How do I get into the game industry
garry.net
garry.net
Today, it's easier than ever to get started making games (even I can do it! [0]) but standing out in a crowded marketplace is very difficult. The music industry saw a very similar trend about 10-15 years ago, with the release of consumer recording equipment. In both cases it lead to a 'de-professionalization' of the industry, where most participants are amateurs but most of the success still goes to established studios - barring one-in-a-million outliers such as Garry's Mod, or other indie darlings like Hollow Knight, Balatro, Stardew Valley.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/
Sticking with the music analogy, it is the difference between programming your own DAW vs being the audio engineer/writer/producer/singer of your own rap album.
I'm a dinosaur who's supposed to hate the music kids listen to these days, but the quality seems as good or better, and the quanity magnitudes higher, so maybe it was a professionalization of amateurs?
The best indie games are amazing these days, but they hide a long tail of disappointed developers.
I'd wager a lot of them are money grabs from someone who followed a tutorial on how to make a certain type of game in Unity, swapped a few assets, and put it out there hoping to make a few dollars?
Video here (fun watch!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6_qbe26m9E
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Though I'll summarize what she played that was released on August 4th, 2025, of what she chose to buy:
* "The Last Mage" was a game produced very cheaply by apparently a lone gal (the videographer found the dev diary) that was a fan of K-pop, levered heavily on existing assets, to produce a campy idea as best she could.
* "You Suck at Football" levered existing "viral game" ideas like "Only Up". Very much someone's early attempts.
* "Velocity Racing 1000" was a racing game that appeared like someone's early attempts. Very wonky controls and physics.
* "Potato Cop" is a simple action game in an deliberately "amateur style", likely produced very quickly and cheaply. She had fun with it though.
* "Escape from Amazonia" is an horror game with a quirky plot premise that did elicit some actual screams. Again, produced very quickly and cheaply, but she had some fun with it.
* "Descent" was a horror game with some genuine attempts on the presentation side, and again elicited some screams. Some clear effort there. Someone was on to something with this one, and it's a shame they didn't refine it further.
* "Agu" is a crude, early access, challenging platformer. This won't go anywhere, but the videographer made the best of it and had some fun with the sheer difficulty of overcoming the physics.
* "Bee Simulator: The Hive" had some FANTASTIC presentation and assets. Localized for 14 languages. Great voiceover. Somewhat educational. It's apparently a re-release of a previous game which is why it has poor reviews. Some quirks and bugs, but some might really enjoy it.
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So are you really "competing" with 50 other games if you put out something extremely high quality and polished? No. You might be competing with 5... at most. If you put out a genuine banger and took the time to market it in advance, you should get noticed.
Steam's algorithms clearly are doing a good job and ensuring most of this stuff isn't getting much visibility outside of release. Though it's there to find if you deliberately look to unearth all of it.
The emphasized part of this quote is probably far more important than you give credit for.
I imagine a lot of solo game devs simply don't have the money to pay for marketing, and with many communities having rules against self-promotion, combined with the latest Discord phishing scam being "Hey can you try my game?" and delivering a trojan, it can be hard to get your game in front of people. Even if you're in a community for game devs, most of members are there to get people to play their game, not someone looking for a game to try.
I bet there are some real diamonds out there, hidden in obscurity, lost in the landfill of early attempts at making a game.
To potential game developers: Do not despair based on reports of a difficult market, despair based upon games you have personally looked at that failed.
Personally, for almost every failed game I can see a good reason why it failed. Sometimes games succeed and I don't understand why, but so far I haven't seen a game that failed and I don't understand why.
If what I'm saying is true, then to succeed you simply need to build a game that does none of the things that lead to failure.
I don't think success/failure should be framed in any other way than "did the game break even for the dev/publisher" and that's beyond what any player perceives. Because crossing that line will send devs into despair, as you mentioned, it's just not sane.
The claim is: Make a solid game - a solid story, solid mechanics, solid graphics, no bugs, etc., and the game will succeed.
And that's an easy claim to refute -- point out just one game that was at least "solid" on all those fronts which nonetheless failed. He's asking you to show him one, so that he can update his beliefs.
"They didn't spend $500k promoting it" doesn't seem like a "good reason why it failed".
For one other example I know of because friends made it is Phantom Spark: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1924180/Phantom_Spark/
Making a good game is table stakes for success not a guarantee.
