not equally valuable. On the other, we we value people beyond their work.
Abstract discussion of this is always disappointing and policy based on abstract discussion is always disastrous. I really wish we could be more precise in our language, because then we would at least recognize the tremendous difficulty at hand.
Maybe an easier incentive would be to give tax breaks to cooperatives?
There's no reason that an employee who just happens to work at a firm that becomes successful should get profits from that, while a similar employee doing the same work who just happens to work at a failing company should get nothing. How could you justify that?
Putting business profit taxes in a big pot and spending them on everyone evens this out.
Fundamentally all you're really saying is you want corporate taxes to be higher. Which is arguable given the well-understood negative consequences of that which hurt everyone (e.g. taxes dissuade business formation, which means no jobs at all).
That sounds like every startup job pitch.
It never really pays off later for game programmers.
A $2M exit sounds great until you factor in the extra taxes and 5 to 10 years to realize that. Many software developers could make a substantial amount of that, without the risk, simply by aggressively working career changes.
One of the biggest barriers to me is getting over my need to make code that I think is clean. And every time I try to read about best practices in game code I come across the same mentality: Who cares, write code quick and dirty, as long as it works it's fine.
And that's fine, it's just intimidating for me to write code like that. Too much perfectionism or something. Maybe too much "What if I do it wrong and introduce a bug so entangled in everything that I can't unravel it".
I wish there were even some bare minimum best practices suggestions for game code.
This is definitely speculation on my part but maybe he didn't become a coder focused on his craft because of the finances afforded to him from Braid, maybe he created Braid a quality game because he was a coder focused on his craft?
If Google cared at all about the targets that game developers cared about, my Gmail wouldn't take 10 seconds to load and run at 2FPS once the page is there.
I've read some of the best code I've ever seen, written by programmers in the games space. Code with very few tests, heavy intertwined behavior, wide-reaching global effects, and lots and lots of state.
Ultimately, treat the code as an artifact of the project: make it as clean as you need to get the game done, but any extra scaffolding you add will only come back to bite you later once you want to change how something is wired. From that end, all the usual suspects apply: make code easy to delete, make it have clearly-defined boundaries, and depend on other code as little as possible. Push yourself to use copy/paste more than you think you should, you'll be surprised how easy it is to delete wild experiments if you don't have to untangle the web of dependencies.
You're correct that optimized code is generally harder to maintain. Optimization often requires punching through abstraction layers or calcifying certain constraints or assumptions in the code.
FYI, about a dozen years ago I comfortably used GMail on a 450 MHz PowerPC with 512 MiB of RAM. The javascript ran without a JIT, completely interpreted. It all ran just fine. Now here I am, on a multi-GHz multi-core box with gigabytes of RAM and a JIT, and I have to keep GMail in HTML-only mode. I simply can't run the javascript and still operate my computer. Mail is piling up because I can no longer select lots of email for deletion; it isn't practical to click every single item.
I've never been in the gaming industry, but what I've heard from some developers is that writing very dirty throwaway code is the norm, since most of it is thrown away anyway when the game is done. Which leads to the buggy mess we get even from many triple A games, and a never ending cycle of re-writing the same things for each game, even within the same studio.
Simple, contrived example: if I create an open-world game with open-world design, I can complete quests in any order. Maybe I can start doing a quest, and then decide to stop doing it halfway through, or maybe I can switch quests halfway through.
The test case matrix for this is now: every quest x every other quest. If some quest spawns a timer that will do something in 3 minutes, and something else forgets to stop it when I switch quests, that's a bug. Maybe the timer spawns some NPC, and it should stop when I switch quests. Or maybe the timer will reset some world state, and should fire immediately once I switch quests. But maybe not always -- if I complete the quest but the game internally 'switches quests' to the next one in the cycle, I don't want to despawn the NPC.
Is this code? Not really engine code, it's more like data, or scripting? It's not really the code that's reusable between games, and between engines; it's custom-built for the game's flow itself. That's where, in my experience, a good majority of "AAA bugginess" happens.
Every engineer knows interacting mutable state tends to make code buggier. Well, a game simulating a virtual world is essentially a huge ball of deeply interacting mutable state by design.
The real hell comes when you think you're working on one and it's actually the other; you either burn time on an overcomplicated solution or invent a maintenance nightmare.
Just like any other development, you need to make guesses about what will change and what will stay the same and your efficiency depends on the accuracy of those guesses.
I say "possibly-misguided" because there are some people for whom that is their one and only dream, and if that is their choice, hey, great. Go for it. I just want people to go into it with open eyes. However, I think the bulk of such people are simply misinformed about A: the nature of game programming and B: the nature of non-game programming. For the most part, they're a lot more similar than a lot of young people realize. You don't go into games programming and get to "design games"; you're going to consume tickets and do a lot of repetitive scut work. Frankly your odds of finding a good job where you're self-directed and not entirely doing scut work is better outside of the game industry.
So... do your part... spread the word that the games industry is mostly bad jobs and the non-games industry actually has a lot of good stuff in it, so that by giving young people a better understanding of the real situation they can make better choice, and help starve the games industry of its continuous supply of fresh-faced naive grads to exploit.
But I had some great professors in university that steered me away from the game industry. I'm quite happy working as a web dev now and I can do games as a hobby.
The main reason is that there isn't enough competition. Video Game Companies are pretty much in a monopoly. No one is making a game like GTA. No one else is making a football game (You need the license), No one else is making doom. No one else is making Counter Strike.
Games became brands. The only thing that drives you out of business is your own greed of recycling your franchises/ideas.
Oh and also many of those companies do not need that many of the "expensive" devs because many of those video game companies are using middlewares like unity or unreal engine.
With more competitions better video game companies would hire better engineer at better salaries. that will lift everyone else.
