Can anyone comment on why "big video game" dev pay has lagged "big tech" pay so badly? Ostensibly they are doing remarkably similar engineering problem solving, so why is there such a disparity?
First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. You need a lot more creativity and ingenuity to solve the unusual problems you run into in gaming.
From there, as others have said, it's a simple supply and demand issue. Nowadays I am a university professor, nearly every student who comes in wants to pursue one of the three fields: cybersecurity, video gaming, or recently ML/AI.
This shouldn't come as a surprise, they want to work on the things that influenced them and shaped their experiences so far. There's an absolute over supply of students who want to make video games.
Gaming, like most of entertainment, is a passion-driven industry. You trade good salary for your name in the credits. You trade nights, hobbies, marriages, and your health for this opportunity. That is unless you reach that lofty 1% of developers who are too valuable to be fired.
Not all areas of gaming are like this. Gambling, like working on slot/pachinko machines, pays very well and has pretty realistic work-life balance. However every student I've talked to about this has universally said "no I don't want to make slot machines. I only want to work on GTA/Stardew Valley/Hollow Knight/Fortnite."
There's seriously no shortage of starry-eyed students who are willing to accept minimum wage to solve SDE3 level problems. I was one of them once.
I'd agree with all of this from what I've seen though. The problems that some of my buddies solved straight out of college, while very different than 'hard problems' at bigcorp, are... hard.
One buddy ended up moving to the worst of both worlds... backend infra for a large video game and ended up getting video game salary for bigcorp distributed systems problems.
(And in indie it's way worse, it's more like 1% making it one year)
If you wanna do low-level code, you can go into embedded, sponsored OSI-companies, Microsoft, etc and get paid the same to more than gamedev with 10% of the stress and no crunch. If you wanna get paid much more and do more "vibe"/fun coding, you can go into app/web dev. If you want stability, you go into fintech/medtech/onsite/etc.
Gamedev offers the worst of all worlds and then constantly posits "why is there so much turn over?"...because you made the industry suck to work in.
What do you mean they "made" the industry suck to work in?
It comes in the form not so much in dropouts, but in bad course feedback and bad professor reviews.
"The professor made the class unfun."
"The professor said she's made games but clearly has never done that before with how she taught the class"
I'm a woman so, unsurprisingly, I experience a fair amount of misogyny from students in the class who have never made a game nor have they worked in industry but believe they know how it works.
And to be honest, I think games are a good stepping stone towards a career in software engineering / computer science. Especially back in the day when getting a game to run required you to mess around with the computer haha
You say in a post below that your total games industry experience was a single internship at Blizzard and then a second stint where you "quickly realized" you didn't want to be a games dev at all, and went back into academia where you have been ever since. You say you made a game as part of your PhD, but it's actually a speech therapy program you describe as research. There's nothing wrong with that project for what it is, but your students aren't criticizing you because you're a woman, they're saying they wanted a teacher who spent time in the games industry making the sort of games they themselves would play.
I wouldn't bother pointing this contradiction out normally, but it's just so socially destructive to ask students for feedback and then attack them with the nastiest accusation you have access to, just because they requested a more experienced teacher. Poor kids! It's this kind of thing that results in recommendations to just avoid university entirely. Why sign up for being abused by a teacher like that?
That is not my entire games experience. I have 15 years total, spanning Game Master, lead gameplay engineer, game engineering director, and CTO. I was asked my route to academia, not my entire Gaming Industry CV.
> they're saying they wanted a teacher who spent time in the games industry making the sort of games they themselves would play.
Nearly all of them have played games I've worked on, and can even find my name in the credits.
> Calling your students misogynists is a shamefully harsh attack on them without any evidence to back it up
You're going to make a bunch of assumptions based on a summary of my academic career and then try to insist that misogyny doesn't exist in tech?
Look - you say you have made games, and that your students have all played games where they could find your name in the credits. You also get feedback that your students don't believe you. This is a weird problem to have and should be trivial to fix if true. Just... boot up the games and show them where you're credited as the lead gameplay engineer? What do they say when you do that?
From there, I wound up at a community college running a bachelor's level degree. They hired me because I was the only candidate with NSF experience. They proceeded to fire their grant manager and have me manage the whole grant without extra pay.
Actually used to hire people for exactly what you want to do: be an adjunct for night classes in tech.
If you want to go that route you need to make friends with the Dean and the head of program. It's rare that we hire someone from the general application process, because most people who work in tech do not make good instructors.
This is such a bullshit thing to experience. I had a version of this where I took on extra work that I was interested in which became a new revenue stream but was told "let's see how you do and then we'll see about salary bumps". Never saw an extra dime from it. I used the experience learned to land a new job six months later with a salary bump while dumping the other job responsibilities. It's truly the only way to get that bump you deserve.
What kind of PhD research did you do? I considered going back for a PhD program focusing on simulation as it relates to discoverability within AI research, but kept ruling out it was a bad career decision and should be left as a retirement thing
Seattle based? If so toss me your email or contact and I'll see if I can help you break into teaching if you're interested.
> What kind of PhD research did you do?
Assistive technology. I primarily worked with kids who had cleft lip and palate to improve their at-home speech therapy exercises. Trained some offline ASR models, built a therapy game, and automated metrics. I passed the research onto another student once I got my PhD, but the project lives on as https://spokeitthegame.com/
Robjrivera23 at gmails
I will have to check out that speech therapy game. Before I entered pilot training, I had received new fake teeth implants that introduced a lisp (new airflow) and as a 20yrold, had to go through speech therapy drills with a military doctor for a whole semester to get my qualification back. Jokes on me, cockpit wasnt for me haha.