I should clarify that by "success" I mean the game had a good amount of attention and enough sales to potentially make a profit. This is what I care about as a potential game developer. Does the market still give decent games a decent shot at being profitable? Regions of Ruin is a decent game and had a decent shot at being profitable.
I looked at Phantom Spark. It's a simple F-Zero style racer through nice looking 3D stages. It's fairly minimal, only one type of racing vehicle with some color variations. The main draw of the game is improving your time trial times. There's some characters that put text on the screen, but their style doesn't really fit the game. Overall, the characters don't appear to contribute to a story or anything. I'm guessing there's maybe like a dozen tracks? This game was reviewed by several gaming sites, including IGN and received decent scores. One website estimated it made $80,000 in revenue.
Everyone will have to judge for themselves whether or not those two games had a shot at success. Judge for yourself the state of the gaming market.
Both are rated Very Positive on Steam so clearly both are good games in the opinion of the gaming population at large.
The thesis that all you need to find success is a good game is clearly not sufficient.
FWIW I think Regions of Ruin was most definitely a commercial success and that estimated revenue figure is probably very low for the review count they have.
This indie dev (who has made millions themselves) agrees with you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCzhyUsDHPE
This is true but it’s also equally true that no plan survives contact with the enemy. No one can perfectly predict the future.
The market isn’t static and everyone else is also trying to avoid doing things that will lead to failure. In some senses trying too hard is also a cause of failure because it leads to homogenization and you enter the market at the same time as everyone else with the same ideas. Games is a place where innovation can be key to success but that is also where the risk lies because it’s not clearly understandable until after the fact. This in part is why AAA seems pretty stagnant.
"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life."
- Jean-Luc Picard
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to talk with one of the musicians who played at a friend's wedding.
They turned out to be absurdly skilled musicians in general who can each play multiple instruments and genres. They've got their own songs, their own musical tastes, their own selection of tracks that they really enjoy playing for their audiences.
And yet they are reduced to playing popular radio stuff to make money. Lowest common denominator stuff that gets pumped out like products to a wide global audience. That's what people ask them to play.
It just feels soulless.
Why though? I’ve played in both original and cover bands and had the most fun playing “the hits” in cover bands to be honest. I think it is the audience feedback and knowing that we are playing beloved songs that I enjoyed.
That seems right... Out of every person in the wedding, this person remembered me because I sat down to enjoy one of the older tracks they were playing while everyone else was busy.
Maybe it's just their tastes. He told me they can play anything but they just really liked playing instrumental music a lot more than big radio hits. They really liked playing jazz which I also enjoy.
A billboard top ten from the 90s or 70s is going to have legendary music on it.
A recent top ten is going to be ...well Rick will tell you it's pretty bad, maybe something passable once in a while.
But I think it's possible that there is a lot more quality music than there ever has been. It's just not rising up past the mumble rap, auto tune pop, or Taylor Swift copycats. Even Rick gets very excited about new music once in a while. Symptom Of Life by WILLOW comes to mind.
It will be game on when a bedroom artist can make their own master vinyl and print their own records without a $45k upfront cost.
Doubt. To me it seems like 99% of everything is crud and I have to wade through a lot of crud before I find something that's actually good.
If this were the case, they'd be paid better.
Thomas interviews lots of successful indies about how to make games that provide a living. My takeaway is that while the AA/AAA environment may have never been more challenging, if you can ship small focused games, you the evolution of devtools (eg free and/or functionally free engines for teams earning under $1m) means that making a living shipping small games is doable. You just have to ship small games, not try to compete with studios spending $150m on the low end.
Monolith platforms right now are more unpopular than perhaps they've ever been. Businesses in your area would LOVE to not be saddled to the monstrous site-builders and corporate-focused clouds that don't fit their businesses. If you want to make a good living, get out there and network with folks who run businesses in your community. I make a solid side-income doing IT for businesses in my area, just easy stuff like setting up WiFi services that they can rely on, managing on-site POS systems, printer ink, that sort of shit. I did the same thing at a previous job and now I do it for a handful of businesses near me. I don't make a ton of money but I think I could scale this up if I really wanted to, I'm just happy with it where it is and want the reliable salary of my WFH programming job too, and a lot of this stuff I also manage with automation.