As evidence of what I'm talking about I also cite the absolutely huge number of "indie" developers, the vast majority of them not being the ones you've heard of, because most of them aren't famous and face sales figures in the hundreds, if not dozens. Many of them are actively taking a negative salary (that is, burning somebody's savings) to work in the game industry.
People make weird career choices for the perception of prestige or being able to call themselves part of a team. I got a friend who is an Agricultural Mechanic who works for some local owned companies. A few years ago John Deere built a facility nearby and you'd be surprised how many mechanics, who by all accounts liked their jobs, moved to work for John Deere for less pay, less benefits.
Video games aren't that much different. People will harm their own career goals thinking they can work for a brand name when an unknown company might have a better fit. I'm sure they have valid reasons for making the decisions they do, but from the outside looking in, it just looks like fanboyisms.
Monopoly doesn’t just mean “this company is bigger than I’d like.”
I'm sorry, but this is completely wrong.
First, there is immense amounts of competition in video games; the industry is bigger than ever but there are so many companies and even small fry indie shops can make it big with talent and a bit of luck.
Second, there are tons of GTA/Doom/CSGO/sports games clones, licensing notwithstanding, that fail for various reasons that usually boil down to "bad game." Brand popularity matters, sure, but many studios blasted their way to huge sales and fame through having a damn good game, like Minecraft, Terraria, and Rocket League, to name a few.
There's so little barrier to entry in the gaming industry at the moment. If you make a good game, you will generally get tons of sales.
I wouldn't necessarily say "make good game get sales", just because there are a fair amount of devs who don't get marketing right, but the point stands.
Successful games tend to get purchased by larger companies, but there are a lot of large game companies. Valve, Epic, EA, Nintendo, Sony, Rockstar, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, Bioware, etc. And that's not even getting into mobile/Facebook games, which are easy to speak derisively about, but are still major players in the game space.
Game companies are about the most-diverse and least-monopolistic of all media we consume.
According to Stack Overflow [1] the median age of a developer is 33 years old, whereas the median age of a game developer is 31 years old [2]. That's not likely to be a big enough difference to substantiate your position.
[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-pro... [2] https://igda.org/resources-archive/diversity-in-the-game-ind...
If there is such evidence, by all means produce it.
You can have a bunch of people who jump in at 23, get super exploited, and burn out in two years balance against one single person over the median age, so long as that stream of younger people is serial. The median is unchanged, but a lot more people leave the industry feeling exploited and abused by it than remain.
I am not disputing that the game industry has a lot of churn. I'm disputing that the game industry has substantially more churn among younger people than older people and that the churn is significantly different from the rest of the software development industry.
It's not so much that young people are uniquely exploited and leave after a couple of years, it's that the number of software developers doubles every 5 years so that there is a huge imbalance of young people in the industry in general.
There's also a ton of societal pressure to "follow your dreams" or "pursue your passion", and people conflate their passion and enjoyment of playing video games for what it would be like to make the games.
First off, people need to differentiate the enjoyment of something with the making of it. Not the perfect example, but I like to eat meat, yet I know I would hate to be a butcher.
Second, if you really enjoy something it's often better to keep it as a hobby. Most people find all the joy gets sucked out of their passion when it also involves the business of selling, supporting customers, and managing costs.
That's actually a way better analogy than you think.
But it's not just that. Every job has a mixture of tangible and intangible rewards. Game development scores relatively poorly on the tangibles: less pay, fewer benefits, less free time. But for many people, it scores incredibly highly on the intangibles:
- Spending your day writing code that makes insurance rate calculations comply with the latest changes to Iowa tax law versus making an orc explode if you hit it with an axe just right.
- Working in an office that lets you wear chinos on casual Friday versus wearing whatever you like, coming in when you like, and being surrounded by culture and people that resonate with you.
- Working with accountants and lawyers versus artists and sound designers.
- Working on a product used begrudgingly by employees of some giant accounting contractor versus make a game you love to play.
- Sitting next to folks doing the bare minimum just to get a paycheck versus the comradery of being on a team that really believes in what they're doing.
- Writing code that's difficult because it encodes Byzantine legal regulations versus code that's difficult because it uses the latest graphics algorithms to push hardware as much as possible.
- Being at a company no one's heard of making software know one knows versus being at a brand your friends all know working on products they're excited about. (Anecdote: When I flew to Orlando to interview at EA, I ended up mentioning it to a guy sitting next to me at the airport. He looked at me like an absolute celebrity. "Dude, you're gonna be working on Madden?" I still remember that moment.)
So, yeah, the hours and the pay suck. But when you're in your twenties you tend to have a lot of time and not a lot of bills. Working on something that resonates with your peers, your culture, and your passions is really valuable.
I wish big companies exploited that less, sure. But you see low pay and crunch even at small non-exploitive companies which implies to me that much of this is simply people rationally trading off tangible rewards for intangible ones that are more meaningful to them.
I find it really weird how much software engineers criticize taking a pay cut to make games while simultaneously romanticizing leaving tech completely to become a farmer, writer, chef, social worker, etc. (all of which, for the record, have miserable hours and shit pay). Game devs are essentially doing the same thing but at least they get to use their tech skills in the process.
I'm glad I'm not at EA anymore because my values and priorities changed. But I don't regret my time there and it got me my current job at Google. If I'd spent that time chasing some other low-paying dream like writing fiction, it's much less likely I would have been able to make that transition.
> Working in an office that lets you wear chinos on casual Friday versus wearing whatever you like, coming in when you like, and being surrounded by culture and people that resonate with you.
Most dev jobs are the second thing. Most dev shops don't have a dress code. Many have adopted flex time. And further, with covid, a lot are fully remote now. Modern development is nothing like Office Space.
> Working with accountants and lawyers versus artists and sound designers.
You seem to think accountants and lawyers are boring, uninteresting, etc. That's just silly. Just because someone's job is boring, doesn't mean they are. A lot of my co-workers have hobbies in art, music, blowing shit up, etc. Just because they spend their day job combing over the tax code doesn't mean they aren't every bit as fun and interesting as someone who's day job is art.