Seems like you found an opportunity that you really wanted to pursue, but unfortunately at the same time sort of became a stat of those that can't do, teach.
I had plenty of professors along the way that touted their credentials, but they were so stale in what they were teaching. I know I know, a Computer Science degree doesn't match industry expectations, but so many professors definitely did not keep up with what was going on outside of their bubble.
Also I still work in industry.
Guilty as charged, despite my best attempts to the contrary. I wish I had time to go back to school for some kind of teaching degree. Is there something else I can do or read or watch or something to make me a better teacher? Knowledge transfer is probably the most important aspect of my job.
I have 15 years of experience and counting in games and entertainment. I had 6 years of experience as a game master and software dev (in-game purchasing and balancing) before Blizzard offered me an internship. I also worked in gaming throughout all of grad school, just as a contractor instead of full time.
Those of you who have gone to grad school know stipends don't pay crap and you need a second job to make rent.
Also I continue to contract as a professor. Those of you who have worked as teachers know that teaching also doesn't pay crap.
Finally, I still work in industry. Most recent game released on Steam in 2022.
Working class person being exceptional at low latency game development, will unlikely get a chance in finance and earning 10x for very much the same level of competence, because their accent might not be good enough and parents don't frequent members' clubs.
I will say that different industries have different formalities (generally speaking). But that just means you have to interview with smarter attire in FinTech vs interviewing for a job in gambling.
As a hiring manager, I can say that companies will recruit for as little as they think candidates will accept. Fintech gets a bit of a pass on this one but only because they rake in so much money that they can generally afford to attract higher salaries. But it does also mean that gaming can get away with paying people peanuts in comparison and that is literally due to supply and demand.
In places where the C-suite have set unrealistic thresholds on tech salaries, I’ve had to get creative to attract candidates. And that often meant contributing back to open source and basically using that as advertising.
Anyway, this is already a verbose reply but the crux of it is:
1. you shouldn’t underestimate the power of supply and demand in the work space
2. The profitability of a sector also plays heavily into the equation
3. You don’t need to be posh to get a job in FinTech.
Come on.
But who’s to say your experiences aren’t the anomaly? Or that other factors weren’t to play that lead those hiring managers offering to other candidates?
I also tried researching your point online (just in case I was an anomaly) and the results I got suggested that FinTech scored lower in benchmarks for bias during hiring.
So at this point in time, given what I’ve experienced, read online and the information you’ve shared, there simply isn’t enough data to support your claim. Anecdotal nor otherwise.
I always roll my eyes when I hear this from game developers. And my eyes hurt from rolling I've heard it so many times.
I've done game dev, systems, backend, frontend, all of it. It's all the same. Maybe you developed low complexity "big tech" projects but, c'mon, you're really going to argue that games are categorically MORE complex than what Google, Apple, etc develop?
They're not. It's all the same. Same complexity ceiling, same prerequisite levels of creativity.
Most frontends that I develop use the same patterns as games and the backends that I've developed recently look like game servers. Same patterns, same techniques, same level of complexity.
Game development is just development.
At a high level the engines and frameworks don't feel any different.
Work with graphics and models feels more difficult though then most networked application work I've done.
Creativity isn’t narrowly defined to exclude everything but art, game mechanisms, and narrative.
You think the creation of GMail didn’t take creativity?
I’m suspicious of anyone who tries to lay a special claim to creativity for their class or type of work. Creates a false creative vs cog narrative that always seems to benefit the speaker.
Have you tried doing modern frontend work? Creativity is required.
I played with Claude recently. It wasn’t able to refactor a CSS one liner into simple sass mixin.
Modern sites are extremely complex. BASH, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Varnish, NGINX, Postgres, Cassandra, Elastic, Redis, Celery, CSS/Sass, Typescript. Observability, logging, build systems, testing, backups, CI, and a consistent design system. That’s all just to get to HTTP 200 “hello world”.
My argument is that you can put most good developers into game development and with a little time and experience those devs will find that the work isn't much harder than any other kind of complex development.
Most of the questions in game dev like other forms of development are solved. Building a game is like developing any other kind of complex modern system, integrating disparate solutions into a cohesive whole.
And these require none of the deep math that the lower levels of gamedev stack require. It's tedious, not hard to string all of these web components.
I'm often doing math when working with ranking (search and otherwise) and throttling/rate-limiting. What about fraud detection and prevention? There isn't an off-the-shelf solution that you can use to build a modern site. It requires hundreds of hours of hard work and an understanding of everything from binary to color theory.
The job of a full-stack developer has a lot of complexity and requires a great deal of creativity. Game dev too.
I'm not sure why my ego would be bruised by anything you said. None of it applies to my work.
What has ranking have to do with the standard website? Or fraud detection/prevention? Clearly these are out of the scope of the standard website. And I highly doubt they require deep math, just some probability, maybe a slight use of matrices.
Given the number of surface level buzzwords you throw out, I think your ego's preventing you from looking deeper.
A lot of fancy keywords, but
1) It's the stack that you decided to put your services on, your HTTP 200 could be also served by nginx + 1 html file
2) You can make empty video multiplayer game which will sound as fancy as that HTTP 200 hello world
Yes! Games are complex! An empty site with modern infrastructure is just as complex as an empty multiplayer video game, exactly, we agree!