There's a lot of money to be made in small IT/Software/Games. It takes more legwork but it's far more rewarding IMHO.
If you're talking about making popular music isn't the de-professionalization of the performers and (in many, many cases, especially for those groups like Metallica or The Beatles) the writers and composers more interesting than de-professionalization of the recording engineers? Which maps pretty directly to changes in tool technology, vs taste?
Though I think you could also argue the opposite, that there have long been huge amounts of "amateur" mass-popular music compared to, say, Mozart. They just didn't have recording technology to turn into Elvis or The Beatles or Dr Dre or whoever.
In games the analog is probably random card games, or Mafia, or dominos variants, vs big productions...?
Yeah, same here! I had done a couple of simple personal Flash games previously, but Garry's Mod is where I really felt like I cut my teeth on programming. Doing Wiremod/Expression 2 taught me PID controllers and some basic linear algebra, and after having helped some friends debug their code, taught me the importance of style and good practices.
I was lucky to work on a AAA game called The Sims from 1997-2000, at the end of the era when a small team could make a product like that (the teams for The Sims 2-4 were enormous in comparison).
We didn't have the resources to ship a demo, so instead we focused on creating tools for user created content, releasing "SimShow" before the game was released to enable users to create and preview skins, so after it was released there was already a big collection of skins available (many that we could not have published ourselves like the Star Trek skins). So the fans were already producing content and sharing them on web sites themselves, before the release.
https://tcrf.net/Proto:The_Sims_(Windows)/SimShow
https://archive.org/details/sim-show
Then we released "Transmogrifier" to make custom objects, which was widely accessible because it only required inexpensive easy to use tools like Microsoft Paint or Photoshop, instead of requiring expensive and enormously difficult to use 3D editor tools like 3D Studio Max (Blender wasn't an option at the time).
https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Transmogrifier
https://www.thesimstransmogrifier.com/TransmogrifierDocument...
Yahoo Groups were instrumental in enabling fans (kids, adults, even elderly) to make objects, share them, and help each other learn how to use the tools.
The great thing is that Sims mods gave people a purpose and motivation to learn powerful tools that would serve them well in many other aspects of life. I knew a grandmother who learned to use Photoshop just to make furniture for her grandchildren to play with.
Will Wright talks about the interrelationships of tool builders, content artists, web masters, story creators, collectors, browsers, and casual players, and organizes them into an ecological pyramid with many casual players at the base, then fewer collectors/browsers, storytellers, content artists, webmasters, and finally a few toolmakers at the apex.
SimFreak and SimSlice are a couple of prolific successful webmasters and toolmakers who met through the Sims community and got married, and are still producing some of the most amazing collections of integrated Sims objects like ZombieSims, and also working on projects with Will Wright's Gallium Studios:
Will Wright on designing user interfaces to simulation games (1996) (donhopkins.medium.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk
Will Wright's Design Plunder (With Slides)
You don’t need a feedback loop here.
A more positive way of framing it is that it has never been easier to make properly produced music/games.
If you have a lot of free time on your hands and want to make a good looking game today, you will have all the tools you need to do so and absolutely nothing stopping you from making something great. No capital required.
Obviously, it means that the field is now very crowded so if you want to live from it you will need to stand out a lot. But the activity in itself has never been more accessible than now.
Amusingly, it means the easiest way to enter the video game industry nowadays is probably just making games. This equally applies to music and video by the way. In all likelihood, people will fail to turn it into a job, but the entry cost has never been this low.
All of those are games made by "small to medium sized" studios and sold enough to support their team (maybe not Quest Hunter, as that's older). My point is that there's just SO MANY games that're just mid-size and floating along. Basically no one is getting RICH on game dev, but there's more folks making a living there than ever.
I've hired many game programmers and the key to getting into the industry is demonstrating a few critical skills:
1. Sufficient technical skill in whatever your field is.
2. Curiosity applied to problem solving. How can we make this work?
3. An ability to finish what you start. Get it done.
If you're a new programmer looking to start out on this journey, I recommend picking an engine and just start making stuff. Participate in as many Gamejams, Mods or minigame productions as possible. Ship things; Finish them. Then, when you're interviewing for a 'real' game job, you will have some experience to share and discuss.