> Sitting next to folks doing the bare minimum just to get a paycheck versus the comradery of being on a team that really believes in what they're doing.
I find it hard to believe game dev doesn't have the "I'm just here for a paycheck folk" Probably not for long, but again, surprised if that's the case. In anycase, comradery and teamwork exists in a lot of dev shops. Just because you aren't making an orc's head explode doesn't mean you can't get excited about increasing stability, performance, or getting a product that saves a bunch of time and money for the company. There's a lot to celebrate beyond "That looks pretty".
> Writing code that's difficult because it encodes Byzantine legal regulations versus code that's difficult because it uses the latest graphics algorithms to push hardware as much as possible.
Both are puzzles to solve, so why diss the one you don't understand? Further, what makes you think regular dev DOESN'T look to push hardware harder and faster than it previously went? Performance work is universal for development.
This isn't to say there aren't boring dev jobs that pay well. Certainly a large number of jobs are "Make REST API over the database". But even those can have opportunities for growth, learning, and finding coworkers you love to work with.
I think you have a really warped sense of what the average software job is really like.
What about embedded systems designers? What about machine/traffic control systems? What about cutting edge stuff like tik tok's recommendation algorithm (which disregarding the politics, has to be marvelled at for its ability to pair users with content they like)?
There is more out there than just Big 4 corporate paper shuffling to make the suits in head office more money..
Also, I'd argue the number one tangible you're missing vs something like, say web dev, is flexibility. Pre-covid, none of my friends in the gaming industry had any flexibility to work in a remote fashion and was very studio based. Whereas remote working has been becoming increasingly popular in the web dev world, and I've been working remotely for years now which was a huge QoL improvement.
I do romanticize about leaving the tech industry in a kinda similar-ish fashion to what you were stating in that example, but really it's more about romanticizing an early / soft retirement for myself, which is only made possible because I took a higher paying path than game development. But yeah, I do have friends in the industry that love it despite the hours and lower pay, because the people they work with are great and they're very passionate about their projects, whereas yeah, I'm not exactly passionate about some of my projects and am doing it purely for financial and career advancement reasons so it contributes to sometimes really extended burnout periods and decreases in my mental health.
So yeah, to each their own with this. I love gaming and have made some of my own games as a hobby, but I just couldn't justify it as the core of my career despite loving it. Kind of a shame in some regards I would say, but it is what it is.
If you're AAA, the obvious problem is one of agency - just like being "guy #4968 who worked on Michael Bay's Transformers 5", you … basically have no influence on anything meaningful about the work - you generally have no voting rights to affect the gameplay, or the storytelling or the balance, or just about anything you'd care about as a gamer looking in from the outside. You're just a machine that produces assets (the vast bulk of coders working on those games tend to be scripting together content, whether it's shaders or level scripting).
But if you're not AAA, and it's your job, there's an equally bitter compromise: you have to make a living. There is a significant overlap between the venn diagram of "doing truly excellent work" and "making a decent ROI", but there's a reasonably significant area where they don't overlap. More importantly - I think the most meaningful questions lie smack dab in that area that doesn't overlap, because that's always the part that gets axed in the interests of expedience.
In order to even approach most of the interesting questions in gamedev (whether they're questions of gameplay design, storytelling, balance, etc, etc), you have to essentially start with a full, finished game, and iterate on what's flawed about that title to try and push it from mediocrity into excellence. Many devs do this by making spiritual successors to games they love; some do it by making their own game, and then iterating from there. RAD/Prototyping can "short circuit" an answer to some questions, but we're at a point in the industry where most of that low-hanging fruit has been harvested, and if you really want to make any progress, then the point at which you've finished a 1.0 of a game isn't the "finish line", but rather, is just when you're really getting started. Even if you're making a "spiritual successor" that tries to make something better by tweaking the recipe, that's still your first experiment - now it's time to drive the car you just built around, and learn what works and what doesn't.
But this absolutely trainwrecks right into the typical economic model for a "we're actually making a living off this" gamedev - except in rare cases with new revenue models, that point right there is precisely the point at which you've got to tie off that existing game, call it done, and move on to a new one. If you quit right there, you don't really learn anything - you just make a series of mediocre games (or occasionally, a lucky good one), but you never really understand why they're good or bad, because you're too busy churning out new ones every couple of years to experiment with reworks.
Almost all of the truly great games we've got going right now are cases where there's been such incestuous cross-pollination that multiple studios have essentially done this to each other (major genre titles like FPSes, fighting games, etc), or are small indie developers who've just knuckled down on one "crazy idea" and churned on it for like 10-15 years (minecraft, dwarf fortress, etc). There are other examples like the Civ series, where the devs have essentially made "the same" game 6 times in a row, letting them iterate massively on the formula.
Furthermore, the brutality of having to make a living off of it really hurts friendships - game development is an absolutely savage industry, financially, and chances are perhaps 90% that you're just not going to stay above water as a business. It takes some extraordinary friends to hang together in the face of that. If you're at all human, people will get scared and lash out at each other for not putting their backs into the oars, at least, once it's pretty clear you're not going to make it. Losing the friends who you went into the thing, with, is bitter as hell (I narrowly dodged it, but it scared the daylights out of me).
> Being at a company no one's heard of making software know one knows versus being at a brand your friends all know working on products they're excited about.
I noticed a dramatic shift in people's reactions when my introduction conversations changed from "I'm a programmer" to "I make iPhone apps".
“A lot of people just felt that there was value in being able to work on anime that they loved,” Mr. Hirakimoto said. “No matter how little they got paid, they were willing to do the work.”
Looking back at his departure, he said, “I don’t regret the decision at all.”