However, NGINX+a file isn't going to get you very far. You know that.
Disclaimer: i've barely ever programmed video games
Not the same kind of creativity, for sure. Gmail has no performance constraints (and its performance is horrible), has no UX constraint (and its UX is horrible). It pushed the free tier some time ago and was arguably a decent webmail at the time, but nothing about it was revolutionary.
The hacks required to get a game to react and push pixels in real time on specific hardware are very interesting. That's closer to proper software engineering than many things we find in startups. That said, more and more games use Unity and other all-in-one engines and are not engineering anymore… and as a player, i can certainly feel the difference in the constant stuttering which mostly was not there when playing console games >10 years ago.
Sometimes you get similar demands at the big companies like Google and Meta, but often you have the opportunity to throw more compute at the problem. That is rarely possible in games.
Having been a game dev before getting my PhD focused on NLP, I can definitely say some of the challenges I ran into developing a first of its kind MMORTS, was seriously challenging. When I took the mandatory grad classes in distributed systems and low level architecture design, I already had first hand experience and aced those classes without any effort. I was familiar with many of the problems and their solutions because I needed to for my work. In addition to working at the lowest level debugging the memory allocators, full networking stack, database layer, you name it all in C++. Being a lead developer on a project of that scope was much more complicated than any work I did later.
My first semester of my PhD I wrote a Transformer from scratch referencing only the original paper (it was soon after the paper came out, there were few resources then). I was the only person who got an implementation that matched the results from the original Transformer (most got much worse performance). I credit the skills and abilities I gained in the game dev industry.
That isn't me throwing shade at others; as I said there are hard problems in industries other than game dev, but the skills required are not compensated at the level you'd expect given the difficulty of the work.
Expecting a 20-year old undergrad or a 23-year old postgrad to do as well as someone who left and came back to uni to finish their degree(s) is... uncharitable.
Again, I've also run into equally talented fresh grads in big tech, but they were much more rare.
Take my anecdotes as you will.
There it is! This is the core argument that I feel like most people here are actually making. Well said, I completely agree.
I agree that game devs are/feel undervalued and underappreciated by game studios. But I don't think that game dev is inherently more complex than other forms of development or that it requires more creativity.
Two different issues.
Instead of arguing that game devs are special I'd argue that game devs should be told that there are jobs outside of the games industry with work that's just as interesting, complex, creative, and fulfilling as game development. Jobs where you'll use the same kinds of skills but may get paid much more.
You find a lot of miserable game devs who refuse to work in any other industry because non-game dev work is akin to mindlessly producing producing grey, soot covered, widgets in some dystopian factory.
If you need to be a game dev, go for it. I hope you get paid what you're worth. But, if you're and if you're miserable doing game dev, you have options outside of game dev.
In summary: If you can do game dev you can do other types of dev work. Similarly, if you can do other types of dev work you can do game dev.
The question is, whichever side you start on, can cross that divide and still be happy?
A simple card game is on par with standard app development.
But if you're working at lower levels of a world simulation engine that require linear algebra, computer graphics knowledge? Camera and joint manipulation? Animation? Navmeshes? Physics? That's a notch harder than a REST app and microservices infrastructure. Some robotics, ML areas touch on this too.
The only tough topics at these adtechs that might match would be graph manipulation, or currently ML knowledge. I suspect leetcode isn't very applicable in everyday usage.
When did that become a thing? When Gears of War bonus checks started hitting Epic's parking lot went from a random collection of reasonable vehicles to looking like an exotic car show. I'm fairly certain every dev that worked on Gears or Unreal could have retired off the bonus payouts.
Yes. Having done everything from mainframe OS internals to proof of correctness to autonomous vehicles, video games are the most difficult.
At the beginning, game dev looks easy, because the tools are good and modern hardware is very capable. But as you approach a big, highly detailed, photorealistic world, the easy approaches hit a performance wall. Then the necessary optimizations become insanely complex. That's the tyranny of the frame rate. That's why I've complained about game engines in Rust. Everybody writes My First Game Engine, then hits the wall about two years in.
The metaverse problem is even worse. All the problems of game dev, plus the problems of user-created content and large scale. With all the effort and money put into metaverses, none emerged that worked as well and looked as good as an AAA game title from the GTA V era. Roblox, Improbable, and Second Life are as good as it got. You'd think there would be some good examples still around, with small user bases, but there are not. There are a whole range of problems only metaverses have, and some of them are unsolved. For commercial games, much of the work takes place during level building and optimization. Unreal Engine Editor does much of the heavy lifting. Metaverses don't have that option.
The total failure of the metaverse industry comes partly from this. It's hard to do, and the problem was underestimated. Mostly by the people who really just wanted to sell their crap NFTs and coins.
The people and wage problem comes from too many people wanting to make games. It's like Hollywood. If you've spend any time around there, you've met the actress/model/waitress types. The male version has stand up comedy levels of ego. That pushes wages down.
Wouldn't VRChat qualify?
An example - a 3d humanoid character. You need code to manage the mesh, the animation (probably skeletal), the animations themselves, all the blending logic, probably specialised code and data for facial animations, and then you need to make sure all of that can mesh with both input driven locomotion and AI driven locomotion - and that's just one problem domain.
And I'm grossly oversimplifying what's involved even in that particular area.
Yeah that's other part. What was PhD level computer graphics becomes table stakes a few years later and not only do you have to do that, but you have to top it a few years later.