For technical candidates, there's a minimum threshold that you must cross to be considered. For programmers, it's often C++. So learn the basics, get proficient, use the tools. Read the books on programming interviews and learn the types of things that are expected.
I would prefer engine experience over language experience if wanting someone to join and get to work quickly.
But it's definitely the hardest software domain I have ever tackled, and if only it were just software! Game dev is realy 6 other disciplines in a trenchcoat. Which disciplines they are depends on your game and whether or not you have help.
Hard disagree. In fact, learning how to apply clean code and architectural patterns in game dev has kept projects manageable and on track and done nothing but level up my general software ability.
Optimization is paramount. To maintain 60 fps, you need to calculate your game state and render graphics in under 1/60th of a second. That's only 16.6[..] milliseconds. If you want to appeal to the high-end players with 240 hz monitors, you get less than 5 ms. When you're operating at that level of latency, every microsecond counts.
You start having to care about how your data is laid out in memory so that you can optimize cache usage. You start caring about branch mispredictions. Multithreading becomes an absolute must, but locks are landmines. If you're using a garbage collecting language, per-frame allocations are kryptonite and you re-use buffers to avoid unpredictable pauses.
Your profiler becomes your best friend. You're not just looking for good performance, but consistent performance. If there's a 3 ms spike in CPU time every 10 frames, your players will absolutely notice it and it will destroy the feel of your game. That 3 ms becomes a critical bug.
Sure, someone might occasionally pull out a profiler, but only if things start becoming visibly bad. But this is an exceptional situation, not the norm.
On the other hand, game engines are constantly engineered with features that go against performance: interpreted scripting languages, ad-hoc garbage collectors (for assets, not only for scripts), visual material editors[0], deep object oriented hierarchies with FAT objects (hello Unreal Engine), etc.
[0] Shader compilation stutter is something a lot of gamers notice and dislike and a common explanation for its existence is the number and complexity of shaders current games use. But one thing very few seem to notice is this is only the case in engines that allow designers/artists to create materials with visual editors that generate shaders without understanding the implications. In engines that do not allow that (such as current id Tech) and artist have to create their materials using a low number of predefined shaders you rarely hear about this issue.
I worked at the intersection of engine and gameplay for a decade, and I’ve personally never seen an engine dev who doesn’t use a profiler nearly every day, and I certainly did. If you watch game dev presentations at conferences (Siggraph, GDC, etc.) you will generally see profile-driven development for new engine tech, they use profilers heavily and monitor performance rigorously.
Sure people did use profilers and the engine did have various profiling views and i personally wrote some of them myself - both for profiling performance as well as I/O since for some time i also worked on loading/streaming too - but as i wrote, those were when things became visibly bad. Most of the time people were either busy trying to fix bugs or busy trying to implement new features - and optimizing them became something to care about later, if needed (and there was enough time). And TBH usually that was fine - at some point i found some big inefficiency in one of the engine's core data structures, but that same engine was already used for a well received game at the past and the inefficiency only became obvious because the current (at the time) game was several times larger. So the thing performed fine for the original requirements and, at the time, trying to do more would be a waste (after all, it wasn't until long after the original game the engine was made for was released that the decision to make a much larger one was made).
It is like an arms race that doesn’t even need to be played. Whatever is released gamers have shown they are fine with if the mechanics are great. Crysis tried to stand out back in the day as the greatest graphical experience and about all it was good for was a benchmarking tool. No one talks about playing crysis anymore. Meanwhile people are still playing on Bloodgulch as we speak. Still playing dust2.
There’s a seed of truth here, but at the same time, I’ve heard this mostly from people who learned certain programming patterns in school or in enterprise application development, and never learned embedded systems engineering, or just plain didn’t start with game development.
You might be referring to issues with specific game engines, or you might be referring to writing only scripts and plugins for an existing game engine, as opposed to writing a game engine, I don’t know, but generally speaking game coding absolutely can and should be clean. It’s just a different kind of clean than you might expect, if you’re used to thinking in terms of C++ inheritance or functional programming or design patterns you learned elsewhere.
If you want to get hired at a company as a programmer, make really really small things, like tiny games. I am talking start with hangman, then sudoku in the console. Then move on to minesweeper and tetris. If confident do space invaders. At this point maybe get started with 3D? Maybe Unity and Unreal?