This is the way it's "always been" for game development. When I was in college 15 years ago, it was the same environment. It turned me off from pursuing a career in game development (among other factors). I'm sure more senior people than me have similar anecdotes.
A friend is on the Call of Duty team, and Medal of Honor before that. The way MoH turned into CoD is the owner of the studio that made MoH was unwilling to sufficiently share the profits, so basically the entire team walked out in mass, got their own publishing deal and made CoD.
But only the people who've made a runaway hit have that kind of bargaining power. The other 90% of the industry is pretty grim.
Things are a lot better on the indie/casual/mobile side, as those tend to be smaller studios with close friendships/partnerships.
For a developer, the skills learned for working in the videogame industry are highly transferable to better paying jobs outside of video games. Skills learned on the job are also equally valuable outside of industry. When a developer is ready to leave the videogame industry, they have skills that are in demand and are able to get positions equal to their experience.
For a 2D animator, keyframing and tweening are not well-payed skills outside of the anime industry. Skills learned on the job are equally not well payed. When an animator is ready to leave the anime industry, they have to start at the entry level of whatever new industry they're entering.
To find that the last few years of your life are deemed meaningless by the job market after working your ass off day and night... That is a real gut punch.
On a serious note, there's a slew of skills an animator has on their Talent Stack (https://personalexcellence.co/blog/talent-stack/). Mere fluency of Photoshop, Illustrator, being able to DRAW period, work ethic, are no mere skills at all.
Physicians at "renown" institutions actually tend to make less (on average) than the average physician. They can do it because so many physicians are willing to move to a high CoL location, work more, and take a pay cut.
The best jobs actually tend to be in rural states and areas. Pay is better and work/life balance tends to be better.
CNN article: https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/27/pf/jobs/doctors-pay/index.h...
Seriously, just do it. Do your passion and earn a decent living.
Now all those things are much easier to do and understand. There are thousands of tutorials on the internet. So making games is becoming more like writing books, putting on plays, making a low budget movie. More people can do it than there is an audience.
The best are still very valuable, in every discipline. But the supply of average people is almost limitless.
> They typically pay animation studios a set fee and reserve royalties for themselves.
> While the system protects the studios from the risk of a flop, it also cuts them out of the windfalls created by hits.
And because we've been taught that discussing how much you earn is taboo, especially with your colleagues.
I don’t think it’s a supply side problem. Another phenomenon is happening here. Animators do have the option of unionizing which mitigates these sorts of issues.
But it's also art. Painting, cobbler, pottery, blacksmith, etc have always been sought after jobs and yet are and have been the least paid throughout our history.
Every frame is literally sketched by hand entirely which makes actual skill required. Anime especially given the more realistic human proportions and extensive use of z-axis. For something like sponge bob or South Park in the US it’s much easier... but in Japan the animation is a real skill.
Take a look at this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yglxt331WoY . This type of skill of animating is basically non existent now in any place other then japan.
Also blacksmiths were not always the least paid. Prior to the industrial revolution it was a common job.
The vast majority of anime is static backgrounds with slow pans and static characters with mouth flaps. The backgrounds and characters often get outsourced and the studio just adds facial features and mouth flaps.
If anything the people who do these scenes which I’m assuming is the same people who do the mouth flapping requires raw skill that is not easy to come by.
If there is a role for a low skill artist that exclusively does mouth flapping then yes it’s an oversupply side issue for those people, but it does not explain the low wage of the person who does the action scenes.
Unless you see coding as art, animation jobs are going to be more fulfilling and that is always exploited (people willing to do it for less because it feels better) by the market.
The number of surgeons is artificially low because of limits on the number of residency spots in this country. So I agree that prices can probably come down, somewhat. However, attorneys are not limited in the same way but can still cost a fortune, because people are willing to pay a lot for perceived value when there's a high stakes outcome. Some things just aren't worth farming out to the lowest bidder.
You need to do a residency to be properly trained to handle all kinds of situations. Your surgeon can't be in a position of "well I've never done this in a supervised setting so let me go find someone to teach me" as the lead surgeon. That's exactly the reason they do a residency.
With law, for example, you have to go to law school and pass a test, but if you do, you are in. There's a lot of law schools out there, to the point where a large percentage of people graduating don't get good jobs. The same isn't true for medical residency graduates.
>It's that there are literally X number of slots
This is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of a privatized healthcare system. It simply cannot be functional this way. I hope Americans will wake up and realize that this sort of welfare should not exist.
It's always sad when I see Americans brag about their highly efficient free market systems when they fail the basic requirements needed for a free market to actually work.
Yes it can work and yes you'd be allowed to brag but as it is you haven't figured out how to make it work yet.
https://www.ucop.edu/federal-governmental-relations/_files/f...
Get prescriptions to variously mostly safe drugs anti depressants/weight loss drugs/blood pressure medicine, dandruff shampoo.
Refill any prescription.
Those two items are probably 80% of the reason anyone I know goes to a doctor.
Now for surgeons.
It's true that you want someone with a lot of experience for surgery but there are still ways to get more highly trained surgeons. Throw out undergrad requirements for med school, if the average career for a fully trained surgeon in 16 years we've just increased the supply by ~25%.
Allow surgeons from other countries to come practice in the U.S. without completing a full residency. We could easily suck up the worlds surgeons because we pay so much more.
Open up/pay for more residency spots.
This role seems to be increasingly filled by Physicians Assistants and Nurse Practitioners.
As mentioned below, PAs and NPs already do a lot of these tasks. However, the big value-add I see in MDs as opposed to seeing NPs or PAs with problems is that they have the depth and breadth of training to have first-hand experience with the exceptions to normal circumstances.
The standard medical mantra of "if you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras" works great for normal scenarios. If there actually is a zebra situation, though, I have far more faith in professionals with extensive clinical training at identifying those situations.
> Those two items are probably 80% of the reason anyone I know goes to a doctor.
