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Comment by well_ackshually | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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

> 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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