There's SO much stuff you'll learn making those games. Maybe you end up making a fancy menu, or adding sound effects. Maybe you come up with some basic particle effects. It doesn't really matter, what matters is you went through it and have something to show.
Don't get side tracked with big projects and trying to be a designer at the same time. Keep it small.
If I am interviewing you and see some solid and polished small games and we can talk about stuff you found cool you're already punching way above most entry level coders.
If you can't make a small game, you can't make a big game. So make the small game first; it should take much less time than the big game, so if you are afraid that doing the small game would waste too much of your time, you are definitely not ready for the big game.
Even the small game requires a lot of work to make it look nice. Consider minesweeper: after implementing the minimum mechanism (click on a field to expose it, you either die or not, the number of adjacent mines is displayed), you are not even half done. You need the recursive exposure for fields with zero adjacent mines, editing the flags, showing the unflagged adjacent fields. Preventing the first click from being a mine. A hi-score table, where you can write your name, and it gets automatically saved, and loaded at start of the game. A menu to choose between simple, medium, and hard version of the game, maybe also custom dimensions. Should the game pause when minimized? All these details matter for user experience. Maybe also an installer?
On the other hand, if you can do the minesweeper right, you can easily create a new interesting game by tweaking some details. Maybe, play on a hexagonal map? Or play on an infinite map that scrolls to the right when you completely clear the leftmost column (except for the fields containing mines)? Add some bonuses (that you can collect by clearing a certain area) that allow you special moves, such as eliminating a mine, or reshuffling the existing mines? Would it be possible to create a version where you can have more then one mine per field? (Just a quick idea I had now, I don't even know whether that makes sense.) Maybe add some time pressure, like you need to make a click before the timer runs out, or maybe every twenty seconds a new mine is added to the plan (make sure it is not right under the user's cursor)? Or just make some non-functional feature, such as displaying a pretty picture in the background, and you get a new pretty picture when you complete the level.
Yet I feel like I get wrongly misjudged as a delusional person trying to make a full-out MMORPG. No my game doesn't have a focus on questing, professions, or theme-park areas and raids. People in this industry are too quick to Pidgeon-hole you into existing game genres when you may be trying to do something new entirely.
I have a playable demo, some interested players who provide feedback in discord, etc. The game mechanics started simple but have gotten more complex with each update. A lot of work is spent in improving the AI and making them behave "smartly". I pay for server hosting and manage the servers. Its just me. But it feels like I don't even get my resume looked at when I'm applying to jobs in the industry. Because I don't have any prior experience?
Okay, pausing is a bad idea if the hiscores are supposed to mean something.
Employers also don't seem to take home-grown experience seriously? Even if you know more about the niche side of things like networking, graphics, AI programming. If you don't have exact experience in whatever tools/framework they use (UE blueprints, Unity, etc), they think you won't be a good fit. Even though tools are just tools and concepts are more important.
That's why I say to make small games that already exist. There's no need to even innovate, you're learning. As soon as it's "your game" the focus is elsewhere and the scope usually gets out of hand. Nothing wrong with showing an original idea, but is it finished and polished?
>> employers are wary about your intentions and whether or not you will stick around
I guess it depends on what the person is showing. If what they show is some big design for a game they want to make and some unfinished pieces of code relating to that that doesn't inspire the confidence that they can finish the work, that they can commit and see it to the end.
>> If you don't have exact experience in whatever tools/framework they use (UE blueprints, Unity, etc), they think you won't be a good fit.
I personally think that's a huge mistake the industry is doing. I have seen it and agree with you that those are tools, and they change often. Being (or only hiring) Unreal programmers will limit you
Actually doing them teaches you how to make them, which will give you foundational knowledge you'll take with you into more complex endeavours. And it will show, I can tell if you actually understand why you built the more complex thing the way you did. If you just cargo-culted a bunch of patterns together in an effort to seem more competent than you are, a lack of fundamentals will show during interviewing.
I don't mean university course fundamentals, I mean pragmatic software fundamentals you get from building stuff.
Which if you think about it is a real issue. Imagine applying at a courier company for a developer role and they keep asking you about the tracking software you've built, parcel measurement integration you've done etc., instead of asking you about your development skills. Having done those things is of course a huge bonus, but excluding 100% of people that don't have that experience excludes a great majority of candidates that could have been a great fit.
