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Comment by q_andrew | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately this probably won't be changing any time soon. Similar to the movie industry in CA, execs see game developers as totally replaceable, because they kind of are. There are so many people who are extremely passionate about making games, that they will jump after any opportunity, even when they know it isn't paying what it should. The only thing that might bring about some kind of reform is a union or a change in US/CA/UK labor laws.

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One thing that I haven’t really seen mentioned is that the barrier for entry is high in a lot of video game development. Meaning, I can’t really take 3 of my friends and make the next GTA in my garage. Those type of games need developers, but also artists, writers, actors, etc.

They’re expensive, risky operations of which development is only a part of.

This is probably why it makes the most sense to treat developers as a commodity in the industry. The level at which the consumer interacts with the developer isn’t as high as say, a website.

Underrated comment.

It's even worse when you consider that the engines are generally already made, you only need developers to do what you could almost call glorified scripting compared to engine development.

I think Unity and Unreal probably have to pay their devs a reasonable salary. But having devs work in Unity or Unreal to produce a game is not really all that hard. That's kind of the point of Unity and Unreal.

Having done work in a variety of contexts from Game Engine development to working in Unity, what you are describing is only true for the most trivial of projects. Larger projects (especially AAA) have so much customization of the engines and pushing of their boundaries that they require just as much technical expertise as engine development for many of the required tasks.

There are advantages and disadvantages for using these engines. They soften the "getting started" part of game dev for newer people, but for complicated projects it tends to be kicking the can down the road for dealing with deeper issues.

You'd be hard pressed to squeeze good perf out Unity while fully using the HDRP and not understanding the ins and outs of the pipeline.

Agreed. I really doubt the parent comment has any idea what they're talking about.

Have you actually worked with a game engine. I'll say any day of the week game programming is harder than front end web dev

I didn't take their comment that way.

I saw it more in that it's not the early '00's anymore where every company had their own custom engine. you can hire devs into a company with experience in UE4 or Unity and skip a significant amount of onboarding, especially if they are hired early into a project. There are certainly hard parts, but this means you can pay junior engineers to worry about "easier" parts of the game while letting the seniors/leads worry about architecture, infrastructure, and optimization. Not too unlike a front end web dev from what I've hears.

And for "street cred" I've worked in all 3 environments, unity projects, UE4 projects, and custom engines.

>But having devs work in Unity or Unreal to produce a game is not really all that hard.

From OP.

Even with an engine game dev is much harder than front end web dev. The depressed salaries are due to the amount of passion game devs have.

Then again doing something in Unity is much easier than building an engine out. I credit Unity with teaching me to program.

Unity famously hired Mike Acton (a minor hero in parts of the C++ world, and a major hero if you restrict to games). I am quite certain they pay people like him, doing infrastructure engine work that scales across all users of Unity, something in the ballpark of what he could make at a tech company. But most game programmers are not doing anything with that kind of leverage, and I think that's largely contributing to the business' ability to pay them substantially less than they could at a FAANG.

I would say this is probably not too close to reality. Artists, writers, actors, qa can drop into a new game a lot easier than spinning up software developers. From my experience they're treated less like a commodity than the other disciplines.

That said, not all games are services yet so once the game ships anyone can make it to the chopping block.

I'm not saying that software developers are more, or as replaceable as creative talent. I'm just saying that from the employers perspective, much much more has to go right than just software development to make a successful game.

Google/FB know that if they get the best engineers, they will have a top-tier product. But games don't have anything close to that same guarantee. You could have the most efficient, elegantly-written, perfectly abstracted game, but if the game-play sucks, it's not going to sell.

This is another issue with the passion hypothesis that Carl Newport coined. It makes one blind to other opportunities where the pay and the treatment is better. You aren't born with passion, you just love doing things that you're good at. So why waste precious time and be miserable at these awful companies in this awful business.

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