Oh and all of these systems have to be aware of each other, because the higher fidelity they become, the harder it is to keep the seams hidden, because the seam between them become more jarring.
Sure, you have skeletal bone animation and all that stuff in 2003, but do your characters adapt their footstep placement to the terrain height? Does the run animation blend smoothly between states? Oh it blends smoothly but now player inputs feel unresponsive because you had the clever idea to make it inertial? Oh now do it all over a network at minimum latency because esports are a hundred million dollar industry.
The overwhelming majority of games actually don’t. Even 5+ year old rigs can run most modern games just fine.
AI-hardware demand is responsible for slowing down the AAA graphics frame-rate treadmill. Back when Nvidia and AMD were releasing improved mid-range consumer GPUs at a steady clip, there was incessant pressure on AAA games to have ever-increasing frame-rates and "photorealistic" graphic-fidelity. Making a game update at 144Hz at 4k resolution/max graphics quality, with no upscaling shortcuts would be a challenging problem, were it a common target.
In an alternate universe where the LLM boom didn't happen, we probably would have 24GB midrange GPUs (and 32GB/48GB Nvidia 5090 Ti), allowing for humongous textures, and likely games rendering at 8k, which 5+ y.o. rigs would struggle with except at low-quality settings.
This is really a self inflicted problem though because game developers insist on making easily marketed games (=pretty screenshots) over fun ones. You don't need insane optimizations to make the next Minecraft or whatever. And let's be honest, most games run like dogshit because they leave very easy optimization opportunities like unaddressed.
so economics takes over.
whereas your typical saas, adtech - once the business is proven u print money unless u r doing stupid shit n being driven by ego such as having the biggest org or pursuing passion projects such as "a.i"
Now I've branched off on my own as I've been disillusioned with academia as well. Can't win'em all.
This tracks with my experience. Games present so many unexpected challenges. Or, known and expected challenges that are challenging nonetheless.
The other place I've had my ass handed to me was in robotics. Translating digital models to the physical space is how physics tells you it's actually in control and your ideas are cute and all, but other things are going to happen instead.
The simulator starts out simple and gradually becomes grotesque as it contacts reality.
* this doesnt even include graphics programmers who are also awesome. and are just a different breed than i am, for whatever reason my brain just won't process the world of graphics pipelines
I worked on games for several years early on but quit after going through an EA spouse experience.
In some ways it’s too bad, because the great thing about games is that there is such a great variety of different kinds of problems to solve. Even so, I quit cold turkey and never looked back. It is what it is.
To be fair, you don't have to be a teacher / lecturer to notice this. One trip to an AI reddit thread asking what people are working on will reveal that it's either porn, role-play, or game development.
I worked on AAA and indie as well. I crunched for years. That crunch was on me because I was being paid to make MY games and like any creator, I wanted my game to be great.
GTA6 is an exception in games being the game with the biggest team (AFAIK). The bigger the team the more you're a cog.
In fact since we are on hackernews that is kind of thing people wanting to be entrepreneurs do. Work at recognizable big tech company for a few years. Leave to be a founder of a startup. Investors ... well that guy came from google they must know what they are doing etc (the irony is they probably have less of the skills to start a company going that path).
~~Ultimately the goal is the same: make more money. So I disagree the motivation is "very different" its just a lot harder now to do a startup.~~
You kept editing your comment so disregard the above. I misread it the first time and then it changed. I left my response thats makes no sense now.
I also hope it doesn't sound like I don't care for these developers who are being taken advantage of. They should be compensated fairly for their work.
EDIT I should add why I think it is a great point especially since I make recruiting software. The greatest increases in salary for most people is done by switching companies or jobs. If you don't want to leave the company because you really like what you do it would skew it so that salaries are lower.
FAANG used to be the _dream_. Change the world. Work on groundbreaking tech. Solve harder problems than anywhere else. Get Paid incredibly well.
Then I guess a generation focused exclusively on that last part flooded the zone. I still believe that The Great Resignation of 2021 did more harm to our industry than COVID or any interest rate or VC changes.
It polluted the brains of most of the people in our industry from a missionary mindset to a mercenary, and it decimated big company's established cultural memory all to prop up a bunch of unicorns who will probably all slowly die over the next decade.
So now half of the people can't get a job, and the half that can are miserable. This was true BEFORE AI.
I'm not lionizing Sundar Pichai here, just saying the cumulative attitudes of 10k L7/L8 is really what sets the culture.
Margins.
Game development doesn’t pay more because game development companies can’t afford to pay more.
Sure, an individual game dev company may make a lot due to the hit driven nature of the field, but the totality of the market simply makes less money per developer than big tech does.
In order for that to change, the market has to increase in size by appealing to a more casual audience, or existing gamers have to pay more. Not something I think most gamers would like. And these are the people who the workforce of game developers form from.
The fun part of all this is that when union demands start forcing the industry in the opposite direction - higher cost, higher prices, smaller market. In a sane world, we would connect this, but in this world, we will just blame management. The union will forever have an invincible PR shield no matter how crazy the demand.
