If you work on small teams and/or for a small studio, then you will have quite a few opportunities to influence the design or decision making. I worked for three small studios and influenced the design of every game I worked on.

Getting paid 60% of what I could get outside the industry and the crunch time lowering that wage further, and screwing up my health, and leaving me with zero time for a social life eventually got to me, though, so I got out of the industry, despite my passion.

I now design board games in my spare time while working on enterprise software at a Microsoft shop, and get paid a lot more, and if I ever have to stay late (which happens every once in awhile) they credit me the time to take off in the future so I'm only working 40 hour weeks.

This has been my strategy for the last few years. I've been making games on my own dime for just a few years but I now have two self published games on Steam, and a few Micro-Consoles, and a Job in entirely different industry with great benefits and hard stop 40 hour weeks.

I absolutely love programming games! It's the most fun programming I've ever had in the 10+ years of writing code. Nothing beats showing off your creations with family and friends and them "getting it."

I've gone back and forth of whether I should join the industry but with a kid and high priority of family time, I just can't do away with what's actually important to me. I've never regretted working a solid job to support an awesome hobby.

Yeah, definitely. I have become a little disillusioned with the video game industry on the consumer side as well, though. There seems to be a lot of "download the newest game, play it for 30 minutes (for an app, 2-3 hours for a big game), then delete it and on to the next game" going on, and it seems very difficult to make a name for yourself unless you're working on large, artsy indie games that take many years to make.

I've started getting into the board game hobby recently and it seems like, while you're never going to get rich off of it, there's much greater opportunities to gain a reputation and while there's a lot of "play the game a few times and move on to the next" in the hobby as well, because games are physical they tend to stay out there and get reprinted for decades, instead of stay out there for a few months, on average.

I tended to design board-game-friendly designs in the first place, so I decided to pretty much switch to board games. As a bonus, there's a healthy demand for mobile app versions of board games anyway, so you can get a physical AND a digital version for the same game design.

Plus it's a hell of a lot faster to prototype new mechanics and build prototypes with physical board games.

But that's me. Programming games is still a lot of fun, just sucks when gamers spend so little time on your game before moving on to the next shiny thing.

For me it's more about what I put in to it than what I get out of it. I realized really quickly I wouldn't make much more than beer money out of this hobby.

I think the most difficult thing about the video game industry is the amount of drama in the hobbyest scene. Still trying to find a "group" that isn't jumping on the latest "cause" rather than feeding in depth discussions of randomly generated worlds.

Graphical programming is a lot of fun. That might just be personal preference, but objectively it's at least very different from enterprise programming. There are lots of interesting problems, and you can see the fruits of your labor pretty literally. Plus, knowing how to create a solid engine opens up the freedom to work on ideas that you are actually passionate about.

One problem is that lots of people want to be game developers, so the working conditions and pay can suffer. But the consensus among indie developers who I've talked to is that the pay isn't as bad as people make it out to be, and it's still worth spending a few years 'paying your dues' at a large company, if only to learn about how the development process works in the real world; there's a whole lot more to making a game than writing a good engine. Unfortunately, game development also suffers from Publish or Perish Syndrome, so it's hard to get a foot in the door with large companies unless you've already shipped a game.

I'm saying all of that as somebody who thinks that they would enjoy being a game developer, but I've never worked in game development so most of what I'm saying is secondhand information. It's enough to make me happy to stick with learning on my own time for now, though.

I'm sure it is different for each team member, but for myself, having been in & out of the games industry since '82, it is all about creating mini-realities, mixing math + physics + illusion to simulate life. I started teaching myself how to code in '77 because I knew computers would be able to run simulations, and I'd just learned about this new thing called 3d graphics. Having been a fan of animation, I knew they'd come together. And they did. And I was there, one of the original researchers of 3D graphics and animation. And it was a blast that lasts to this day. I'm sure my presence has influenced the industry, even of few know my name. Its a piss poor career with shitty psychological working conditions nearly the entire 3+ decades I've been trapped in it. I'm glad I was there and would do it all over again, maybe with a few punches in the face to the appropriate coworkers at the right times during my 2nd go.

I worked on a very large team making a AAA game and it was tremendously fun. Games are at the intersection of high-end art, tech, design and commerce. Working with 150 highly skilled, highly diverse and highly enthusiastic people on a focused 2 year project was wonderful --even though I only controlled a few small corners of it. And, even though we had several months of schedule overrun and the stress that entails.

If you're lucky you have some unique, weird system you have to build. If you're unlucky you're doing something mundane you've done a dozen times before. I would think this would be the same with many programming jobs.

One time I was tasked with implementing a system that simulated traffic in a city for an open world style game. That was a really interesting problem that I enjoyed working on.

I'm working in "regular" B2b company. I make games in free time. I dreamt of being game programmer since I was 8.

I went to a gamedev job interview recently (messed up the 2nd stage (un?)fortunately), the first stage was some small tasks about 3d graphic, gemoetry, collision detection, etc. It's just so much more fun to me than "parse xml, put stuff in db, render html". I don't know why, maybe simply because it's different? I always enjoyed small scale math problems, and I don't really get to do that in my regular job.

This is what most of my friends who used to work in the games industry have done. It's not about the games for them anymore, it's about solving the problems. And they make significantly more money doing it elsewhere (one almost 4x as much).

This isn't game development specific, but in 2014, I made the move from programmer/developer to analyst.

ALL of the joy had been sucked out of development.

Work/Life balance was fine but the technical work/administrative work balance was completely off.