The problem is even bigger than that if I think about it. In this example they don't want to know about individual pieces of industry relevant software that you've built, they are expecting you to have shipped enterprise wide solutions that fit the criteria and that doesn't match your skillset. The role they're advertising might be a senior tech lead/developer, but you're not being hired as a programmer, you're being hired as a game maker. They want you for the games you've shipped, not for the code you've written.
Does your little games have "juice"? That's going to get you hired 100%, but mainly because of your skills as a designer, artist, tester, audio engineer etc., coding only made up 20% of that package.
You’re bringing the topic of industry experience into a thread about how to get your first game dev job. If you have industry experience, you have a different problem, and there are different recommendations. The question at hand in this article, and from the comment you replied to is how to start getting industry experience, when you haven’t shipped anything before.
As such you could try to specialize in this area (collision detection, ray queries, rigid body simulation, constraints, solvers, softbody sim, fluid sim etc.). Of course this isn't for everyone as it requires skills and interest in: low level concurrent programming, maths/linear algebra and physical behavior intuition. If you do find these topics fascinating and can demonstrate some ability in them, your skills will certainly be in demand.
In the mean time as others have mentioned I know people, industry pros, that make money on Roblox and UEFN. The valuable part is a talent for creating gameplay systems, which is not in any way related to low level programming or rendering algorithms, then you stand at least a small chance, but due to how crowded the market is the returns on this get smaller every day.
To anyone wanting to make a living from the games industry I would advise simply going outside and doing something else.
Edit to add: I have noticed than when I started in games over twenty years ago people knew hard work was involved. These days if you tell people you work in games you are met with a response that you basically play all the time and are not serious, and to some extent this reflects the changing nature of most of the work being done in that period.
I think people have their head in the sand about how disruptive generative AI will have, not just to the game industry, but all entertainment industries.
It has started with music, 2D and 3D art, text to voice (voice actors no longer needed). Entire 3d environments, and then worlds, characters, story lines will be generated on the fly. The people holding IP will be the big winners (Disney, etc). If you don't hold any IP then you'll be shit out of luck.
I too started in the games industry 20+ years ago, and would not have recommended it even then. Crunch was brutal, the pay was low, and I left feeling like I hadn't learnt software best practices or really progressed in my skill set compared to people working in "boring" enterprise shops.
Convincing people to give a shit about your IP is a totally different issue to producing it, in my opinion. There are already countless talented artists a big producer could hire to make them new IPs but it is still incredibly rare for a new IP to take off.
Art keeps getting cheaper and easier to make yet as a society we are addicted to remakes and expanded universes, new seasons of shows that ended a decade ago etc.
Agree with your points about IP. If it can be enforced, then IP is going to be the sole differentiator of these AI "holodeck" apps. I guess it depends how stuck on certain IPs users are. If new characters and worlds are being created at epic speeds we might not hold them as dear as we think.
That was how people responded when I told them I worked I was a game dev ~20 years ago too.
I hired someone I disliked from high school as a QA because I knew how horrible that job is. Even worse paid than development and you get to play the same level four hundred times in a row.
Maybe this is just more cope but I think its important to remember that anyone who can write will still read books written by others. AI will be disruptive but art is ultimately about sharing and receiving what someone else is trying to share.
I don't think it would be that disruptive, we already have a sea of sloppy half-baked games to swim in and it hasn't destroyed the industry.
I think what people will quickly find in their holodeck reality is that the average gamer can't think up good games, that the shared playerbase is half the fun, and that there would be a serious shallowness to the experience.
I think what will really happen is that game studios will start pumping out even more shitty mobile games with AI, and the type of people who binge 20 advertainment games per week will be sufficiently numbed.
Meanwhile everyone else will continue to desire the same more genuine and substantive games from studios, that is my prediction.
unironically I think this is the next frontier. If "other players" constitute part of the experience, how do you create/attract/curate a "quality" playerbase?
You see it with things like Counter-strike and private servers. Sim racing and leagues/discord servers etc.
I really don't think this is what most gamers want - and I think they'd like it even less if they tried it, for the reason you highlight 2 sentences later...
> The valuable part is a talent for creating gameplay systems
Beyond that, gamers like a sense of "community" - being able to talk to people who play the same game, have a shared framework for achievements and the like, etc.