To really drive this point home, the gaming community recently lost their minds when it became clear that this generation of video games were going to retail for ~$90 per game. Never mind that even in the early 90’s an average game might retail for $40 and what we would call a AAA game could reach as high as $70. In 2025 gamers declared that $90 was highway robbery. But go look at the credits for an early 90s video game. That $40-90 per unit in the early 90s might need to cover the salaries of 23 people (the size of the credits list for Super Mario World on the SNES). Now $90 has to cover 435 people (the credit list for Super Mario Wonder on the switch). Sure we’re selling a lot more copies now, and (some of) the manufacturing costs are lower. But that’s a nearly 20x increase in personnel for a mere 2x increase in (non inflation adjusted) price.
29.8%: Retailer's margin
15.1%: Publisher's margin
14.8%: VAT
That's... 92.8%.
Developer's royalty: 4.6%
"Yikes" -me, just now
There are 20,000 games released per year that split all that revenue, minus the cost of building those games.
My point about revenue was that games are pulling in more money than film and TV and we all know they cost less to make, and film and TV has good pay so therefore the games industry can afford similar rates, if not more.
There isn't any business on earth that compares to the margins of HFT firms. Regardless they aren't asking for big tech or HFT level salaries.
> People want big tech on their resume because it makes them look qualified.
I think I said that?
> People with top qualifications work at big tech because of pay.
Actually I am not sure if that is true. I think top qualification people work at these places because of other reasons than just money. I'm talking Carmack working at Facebook for example is because of more possibilities and less the pay. Like FB is we have this really smart team for you and this tech for you and you can make your own products etc.
After all there is academia and that mostly pays shit and plenty of qualified people there.
> If low quality engineers worked in big tech, it wouldn't be a coveted qualification.
And I think that is probably happening more now. The 10x developer was kind of a myth. More people for less money these days particularly with AI is becoming more of the norm.
It may not pay the rent or put food on the table, but seeing your name in the credits of a movie your friends watched or a game they played is a perk that has real value. Writing a technical book rarely pays the bills either but it's the same story of getting to see your name on the shelf, and maaaybe it leads to getting on a conference panel or something at some point but really you're doing a lot of labour for far below minimum wage just to be able to say you did (as I did for Apress when I was 20 years old... and it landed me an internship at Google, so there you go).
- be well compensated - work on something interesting - work on something ethical
Obviously there's the rare unicorn out there where you get all three, but those are the exception, not the rule.
in most cases it don't unless this game become really legendary which often not the case. So young person easily can spent 10y in attempt to do that but as result non of those games will be remembered in 2y after release.
But in reality that environment helping only to grow in technical aspects of the job ( maybe also learning some market forces) but it leads to severe degradation in artistic practice of which person original desire cultivate even not realizing that just because is no business need for anything like that. Bus sines can be fine by just coping that everyone else doing or implementing some one else vision.
I too wanna work on cooler stuff. Sooner rather than later.
[1]: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2024/05/seinfeld-on-when-mo...
There are a large number of people that are passionate about games. Moreso than say, ERP software.
And this holds true relative to demand (gaming is ~$300B/year globally).
---
Additionally, most software engineering is not FAANG. That is the upper end of it.
However, I joined EA in 2015 and have been in game development since. They offered really good pay and now at my current job I even get great pay and no overtime.
I had to look it up as well. I assumed it was a play on words about Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony (the three big video game console players).
Monopoly is a single seller.
Monopsony is a single buyer.
There isn't a single seller so the proper ones are
Oligopoly - Market with few sellers
Oligopsony - Market with few buyers
"few" really meaning that they have pricing power as opposed to 3 companies.
Now rather than being a relatively underpaid worker in an industry you're passionate about, you don't have the opportunity to work there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision_Blizzard_worker_org...
Regarding your hypothetical, two points. First, Hollywood unions did essentially go down the path you imagine. The solution there was to create a less arbitrary system that allowed actors to work their way into the union and get a degree of income stability and protection from (previously horrendous) employer abuse.
"The supply of jobs won't magically increase (it would likely decrease with higher wages)"
You should look into the economics of these game studios a bit more. The unit economics are not like those of producing bricks which an essentially linear (capital, labor) -> bricks production function. The distributive effects between the employers, workers, and consumers would be very difficult to model. You can't really figure out the marginal contribution of the factors of production. To use a Hollywood analogy: Do we know how much less one of George Clooney's films would net if a different actor were cast instead of him? If we can't be sure, can we know what his marginal contribution was?
> The solution there was to create a less arbitrary system that allowed actors to work their way into the union and get a degree of income stability and protection from (previously horrendous) employer abuse
Less arbitrary sounds good, but you need discretion. A lot of unionized jobs rely or pretty arbitrary rules, like how long the person had worked there. Why should someone doing the same job as me get paid more just because he was there longer? That seems more arbitrary to me than my manager's opinion of my work. You end up having an underclass of younger employees and all the benefits accruing to people that have been there longer. This could sink an entire industry or company as they would be stuck with more expensive labor they can't get rid of while a new company can just hire younger people at the bottom of the scale for the same work
> You should look into the economics of these game studios a bit more. The unit economics are not like those of producing bricks which an essentially linear (capital, labor) -> bricks production function. The distributive effects between the employers, workers, and consumers would be very difficult to model. You can't really figure out the marginal contribution of the factors of production. To use a Hollywood analogy: Do we know how much less one of George Clooney's films would net if a different actor were cast instead of him? If we can't be sure, can we know what his marginal contribution was?
I agree, but that's exactly why you don't want some union to do it that doesn't have the insights. The Hollywood analogy is exactly right, how much would George Clooney films net if they used a different actor. Movie studios have a direct incentive to find out. They can pay someone a lot less and if its comparable, they would. But the idea that a union can have a matrix that can capture George Clooney's worth and pay (how long have you been an actor for?) is unrealistic.