Regarding prescriptions, this may be blind faith in regulatory institutions, but I assume that there is a reason that mostly-safe drugs require a prescription. If the criteria for prescription refills or simple procedures doesn't require the full breadth/depth of clinical training, though, then NPs and PAs already exist to fill that role.
> We could easily suck up the worlds surgeons because we pay so much more.
I'd argue that this is an explicit non-goal. We don't want to attract the most surgeons/doctors, we want the surgeons/doctors we have to be trained and practiced to an extremely high bar. You're definitely right that there are lots of scenarios which don't require this extremely high bar, and that's the reason why not all medical personnel are doctors. Nurses and physician assistants play a critical role in healthcare specifically because they can tackle those 80% of cases you mentioned, but the way around this isn't to dilute the training of medical doctors, it's to delegate the work that's better performed by others to those others.
software engineers are one of the best paid people today. i highly doubt that we are hard to find.
https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/software-develo...
it has been often mentioned but i don't think i have ever seen a link to the report people are quoting.
> Less than 1 year $103,269
Sounds like it's pretty hot!
How would this avoid (a) and (b) though? Your society needs to somehow balance what jobs people do. There is no real way to measure how difficult a job is. You could argue that hard manual labor is a very difficult job, yet there are many people who prefer that to sitting down, learning a lot and then doing a mentally exhausting desk job. The willingness of people to do a job needs to be accounted for when you're deciding whether a job is difficult or not, but this very much depends on the person. How would you account for this without looking at how difficult it is to replace a person doing a specific job?
Society is also structured in such a way that for the most part every job will have folks clamoring for it. When you are born without capital, you have to take what you can get.
Unfortunately I think it's going to keep getting worse as wealth inequality increases.
Imagine walking into a monopoly game where each piece is already bought and owned. Try to win at that. Instead, I could imagine you wind up working for someone, and feed them a majority of the profit while you get scraps.
I don't have good solutions for how to fix this, other than perhaps universal basic income would alleviate things.
Entities like this can't get funding though, since it endangers the contemporary business model and leaves little in the way of profit for banksters since by nature company stock is traded only internally, exchanged between employee and the company to prevent external interlopers from gaining a foothold. Governments would also see a great deal of their power dissolved as a product of the internal democratic processes dealing with social issues.
It comes with issues, but with multiplicity, I think the stratification would be greatly remedied. The stratification comes from non-owners participating in the business, they don't have voting rights and they're subject to lower compensation, generally. That's what we're subject to now, generally, in any case. With more companies following this modality, I believe that would be alleviated to a degree where if one was insistent they could always find an opportunity to become a worker-owner.
And what are "wild" profits? Because most companies are making far less than 8% of revenue as profits.
But I don't think that is necessarily true nor that things would follow suit if we think like that.
I mean, we employ much more people today than in the industrial revolution. Yet, people are paid significantly more, child labor has been abolished, all that working 8-9h a day instead of 14-18 which was common. We are not in a cooperative environment, when it comes to salaries. Companies are legally obligated to show gains to their investors, and if they can cut salaries and keep the profits they will do so. We are in a competitive game against employer, where the balance is found when both parties compromise. But make no mistake, as soon as the working force stop fight for better working conditions, it will not stay the same, only degrade.
Don't read that in a personal way. We are in no way personally against the employer, but the employer as an authority figure. The balance is not found through cooperation but rather through clash of professional interests.
No, it would be good, because it would mean that they were more efficiently utilizing their current workforce, probably through technological advancement that should ultimately benefit the entire industry. Technology is almost entirely driven through higher labor costs and dictating better conditions for employees. The benefits of technology improvements are also not zero-sum (equal to their costs to develop or maintain), and are redistributed through those higher salaries and through taxes.
If you end up unemployed at that wage level because your skill level has not made the new cut, there are other things you can do. Wanting to program but not being able to find somebody who wants you to program at the minimum wage is no more tragic than wanting to program but not being able to pay your rent doing it.
You have to be careful there because the overwhelming surplus of cheaply acquired goods/services goes to the people who received the goods and services and not the person selling the goods and services.
Businesses only capture it when they have a competitive advantage (either because they have no competition or b/c the cost savings can't be matched by a competitor).
Grocery clerks are lowly paid. But grocery is a competitive, low margin business. So those low wages mostly mean cheap food.
David Graeber made this observation, and suggested some sort of class tribalism.
Btw, to use cleaning as a specific example, taxation of domestic services is broken in almost every (western?) country and skews how people spend their time and money. Most professionals would happily trade an hour of work for an hour of cleaning services, however, by the time you put income tax (and VAT in my case) on top, your hours need to be about 2.5x times as valuable as your counterparty.
Law is a very status-conscious industry (even more than software) and so most of that oversupply of law graduates are not "in the club". They get paid relatively low wages and have to fight with each other for peanuts.
Some much smaller fraction of law graduates from top schools or who otherwise have the right connections get paid extremely high salaries because they are only competing with each other.
You do get supply demand corrections over time though. If you know you'll be making minimum wage if you didn't go to a top law school a lot of people would stop doing so.
Or another way to look at this is that lawyers get paid based on their reputation. Firms with a high reputation only have the ability to hire so many new lawyers. Those positions are indeed highly sought after, because that's how you get paid well, by getting in with a firm that already has a reputation. You're going to have a hard time starting out on your own, building up a reputation. Hell, sometimes you need to have built enough of a reputation just to get a position with a firm that has a high reputation.
While people/companies are looking for the best person/firm they can afford to represent them... cleaners are still just cleaners.
It’s basically a psychological refusal of our vulnerability in the world
Edit: What I mean to say is, the good lawyers make the same good money, the vast majority of lawyers do not.
It's also not even about being a "good" lawyer. It is completely determined by your law school and GPA. The big firms won't even look at your resume if you're not from a top 10 school.
But generally yes. School first, then class rank.
