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Comment by diath | Hacker News Reader

It has not lagged behind depending on how you look at it, video game development can be split into engine programming and gameplay programming. For engine programming, you only need a handful of senior engineers specializing in low level details of a video game engine, and these will get paid high appropriate wages that match industry standard salaries. For the gameplay programmers, they just seek the cheapest labor that can do "quantity over quality" type of work to pump out content and 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.

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But don't bad gameplay programmers implement gameplay badly? If that is truly the state of the industry that explains all the modern games with extremely mushy controls.

I assume by gameplay he means stuff like in game scripting - when you walk here it triggers this. Mushy controls would be down to the engine developers.

Customers don't care about the code. They just care that the gameplay is fun.

Are you implying the only differentiator between good and bad developers is the aesthetic of the code itself? And not the actual computation the code does? Wild take honestly.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, it turns out video game consumers don't care much about the actual computation either. Most games are riddled with bugs, and it has next to no impact on sales. Rather, having weird, even embarrassing bugs can make players look at the game more fondly. Skyrim is one of the best selling games ever. Ostensibly it's about fighting dragons. But "Skyrim moment" does not mean an epic battle with a dragon. It means said dragon flying through a goddamn castle, then getting stuck on a single tree and disappearing into the ground, and still hitting you with fire breath somehow.

Buggy games have destroyed franchises. Gothic 3 being a prime example. Contrary to the memes skyrim is not even close to the worst offenders in terms of bugs. Besides bad code does not only lead to bugs. It can lead to bad gameplay, bad performance, missing features, slipped deadlines. A things users care a lot about.

Gothic has always been a niche franchise, and G3 was poorly received not because of bugs, but because of bad worldbuilding (orcs speaking human language, magic runes disappearing, a powerful kingdom getting wholly conquered in basically no time, pretty small open world) and uninteresting story compared to previous titles. Sure it did have bugs, but so did G1 and G2. And that one AssCreed game where people's heads disappeared leaving just eyeballs behind, which still sold crazy numbers. Or the famously bad Cyberpunk 2077 launch, where bad means millions of copies sold in first 2 weeks, not even counting preorders. Or countless other examples.

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.

> Gothic has always been a niche franchise, and G3 was poorly received not because of bugs, but because of bad worldbuilding (orcs speaking human language, magic runes disappearing, a powerful kingdom getting wholly conquered in basically no time, pretty small open world) and uninteresting story compared to previous titles.

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.

> Gothic 3 is still pretty alive in terms of modding

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.

> 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.

You do realize that Bethesda's excuses for worldbuilding are some of the most modded turds out there, right?

Gothic is not by Bethesda, they are very different games. I'm not sure what exactly you want to say with your comment

People care about stories.

There are plenty of examples of engine being bad, but gameplay being fun.

It’s more nuanced than that. Programmers generally will be paid decently. Gameplay programmers aren’t really the bottom of the pecking order. That dubious honour usually falls to UI engineers. Other folks involved in development who often don’t get paid well and are usually involved in unions are QA, junior programmers, and junior artists. There are a lot more roles than just engine and gameplay programmer.

Artists in my experience earn a lot less than programmers in gamdev; unless you're a technical artist... which is another type of programming.

Very true!

That’s not really true at studios - maybe at Unreal and Unity they get paid normal wages. I know some people working on the in house engine and rendering of AAA studios and they make like 60% of what I make in general big-ish tech backend

Or, just buy Unreal Engine so you can focus on being able to just plug in interchangeable cogs for gameplay programmers. You don’t have to pay them much because you can teach a child how to use Blueprints. Then yes, just crank out slop content for the lowest common denominator and charge $80 for the AAA experience and call it day while laughing all the way to the bank. Churn out battle passes and $30 cosmetic skins for pennies on the dollar and gamers will justify it with “it’s just cosmetic you don’t have to buy it” - while these corporations have behavioural psychologists on staff figuring out the most effective way to exploit FOMO to get you addicted and needing to spend more money on useless shit you don’t need.

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.

Nope. Rendering, tooling, audio, core engine... None of these pay particularly well. More than just gameplay programmer, sure, but because many engines have moved to a visual node style of programming, it's also less and less programming in the gameplay department.

>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.

I think by “something popular” gp meant an industry that people are excited to be in — which dovetails with your implication about accepting low pay for a way in the industry

> 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

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.

> but because many engines have moved to a visual node style of programming, it's also less and less programming in the gameplay department.

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?

Epic has over 4000 employees. For 1 SPJ (that might be really well paid, but you don't even know that), there's a hundred good engineers that are underpaid (compared to what they could make selling AI slop and advertisement).

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.

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