Would the company not conduct interviews and pick out whoever seems like the best candidates?
This just brings game development in line with other code monkeys. Top studios will pay top dollars, Indie studios will pay what they can, often almost nothing.
And I see nothing wrong with that, do you?
First you gotta get passed the resume screening before you get to leetcode. Average resumes with no-name companies don't get past FANG recruiters to get to the leetcode stage.
How is the existence of a monopsony necessary or even related to a passion tax existing? Suppose the market were a fully free market with tons of software companies on one side and tons of developers on the other. It would fly in the face of reason, and fairness in my eyes, if all developers were paid the same but some got to work on fun stuff like games and others worked on the scheduling software for the scheduling software for the warehouse robot repairs. So a passion tax seems like something that should exist and not really be decried.
To put it the other way, work that is distasteful in some way, should also pay more, but this is missing the point.
I think the point of the unionization is that the monopsony of a small number of AAA game studios gives them excessive market power to reduce compensation and especially to reduce working conditions.
A union can acquiesce to the passion tax and say that top developers at a AAA should make $150k/year (a bit low), while simultaneously saying that that developer should be able to see their children on nights and weekends. The project management that leads to "perma-crunch" is something that ought to be resolved on the employer's side, not by the employees.
Not many people get into computers because they dream about staring at a console to figure out why the kubernetes cluster is misbehaving again (though some do).
Like another commenter said, it's the "passion tax": The more interesting a job, the more people seek it. The more people competing for a job, the lower the pay.
Most players care about performance even less than they care about bugs. Basically every AAA game nowadays is criticized for piss poor performance and not having the looks to justify it. They're still massive successes.
Usually, it's good code that leads to missed deadlines, not bad code. It literally takes more time and effort to write good code. Gamedev lives on 3-year cycle, that's not enough time for code debt to start causing problems.
Bad gameplay... yes, that can be actual problem. But it's rarely due to a single bad line of code, or even ten thousand bad lines of code. In most games, gameplay is bad because it was designed to be bad. As in, they had a certain way of playing in mind, and they made the game exactly how they wanted, it's just most players don't find that way of playing fun. No amount of code quality can fix that.
This is just not true. Gothic 3 is still pretty alive in terms of modding and improvement precisely because the base underneath the bugginess was good. You don't have a good community after 20 years if you have bad bodybuilding and uninteresting story.
> Most players care about performance even less than they care about bugs. Basically every AAA game nowadays is criticized for piss poor performance and not having the looks to justify it. They're still massive successes.
You equal success meaning that players don't get care about bad things in a game. That's just a way to reductive view. You can literally read everywhere how people complain about the bad performance of games. Performance is a standard staple in game reviews.
> Usually, it's good code that leads to missed deadlines, not bad code. It literally takes more time and effort to write good code. Gamedev lives on 3-year cycle, that's not enough time for code debt to start causing problems.
Nice trying to put words in my mouth. This is about good and bad developers. Good developers write better code in the same or less time it would take bad developers. that's literally why they are good developers. Bad developers compound on bad code making progress exponentially slower compared to if you had good developers from the start. The question was never the same developer writing good vs bad code.
> Bad gameplay... yes, that can be actual problem. But it's rarely due to a single bad line of code, or even ten thousand bad lines of code. In most games, gameplay is bad because it was designed to be bad. As in, they had a certain way of playing in mind, and they made the game exactly how they wanted, it's just most players don't find that way of playing fun. No amount of code quality can fix that.
I think you really underestimate how much a gameplay programmer can influence the gameplay. Not every millisecond of latency is specified in game design docs. Most of gameplay is designed by feeling. If your developer is not capable of producing good gameplay your game designers can do nothing.
A fraction of G2's modding scene. And the reason is even after all the bugfixes and community patches, people still overwhelmingly prefer G2 over G3.
> You equal success meaning that players don't get care about bad things in a game. That's just a way to reductive view.
I equal success to financial success, because we're talking why game programmers are paid less, and the reason is (partly) because code quality has next to no impact on sales. If people still buy your hame despite the bad things about it, then it's a financial success, and game studios exploit this fact to the extreme.
> Nice trying to put words in my mouth. This is about good and bad developers.
I was replying to this part: "Besides bad code does not only lead to bugs. It can lead to bad gameplay, bad performance, missing features, slipped deadlines." My intention was that no, generally it's not true that bad code leads to missed deadlines. Slow coding, yes. Bad coding, no. Good programmers are valuable to game studios not because they can write good code, but because they write bad code faster. Which is reflected in lower salaries compared to other software products where writing good code actually matters and where salaries are higher.
> Not every millisecond of latency is specified in game design docs. Most of gameplay is designed by feeling.
Not every millisecond matters for the feeling (unless you're making a fighting game but that's why I said rarely, not never). Usually performance issues in gameplay can be masked by increasing timing windows or by the eternal excuse of git gud (usually, not always). In general, the gameplay of the vast majority of games is simple enough that with modern tools, any half decent programmer can implement any feeling the designer aims for, with varying amounts of noticable issues. Sure, there are exceptions, but exceptions don't shape salary trends.
You do realize that Bethesda's excuses for worldbuilding are some of the most modded turds out there, right?
>there's a large pool of juniors/interns that will accept these low wages just because they want to be a part of something popular.