He was good at that area of law, one which everyone encounters at least once in life. He did not do the work million-dollar lawyers do and he did make millions.
The difference is vast when it comes to the lawyers who I know who are making incredible amounts of money and those who are just... somewhat independent small business folks.
That's not the case for starting lawyering, you have to: Go to law school, pass the bar, have a set of specialized skills than cleaning doesn't require.
This combination of skill and long (and costly...) processs is what keeps lawyer salaries higher.
What makes you think that? It's pretty trivial to cram for the coding and design questions, and be a mediocre engineer on a good career trajectory.
we live in a society that is heavily litigated because we have governments at all levels churning out laws and regulations to their benefit and those of their supporters.
There are some fields that exist to protect you from physical and financial harm and those will always exist and be desirable until we can eliminate the causes.
Watching Gantz, you wait for that moment at the end where something happens and realize you've wasted 10 hours of your life.
Accused of a crime? You may realize you've wasted your life in jail because you hired a bad lawyer.
I thought parent's argument is that you get thrown into jail because you didn't hire any lawyer. It's not that you got a bad lawyer, it's that you must hire one to defend yourself in the first place. Thus there is an always growing need for lawyers, bad or good.
Perhaps this isn't true? It's possible that salaries for lawyers are not going down, but that salaries for law graduates are going down (because not all law grads become lawyers).
Also, I thought salaries outside the major firms have cratered? (Or maybe were never all that high to begin with but law school has become crazy expensive and the lower ranked schools are churning out more and more people? IDK.)
My local bartender has a JD and passed the bar. He bartends because it pays better.
If you want to learn how to solve any engineering problem or how to create an illustration you can choose from ample amount of tutorials that are free or very cheap and teach specifics. If that's not enough, you can ask veterans for guidance and most will happily help you out and even give you specific detailed answers to your problems. People also would be hired based on their performance and no one will ask for diploma if you show performance.
On the other hand, if you ask a lawyer they will be extremely vague and would never solve your problem or guide yo without a pay even if the solution is something practical like "Go to the Home Office, find the whatever manager and ask for the hr-103/B form".
They also would limit practicing through memberships to professional organisations, limiting the practice only to formally trained lawyers.
Governments meddle with the economy all the time, there was a short period of laissez faire being the dominant thought in the Western World in 18th and 19th century, but after WWI. Nowadays governments command 30-60% of GDP.
So it would seem this article is truly about the animators responsible for the animation between keyframes. Unfortunately I can't find the article on the making of anime I had once read, but basically, the key frame artists are drawn by those truly responsible for the art style you see. The animation work between frames truly is grunt work (this is the truth, I'm sorry if you find this offensive) that is accomplishable by many.
And lets not pretend that shows with good animation are automatically a success. You need a good story, good pacing (direction), and in most cases you need to choose the story from a pile of hundreds of possibilities.
And, as is often forgotten when the whole "revenue sharing with employees" is brought up, the employee is staking no capital and can leave at any time. If the anime fails, surely you don't suggest "revenue sharing" that loss with the employees.
The vast majority of anime does fail, or only serves as an advertisement for the source. Just look at any given season of anime, the majority of anime is not well received.
The highest profit margin I can find is Toei Animation, which in 2020 made 11.4 billion yen in profit on 54.8 billion yen in sales[1], giving them a 20% profit margin. If every animation studio had that high of a profit margin and 100% of profits went to workers, industry wages would rise 20%. Though if that were the case, the company's profits would be zero and one bad year would end them.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20200930164251/http://corp.toei-...
The only weird corporate structure I found was Studio Ghibli. Their museum's store (but not the museum itself) is run by Mammayuto Co., Ltd.[1] This company loses 60 million yen a year but has only 1 million yen in liabilities. I'm guessing it's a way for Studio Ghibli to avoid taxes of some kind.
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=https:/...
People would complain about cleaners getting more money than their white collar jobs, but that's classism embeded in part because of the current situation. As soon as people realise job X makes good money, suddenly the stigmas go away.
Mentally demanding is worse that physically demanding for our bodies. All we do is create things to keep us from thinking, GAI being the end goal.
Sure I was very tired afterwards, but at least it was a nice kind of tired. The mental tiredness/stress from coding is much worse in my opinion. If I could earn the same doing a physical job, I would probably switch now.
I do want to acknowledge that some of these physical jobs will destroy your body long term.
I did some 3d animation in the past, and once in awhile do some 2d animation. I've never met anyone else who does traditional 2d animation in person, in comparison with the zillions of programmers out there in the wild.
Most people want a steady paycheck at the end of the month and (a feeling of) security. This seems to cost money indeed.
At least in Europe, when you are a freelancer, you earn considerably more for doing the same job. Why? Because of the earlier mentioned point.
You would think most people would start freelancing because of this, but it's not true. Most prefer the safety.
That may solve an observer's concern about profit/exploitation, but it leaves the worker with strictly fewer options.
People not getting what they want is just as bad whether or not anyone else is benefitting at the same time.
Good artists and animators are very hard to find. It is about culture more than anything. Japan is the problem.
My favorite sub-genre concerns adjuncts: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc.... All of them can be summarized as, "When supply exceeds demand, prices fall."
/sarcasm
Too many predatory gatekeepers offering dream jobs to kids who don’t know any better. It’s not just anime. In music, you got acts with albums in the top ten albums of the year lists with millions of plays making like hundreds of dollars per year on Spotify, same people are on tour each year in the red financially after being on the road. The economy isn’t kind to the creators who entertain everyone.
and the animators of shows that flop still got paid something.
if you want upside risk, you have to be exposed to downside risk.
because they are worker. they get paid with the wages that they agree on. Koyoharu Gotouge probably get a big chunk of that money since she created the manga.
If something can be produced with little differentiation – bulk or standardized quality product or service, its all about cost and supply and demand. This is how competitive market economy works. Profit margins become razor thin.