I do believe generative gameplay will be the next big thing, but not to spit out an entire game by any means.
While there is a ridiculous amount of competition, so far it has been offset by platform expansion. When I started in 2020 the whole platform had about 30M daily active users. Now over 110M. Maybe my share of plays has shrunk, but it's now from a much bigger pie.
(I don't know if this holds true generally or if my games have somehow persisted better than the average game)
Anyway....it looks pretty neat. I feel like the industry as gone from a time of mods, through an era of AAA unmoddable games, and now we're landing on "all games will be mods.". I guess we're chasing Minecraft and Roblox and Fortnite models now.
And yeah, the steam workshop was way ahead of its time, and feels like a new, higher tier of sandbox game. I don't think there's any other game that came out around the same time as gmod (2006) that has had comparable momentum and staying power.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/uses/uefn-unreal-editor-f...
1) Yes, learn to program.
2) Yes, learn 3d art.
3) Enthusiastically do those things almost every day of your life.
4) Don't follow too many tutorials, just enough to unblock you.
5) Let the debugger/screen punch you in the face. Learn to love being told when you are wrong.
6) Keep your expenses low, but probably you still need to go to a relatively good college.
7) Why? That's because a large part of our world is based on needless credentialism.
8) Build tools that people literally use. This is how you know you're ready for interviewing.
9) Grind leetcode and brain teasers and common interview gotchas for your language/domain of choice, but only an hour a day max.
That's basically what it takes to get a real and good job in the industry now. No magic bullets, just hard work and acceptance of some arbitrary BS.
This often translates to anxiety once you get into an interview, because you are trying to answer behavioral/design/career questions based on some heuristic, some proxy, some guess at "what the interviewer wants to hear".
While some interviewers are indeed assholes who play weird games and don't operate anywhere near reality, the truth is, if you've written literally anything that people actually use even weekly to do something (e.g a blender add on that simplifies texture baking, a toy online chat room as a discord alternative, a wrapper for ffmpeg or etc to convert files to different formats, a simple time wasting game in threejs, etc), you will be astonishingly more confident in your answers, even if they don't work every time.
Why is that? Because, by actually writing software without a tutorial that is still good enough for someone to use, it guarantees you have solved some problem, without any help besides reference documentation, and have therefore wrestled with crucial design questions like "should i make this a vector or a scalar? do i need a map here? should i do this by naming convention? should this be done in a loop or should i make it a task for multiple threads?"
It doesn't mean you should like, focus on marketing or chasing hot problems, but definitely do this if you are feeling like you are faking some parts of your interview questions, which are so abstract, they can benefit from delivering a real world answer naturally and confidently.
It’s a mistake to think that software engineers making assets is a waste of time. Engineering and games in general would be better if every dev took a rotation in the art department. The reason companies silo and specialize their teams isn’t for your benefit, it’s for the short-term efficiency of a specific production.
It’s a bonus that you could make assets if you want, as opposed to the vast majority of programmers who can’t. Being able to code+art will also give someone a major leg up in small shops and/or for solo devleopment.
I still think it was a good idea in theory. Crypto is a pain, though. It adds an annoying step to everything.
https://youtube.com/@chriswilsonvideos?si=qD1rbztnI0nY7pDf
Definitely a controversial question in this economy.
The only alternative is to have enough runway to quit your day job and self-publish a game to steam. The biggest problem with this (beyond the money) is having a game concept that is marketable in 2025. If you have both the money and a good gameplay mechanic in mind, this would be the most sustainable path. Setting your own schedule makes all the difference if you can afford to.
the company could definitely do with better PR, and their child safety features are good but not perfect by any means. i'd still say it's a good choice if you're trying to make a game easily and quickly
disclaimer: i've made money from Roblox's DevEx program
Are you from the UK or Europe? Have at it! American game jobs are quickly relocating to those cheaper places. If you are from the US, the costs have gotten too high and the pressure is massive to reduce those costs: large projects are seeing an increasing percentage of the total number of people on the project be from partners outside the States.
The trend is bottom-up: outsourcing partners are providing cheaper staffing starting at the bottom of the org chart, steadily going up said chart. The growing desire to have a smaller primary-studio footprint means more outsourcing in general. A desire to cut costs means more and more of that outsourcing is going to cheaper locals. Often, the majority of people who work on a game are not from the "parent" company - and a quickly growing percentage of those are not in the States.