That's an unbelievably bad _and_ disrespectful take. They accept these low wages because it's their only way in the industry, and because the industry has made sure to keep a steady supply of fresh meat to burn out. "because they want to be a part of something popular" doesn't work when the vast majority work on unknown games in content factories for the first ten years of their careers.
Is it really “disrespectful” to make an observation of how the world is even if it maybe isn’t how it should be? That fact of the matter is no one “needs” to accept these wages. Software development in general and game development in particular are labor fields of choice. Being a software developer can pay you better in so many different parts of the field, even today long after the dot com boom. People are choosing to accept these bad offers because they value working in this part of the industry more than they value the higher wages they can get elsewhere. Just like plenty of us choose not to make FAANG levels of money because we value our work life balance, or our specific living locations or our principles and beliefs over the money that those companies are throwing at people.
We can talk about how these bad offers are knowingly abusive or artificially suppressed and still acknowledge that people are making informed choices to accept those offers.
He's talking about the people who make those tools, and he's right. Engine developers are paid pretty well, especially at Epic and Unity. You don't think Tim Sweeney snagged SPJ because he's really into Fortnite, do you?
If your goal is to get rich, you make more money as an L3 at Google doing absolutely fuck all than an L5 at Epic does bearing the entire responsibility of an entire subsystem on your shoulders.
Suckers.
Is it any wonder the quality bar for modern AAA games is under the floor? How many $400 million dollar flops do we need before these people take a hint?
I would bet money that the story for GTA6 is gonna be horrendous, based on what we’ve seen so far, but this game will make a trillion dollars or whatever because “it’s GTA6”. Bbuut they modelled individual bubbles in the pint of beer with real physics! Does the game even need to be fun anymore? Does it need to innovate or push the medium forward in any way? Or is it just a way to juice up another GTA online putting out mid content with horrible writing just to keep buying up shark cards for another decade, because people will buy it no matter what. Game journalists would never dare give the game a bad review, because they can’t risk losing access to Take Two published games. So what are we left with? A game with completely unjustified amounts of hype and “brand loyalty” that can absolutely get away with phoneing it in and make record breaking amounts of profit. But if you criticize it in any way, you’re just a hater or you’re not “media literate” or something.
1. You love the area and are willing to take a cut to work in that area, particularly when the alternative is working on CRMs for a PBM;
2. Demand for these jobs still exceeds supply; and
3. The very top of this pyramid makes a shitload of money. If you get to like a Lead Engineer type position, you might be making points on unit sales. And for a big hit that can be big money; and
4. Historically, indie development wasn't a viable route to making a living but it suffers from the same distortions too. For every Notch or ConcernedApe, there are thousands of pepole who below the poverty line. Look at something as widely regarded (but niche) like Dwarf Fortress. They made bank (and deserved it) from the Steam release but they spent 10+ years making a couple of thousand of dollars a month between the two of them.
Just look at the music industry. There are artists and bands who are trying to make it, training for years and making $50 to play some local venue and they're just hoping to get noticed. In years gone by that was a record contract. Nowadays, there are alternate routes. Justin Bieber was a Youtube breakout.
Fun fact: the first artist to have a #1 single without a record contract was Lisa Loeb for Stay in the early 1990s because it was picked up for the sound track (those used to be a big deal) for Reality Bites.
Also VC doesn't seem to be all that interested in investing into game dev companies, I guess because it's such an extreme hit-and-miss business (e.g. even when a game-dev company lands a massive hit, the next attempt may be a massive flop and sink the whole company).
> Ostensibly they are doing remarkable similar engineering problem solving
The engineering problems have been mostly outsourced to Unity and Epic Games (e.g. Unreal Engine)
And Unity always ruled supreme for AA and mobile games.
Knowledge of a proprietary engine is completely locked to that specific company. They pointed out that Unity and Unreal became industry standards simply because of the dynamics of changing jobs. I fully agree with that assessment.
Recent notable example is Crimson Desert, they spent years building their own engine for this game and IMO they raised the bar when it comes to creating a huge realistic world.
Others that come to my mind are Decima and RE Engine.
While the company is extremely proud of its proprietary engine, I was told it causes severe internal politics. The studio is heavily biased toward the engineers who built the engine. Another huge downside is the lack of documentation—you can't just Google your bugs. (Granted, this was the situation two years ago).
The CEO is famously known in Korea for prioritizing developers while devaluing writers and planners. However, even within that developer-first environment, the proprietary engine has birthed a clear internal hierarchy among the programmers
id Software, the new Doom series uses highly performant engine (as if there was some legacy there for that).
That's how most studios work.
Most games are expensive to make and most of them fail. Way more than normal software which doesn't have ultra-high marketing costs or diverse staffing needs (Art, QA, game design, etc).
And Advertising (FAANG) is insanely profitable, while doing software in other difficult fields (firmware in automotive or embedded, etc) may be technically challenging, but the margin is is only like 6-10% max
I think flipping the question like this gets at the heart of the true answer.
The question is not why video game pay has lagged, but why tech pay has jumped ahead.
Not in a sense that it's so good so you don't want to leave, but that other companies are leery of hiring people with the gamedev experience.
Make what you will out of that remark.
The question is why the gulf, rather than why the lag. Why is big tech pay so high?
When you compare it to other trades and industries video game dev pay is much more “normal”
I don't really buy the supply/demand argument everyone else is saying here. The end product just doesn't provide value to people's lives. The amount of effort you'd need to put in to provide value to someone's life through a video game is way higher than the effort you'd need to put into a productivity tool.