I don't know why we'd care too much about it here. Japan's unemployment rate is 3%: as far as I understand, people are working these jobs because they are their dream jobs, not because they don't have options with better conditions.
There are lots of other jobs in the entertainment industry like this - hard work, low pay, long line of people who want them - and I can't find it within myself care all that much about the outcome.
I think the only exception to that was Kyoto Animation (KyoAni) Studio which made fame for treating their employees very well. Unfortunately they were targeted by an arson attack in 2019.
People who can afford daily food and internet and computers will never be classified as living in "poverty" here.
I'm going from memory but level 1 was what you describe.
Level 2 is being able to meet your needs but all your time goes into meeting those needs.
Level 3 is having enough extra money to pay for things you don't need.
Level 4 was IIRC basically not having to work.
Most countries have a range of 1-3 or 2-3 or 3-4 or some distribution of that.
Anyway long story short, western countries mostly have 2-4 and don't know what 1 even looks like (on a lived experience level). They've seen pictures of it and there are people living in Level 1 in western countries, they just aren't as front and center. If you've lived near Level 1 you know what real poverty looks like. If you haven't you think that Level 2 is real poverty. Both need to be addressed, but I agree that Level 1 poverty is so much worse for people living there.
Like a phone is £20, but a weekly shop for a family might be £100. A TV might be £250, but rent is £500.
So you can be in the paradoxical situation of being able to afford to buy a phone or a TV one month, then next month run out of money for food or rent.
Some that I can remember:
- Someone completely mad at their phone because the video on a call was dropping (just after landing, while the plane was still taxing, in the middle of the tarmac of a very large airport).
- The airbnb-mate in a shared Airbnb crying because the outside of the entrance of the house smelled a bit of cigarettes. I mean like real telenovela ending style tears.
- Someone kicking and shouting at a ticket vending machine because it was out of service (a working one was next to that one)
- Complaining about food choice in an event buffett that had like five different cuisines.
Fortunately my needs haven't grown that much, it seems that the only first world thing I want is a Japanese toilet.
Did a really good job of defining the levels and putting them in perspective. In addition, it's a refreshingly optimistic take on the direction humanity is trending. I read the book because it was recommended by Bill Gates
Thank you for reminding me.
I totally agree, we hear so much negativity his approach to showing how humanity in general is better off today than any time in the past is encouraging.
And there are plenty of people living rough in the west.
1) pay lower wages until some of the people leave the profession
2) use some kind of essentially random (even if theoretically bureaucratic or administrative) method to assign those slots to people; for example, you can only do this job if your parents happen to be people in the industry
3) vicious back-stabbing politics and sharp elbows, as people who want those jobs suck up to the ones who get to choose who gets them
4) conditions (other than wages) in that profession get so bad that people become dispirited and drop out
You also see this in certain areas of academia, or in the music industry, or many other fields. There can be combinations of these methods, of course.
The best way around this conundrum (that I know of), is to do this as an avocation rather than a vocation. For example, the many people who have composed music, written novels, etc. on the side while earning their money in other ways. It's not a perfect method, but it's the best (least soul-eating) way I know of.
It's not dissimilar from things like L1 support in tech, which are often low cost international folks trained to respond using a fixed template. Both don't get paid much because their existence is expressly designed to be as easily replaceable as possible.
https://i.imgur.com/ORAFhaN.png
If this is accurate, then only A-list voice actors are making any serious money because they're scarce and in high demand. I think that most of the money in anime just gets spent on creating more anime, so very few people end up making money.
One Piece is younger than both Lord of the Rings and James Bond but as a franchise has grossed more than either of those. [1]
Fist of the North Star and Dragon Ball are also in higher positions on this list than One Piece.
[1] https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/the-...
The NYTimes article flaunts a $24 billion market figure, but this figure would be the few big names (Naruto, One Piece, DBZ) and those series are making money off of physical product sales and licensing deals. The anime, at the end of the day, is not the product - it's just a commercial for the product. Every so often, studios experiment with original anime, sometimes sponsored by various other companies, but these rarely turn out to be financially fruitful and primarily end up again as advertisements or a test of some new technique or technology.
Most "anime" is being created in Japan(That's the literal definition of anime) hence the issue.
You don't hear about starving Pixar animators or Disney artists overworking to extreme levels.
This is part of the Japanese culture. Moreover, I would say that anime is having more difficult time making profit and being sustainable.
In Japan, you are expected to deliver no matter what, working extra hours and grinding is normal. you are not compensated for any of that.
Very very few publishers care about the quality of the content they ship as long as things pan out.
You have so many numerous examples of that in the industry.
While this is very high level, it is important to observe that none of this has anything to do with being really good at making hand drawn tentacle porn, or writing code for that matter.
If you want to maximize for total compensation, then you should work in an industry where the companies have to compete for your talents constantly.
A friend of mine runs a motion graphics studio. He does work for big names. He said his number one fear is a teenager in his mothers basement with Adobe After Effects.
How is that either legal or possible to survive on such wages?
There is this magical internet they can create their own IP and charge whatever they want. Nobody is obligated to buy it, just as they aren’t obligated to go into crap contracts.
I wish the article had been clearer about this. I'm sure animators in Japan work really hard and aren't paid much, but while the article made it clear how I should feel about the situation, it left me uninformed on the details, which would seem the more important part of a news article.
This isn't just limited to collectivist societies, either. Being 'sponsored' by family is pretty common for artists and writers all over the world.
Median household income in Japan is about 30K USD, which is lower than the US but a lot more than $12K.
The most recent example of this might be porn performers who are seeing a lot of money with the advent of platforms like onlyfans. None of them made anything from the tube sites.
The same can be say about other entertainment industry: A few on the top make the majority of the revenue. Many people are attracted by the prospects to make it to the top. Despite the low pay, they are driven by sheet passion. They are often burnt out and forgotten.
