We've never had issues finding artists, much of the bulk work is outsourced anyway.
Cloud infrastructure/devops, data analytics, backend code, data storage all need people especially in mobile games.
Cloud infrastructure/devops, data analytics, backend code, data storage all need people especially in mobile games.
I think they meant graphics programmers, not artists.
You'll get a lot more people in Highschool who know Web simply because of how accessible and easy it is and a lot less people in Highschool who know how to create a physically correct rendering engine or a realtime graphics engine. It is brutally harder.
If you're just working on top of a platform, it's trivial for sure.
With engine creation you are creating the tool. It's programming through and through.
Though I can see how a lot of backend people are taking on the role of "configuring" stuff so it's hard to delineate backend programming away from it completely.
Still even when taking this into account, it is of my opinion that a rendering engine is significantly harder then even K8s or spark.
You are right though that with existing game engines graphics programmers are not as needed anymore.
They specifically are talking about creating the tool.
In the mobile world very few companies bother. If they do, they're either so old that Unity mobile wasn't very good and already have their own engine or they're doing something niche where Unity doesn't make sense.
Everyone else just uses Unity and Unreal, because trying to launch a new game is hard enough without having to build everything from scratch.
There's a ton of shader development happening. Optimizing the graphics stack takes some specialization.
Depends on how one defines “graphics programmer”. Those people are arguably more “tech artists” than “graphics programmers”.
Lots of people can write clever shaders in node graphs. Those folks are usually more “tech artist”. Although the line between “graphics programmer” and “tech artist” is very very very fuzzy.
The highest paid IC's at my last few companies (gamedev) were people that had been there 20 years (He was AI programmer) or the infrastructure people running the gameservers and multiplayer backend.
That might seem weird. But it's hard to hire infra people as they can work basically anywhere and will have as much enjoyment.
Render programmers can work in CAD or Games, there's much less demand, and they tend to want to work in games.