In fact, more often than not, video games provide negative value to people's lives. They're usually a waste of time at best. And at worst, addictive and carpal tunnel inducing.
I'll concede an email app doesn't produce that kind of wide-ranging effect on humans.
So bringing this back to the "why don't game devs make boatloads of money like FAANG" it's because the vast majority of roles are being a scripter at Game Freak or Rockstar or whatever. I'm sure the engineers at Valve or Roblox or Epic Games are being treated very well because those companies actually provide value to people's lives.
Roblox to a lesser extent, but you get my point. I'd rather have my kid play Roblox where he might learn Lua scripting, than Pokemon which is just a complete dead end. Just look at what happened to Byuu and Hax. Or hell, even endrift with that weird unnecessary drama with Analogue. Many such cases. Not sure if you get those references. But the stories surrounding those people are why I stay far away from Nintendo stuff. And gaming in general.
You're waaay too tuned in to the corporate ideology to be saying something like this. I suggest you zoom out. The top heavy games do make a ton of money, so evidently there's value in entertaining people and giving them some good playtime compared to the drudge that is corporate life (PS. in case you didn't know not all people love to work for some other guy's mission/vision).
You can't ride on a single game for long, and if the next one goes badly half the company will get fired. Not true of the bigger studios, but of course not everybody works in those.
I have friends who work in gaming, and it's a regular thing for studios to form with a great game, go bust a year or three later, and then a new studio get formed with largely similar staff.
Developers move between the same companies around and around again. The lack of stability is a real problem, especially with increasing use of "AI".
IIUC, the majority of FAANG is people who are there, first and foremost, for the paycheck. (And then maybe they get interested in the work, especially if it seems like progress towards a promotion for more money, or because it gave them skills or resume keywords that they can then use to get more money elsewhere. It's the money/career that's interesting first -- craft and product are only a consequence of wanting the money.)
So basically, high supply of labor and relatively lower demand for it in games than in boring business/SaaS software.
Tangible example: Walmart labs had to quadruple the salaries once it realized they could not attract any scientists or top tier engineers.
For example, GPU shader programming is something people will practically fight over doing because it's so non obviously utterly addictive.
I would say dev roles in tech in general that lack an operational component also lag in pay, and much of gamedev is pure dev in a sense the wider tech industry has since largely forgotten exists.
On the art side it's even more extreme.
“Writing react components” “deploying a database” “debugging the Android build” are not dream jobs and you can do it at hundreds of companies
But the labour demand half is important too. Bigtech makes so much money (or is so well financed) that competing on top talent is more feasible when compared to the boom/bust nature of the games industry.
That and they used to be able to waive a mythical shipping bonus but if it was ever true, I don't think its really something to count on these days.
I believe its game developers are more easily exploited is because typically they really want to work in the game industry.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenue...
Big Tech has infinite money from ads to spend on whatever. Video games do not.
To start with, I've been at Ubisoft for 10 years - and the pay was famously abysmal. Like you could go and work at a supermarket and earn more, without joking. And every time I tried to argue about it the counter argument was
1) we pay low but you get to work on cool stuff
2) there is an infinite number of people interested in working here
3) if you don't like it, then leave
And you know what....as much as I absolutely hate to admit it, there was a nugget of truth to that. I was paid like shit, but I got to work on games which sold 30-40 million copies and were enjoyed by a lot of people. Nothing makes me happier than meeting people saying they played one of the games I worked on and they loved or they have fond memories of it. I don't think that justifies the poor pay, but all of my friends in IT were paid a lot more but worked on some software they hated and no one remembers it. I mean there are exceptions to this, but in general, I really enjoyed my time at Ubisoft, the problems were interesting and everyone who worked there really wanted to be there. Incredibly skilled and passionate people.
BUT I've since moved to one of the other largest publishers in video games and basically had the same position but doubled my salary. Then couple years later I moved to another big publisher and I got a crazy pay bump, basically in line with what people I know at "big tech" are being paid. And I took a step down from a tech lead to senior engineer to be here.
So I think some parts of the industry are definitely paying top money for people to work for them. When I was looking for jobs I had several offers from big companies in video games at similar pay too, so they weren't alone in this.
I think the industry has just changed from what it used to be. At least afaik programmers are being paid much better than they used to be. But that's just my personal experience.
Those silos maintain different processes and workflows, different company cultures, different skill specializations, etc and jumping around between them in mid-career or senior can be very challenging. So they tend to have their own org chart shapes and salary/benefit norms.
When a Big Tech company moves into or absorbs one of those silos, or emerges from one of those silos, it can shake up what the people within them get paid (and thereby have big knock-on effects for legacy employers), but otherwise it's just it's own little bubble in a lot of ways. People can share stories and ideas across the siloes in venues like HN, but many of the "what are you even talking about" reactions that happen on here often occur when people from these different silos stumble into what are sometimes deep differences in what they do and what their work experience is like.
It's a consumer business much like any other. Just like most startups and major companies, they are not necessary for the world in the way utilities for example are.
The problem of videogames compared to startups and SV tech is that the long-term money potential is very limited at best, and rapidly becomes very brittle. Most startups pay bigger salaries for much easier work, because they burn the money investors are betting hoping the company will crack a new long-term market, not because they make money themselves. There's very little games market to crack, very little chance to turn your product into a long-lived platform to built on top of, meanwhile the upfront investment is huge.