The world doesn't need pianists like it needs software engineers. This demand was also different 200 years ago.
This is basic economics that not enough people seem to understand when they choose a job. Or maybe they do understand but want to ignore the problem early in their careers.
As a student in my 20s, my love for mathematics exceeded my love of engineering. I studied both and was good at both, but never went far beyond undergrad level mathematics due to job opportunities.
Sometimes in life we need to clearly separate what to do as an amateur (for the love) and as a professional (for the money). Sometimes the interests align, and if they do, good for you! But it's important to be honest with yourself about goals and planning.
A world class pianist makes 25 to 75k per show. Far more than any developer lazy or not.
A concert pianist makes 50k a year. Getting a seat is the hard part.
And someone majoring in math can go as far as someone majoring in engineering. Your college doesn't teach how to code, you need to do that on your own.
Even if we picked such an outlier, the bookings would be sparse.
A mediocre SWE in the Bay Area has a paycheck every 2 weeks over the course of decades.
> And someone majoring in math can go as far as someone majoring in engineering
The choice in my personal story was about becoming a professional mathematician, not majoring in math and then getting a job in engineering. The latter in fact is what I did.
Remember this is extremistan, top 1% of artists earn pretty much all the industry’s revenue.
The anime industry seems like it should be rife for someone to pull that off.
I'm always amazed at how little money artists (of any form) make. You can get really significant access to them for very little money.
There really isn't much to say
What distinguishes animation and most other industries from software is individual leverage. A fed up software engineer has a fairly decent shot at either working freelance or starting their own operation. This is possible for animation, but there's way more of a hurdle in competing in the market with an independent company unless you have prestige or lots of money. It's really not easy to make substantial profit with a shitty animated film(unless you can afford exceptional marketing, and even then...), and it can take years of making no money to produce one. Contrast this with software, which has a possibility of being profitable in the first month, and can be improved over time, whereas with films and shows you pretty much have a few shots or just a single shot at doing it right. In other words, most animators know they can't just strike it out on their own if the going gets tough, which is one reason why unionization is more common in animation. You'd better be insanely talented if you think you're going to make a living as an independent animator, and most animators aren't excellent at all aspects of animation. There aren't many "full stack" animators. Believe me, I tried to be one. There's very disparate skills that go into making something that's production quality.
There's also a general cultural difference between animators and software engineers. I'm painting with a broad brush here but, in my experience, animators tend to place more value on prestige and there's way more workplace politics at animation studios than I've ever witnessed on any software team I've joined. There's a prestige factor with software, too, but I don't think we make as much of a value judgment between someone who's a Googler and someone who's a freelancer. Again, just my opinion. Since animation is a part of the entertainment industry, it inherits the good and the bad of entertainment in general, which includes not highly valuing anyone except directors and producers. Most everyone else, besides big name actors, are expected to be treated like trash and disposed of when they aren't immediately needed anymore. One reason I ditched animation, besides my lack of talent, was that it can be very challenging to stay working at one studio for a long period of time. People do it, but they're the ones that seem to work a lot of extra hours(for no pay) and have a handful of useful talents that make them worth having around between projects. Basically, animators are used to being treated like crap and have a different sort of work ethic around it.
Entertainment also attracts a different type of person. Again, another generalization, but there are way more neurotic and crazy people in entertainment, animation included, than in other fields. I think that's because it attracts both visually creative people and those who are bent out of shape easily if they aren't the ones winning, since the field can be so incredibly competitive. This leads to a dichotomy of needy animators who are always doing anything they can to "get their foot in the door" and tyrannical leads and directors who don't value their subordinates because they see themselves as Hollywood moguls. Of course this isn't true across the board, but my family members and friends in the field all have multiple stories of leadership treating people like garbage and getting away with insane things that you think would have been rooted out in the #MeToo era. In the end, it's all seen as a necessary evil on the journey to the glory of producing successful art. I don't think this is nearly as common with software(and many other things) because the average person doesn't give a flying F about software, so the drive to achieve prestige is very limited.
So to summarize, for various reasons, there's far more ego involved in animation, which leads to people with power treating everyone like crap.
Oh, before I conclude, we can't forget how much it costs to produce an animated film or TV show that meets the current expectations of the industry. Even though I think a wall is being hit in terms of just how much visual spectacle they can produce, the precedent to pay animators poorly has been set long ago when new studios were popping up and desperate to make something. Other industries, such as software, never went through the same cost hurdles during infancy; even back in 1996 you could start a software company easily with just one guy behind a single workstation and maybe a server rack.
Was it also supply and demand when a bunch of silicon valley corporations decided to keep salaries low with secret agreements?
And to answer your question, no. It was a crime, and law enforcement put a stop to it.
The particularly nasty bit of collusion was between Apple and a few other companies (Google, Adobe, Pixar). This collusion only happened because of Steve Jobs's vindictive personality combined with interlocking directorates[2]: Jobs was on the board of Pixar, and Google & Adobe executives were on Apple's board. Despite Jobs's best efforts, the collusion fell apart after only 4 years because the companies kept poaching from each other. It was over a year later that the DoJ filed its first complaint.
Despite what most people think, it's really hard for companies to cartelize. There is a massive incentive for any one member of the cartel to pretend to collude while secretly not colluding. Typically, such arrangements fall apart unless there is a governing body that can sniff out and punish defectors.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
For the vast majority of people who need to work to be able to afford rent/food/etc, they _must_ sell their labor somewhere, and that choice is additionally restricted by the skills and experience they have (you can switch careers, but an animator can't just pack up and become a programmer immediately - significant time/money is invested to gain the skills and/or experience and/or credentials needed for another job).
In aggregate, the labor market generally follows "higher skill (i.e. lower supply) job = higher wage", but zoom in on any smaller part and that is not guaranteed.
I.e. still capitalism but the owners of companies are required to share X percent profits with employees?