The model that we are slowly converging on, bit by bit, is maybe 20-30 percent "home studio" in the States, with the rest being partners from non-American, cheaper areas. The pressure that drives this is massive and inexorable.
Some of this came from the lead up to, and the full stretch of, the covid years: up until just a couple years ago, it was quite difficult for an American studio to hire staff - it was a wonderful time to be looking for a job, and salaries for non-engineers (who were cheaper) rapidly went up.
Now we are in a situation where the costs are just too high, so the pressure has mounted to manage those costs. Outsourcing to cheaper areas is the solution, and the pace is increasing significantly.
Again, if you are an American interested in the games industry: don't do it. It has become deeply unreliable and unstable for anyone who isn't quite senior.
//edit - i have more thoughts. These will be deeply unpopular, but I feel compelled to express them.
A well-intentioned union drive in the popular press (a great idea when focused on bottom-of-the-heap, poorly-treated QA teams) accelerated annoyance with American development teams by studio and publisher leadership, leading to more exasperation-driven offshoring. I don't have a strong opinion on this topic, but I have to admit to myself it is a real issue.
At many American studios, covid-era hiring goals changed in a way that placed value on things other than immediate raw skill - instead favoring a more holistic stance on staffing. This was an approachable concept during ZIRP, when funding was more generous, but has put studios in a tough position in the new era of an absolutely brutal filter of pure output.
A passionately-defended work from home thing means that, just as everyone predicted during covid, studio leadership has realized that if they forego the power of intense in-office collaboration, why not just remote those remote jobs to cheaper places? After all, west coast studios still get a couple hours overlap with UK development teams: get better at slightly out of sync development, and suddenly US-timezone jobs don't seem as massively necessary as they once appeared.
Making money to keep the lights on is important, but I like to believe that for many studios, the collaborative process and the art of game creation matter more than maximizing profit at all costs.
So what’s is driving this move to outsource?
1. Greed by owners and investors?
2. Can't be profitable without outsourcing?
3. Other factors?
I get large publishers like EA or Ubisoft just focus on making money, but I do think there’s a strong case for greater solidarity or even unionization among smaller studios and suppliers. Look at an example from an adjacent sector -- Rhythm & Hues, the VFX studio that closed despite its creative success, largely because it lacked leverage against film production behemoths focused solely on profit.
What role do you think generative AI will play in this landscape?
Will it allow those folks who can't find jobs in the game industry to come together and create more smaller studios or empower existing smaller studios, those driven primarily by creativity and innovation, to compete more effectively and bring new kinds of games to life?
i have a hobby of watching movies. i watch a new movie, new to me, almost every other day. after doing this for years i can tell you something: the vast, vast majority of movies made before 2010 were horrible. almost every movie ever produced has at least one glaring flaw that could have easily been fixed. but the idiot at the helm entertained delusions about their crappy writing being interesting. this was all before netflix slop and AI slop… it was all professionals. there is something deeper at play here than indie devs. if you can actually have a rational, clear and accurate opinion about what makes something good then your game will are better than 99% of your competition
If you have taste, drive, and vision, your actual competition is miniscule. Marketing and whatnot can still be a challenge, but it's not an insurmountable wall if you have the patience to climb it. And if you ever feel lost, you'll be hard pressed to find a group more ready to dispense advice than game developers.
If a game truly has "the magic", then you often don't even need to worry about this.
I think the best case study of a zero-marketing launch being successful would be the Apex Legends. That one was like a precision bomb strike in the middle of the night and was wildly successful.
My best advice for today:
Make something in your craft, whether it is art, a game, code/tools, music… that gets significant attention from an audience online.
If you cannot get enthusiasm for your work online, it is unlikely you are going to get a job.
In some ways, it’s never been easier to know if you are good enough. It’s never been easier to learn.
It’s never been harder to stand out. And imposter syndrome is too often confused for “you just arent good enough yet”.
So if you keep making stuff and nobody cares, figure out how to get better or quit wasting your time.
Being able to connect to an audience is becoming absolutely everything.
But yeah… something.
So at least some privilege?
> Our college is free and normally vocation targetted. People who leave school usually either get a job, stay on at school for 2 more years, or go to college.
My mates went to Cambridge/Oxford, I didn't.
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