Most people who work in the game industry are not doing deep game engine hacking, but doing grunt work like scripting/designing some scene in a giant adventure game who's going to have thousands of those, and all of those need to be finished before the release date.
I wonder how many commercial engine programmers there actually are, anyway? I'd guess very few.
There are only a handful of major engines today and it's been that way for years. Unreal, Unity, Frostbite .... a few games still roll their own but the costs of keeping up are getting extreme.
I really doubt the Unreal Engine developers feel abused. For one thing, the release schedules of engines and games are now to some extent disconnected. Games get whatever the engine can do. Epic isn't going to move mountains to add a feature to UE for a licensee unless they get a TON of money to do it.
But for a lot of companies, using an existing engine is a no-brainer - even more so when the developer has no idea how well their game is going to do, using something like Unreal effectively means they share the risk with you.
(Disclaimer: Not affiliated, but I enjoy reading their developer's blogs)
If you haven't seen it, go to http://cbloom.com/rants.html and search for the title.
Epic's AAA market ended up with bigger budgets and a demand for more control, so many of them simply created their own engines. So most UE games seem to be big budget indie titles (Obduction, PUBG, Psychonauts 2) or tight budget AAA titles (Street Fighter V, Shenmue III)
Part of the continuing split of Unity indie and UE4 'AA/AAA' is less to do with the capabilities of each engine and more to do with who has the longest experience with each. They both are creeping in on one anothers turf in that respect.
Cities Skylines?
I know, I know, Correlation does not imply causation. But just from wikipedia:
> On March 19, 2014, at the Game Developers Conference, Epic Games released Unreal Engine 4, and all of its tools, features and complete C++ source code, to the development community through a new subscription model.
Same year Unity took best engine.
> In July 2014, Unity won the "Best Engine" award at the UK's annual Develop Industry Excellence Awards.[1]
Unity made Epic react.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Engine#Unreal_Engine_4 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine)#History
Even so, it may be too little too late for Epic. It's straightforward to drop prices, but difficult to change business models, release timeframes, market position in customer's minds, codebase, customer feedback from a new usage.
Even so, it may be too little too late for Epic. It's straightforward to drop prices, but difficult to change business models, release timeframes, market position in customer's minds, codebase, customer feedback from a new usage.
The focus of exploitation is just different -- the Harvey Weinsteins of the game industry don't try to sleep with brilliant Romanian programmers, instead they work them to death.
As a romanian programmer (although not in the game industry), i must admit this is a very eloquently put. Hats off to you sir.
They've honed using your "passion" to extract as much work as they can from you for ~2-3 years. After which there's a 50/50 shot that the studio folds/etc.
In the AAA space there's also a vicious 90/10 rule where 10% of the games make 90% of the money. With rising costs it becomes increasingly difficult to keep hitting that 10% you need to keep your studio running.
The same is true for any product industry. There are things you can do (customer development, short iterations that involve your potential customers, etc) to increase the chances, but if you're not doing work for clients directly, then there is no guarantee.
Note that the "doing work for clients directly" exists in game development too, there are many freelance or services companies that do work for other companies, and from what I hear about the game industry, these have much more guaranteed pay, just like outside of games. Its the "build the product, when its done, hope someone buys it" type of work that has no guarantees, but that is in no way unique to game development.
The difference is, most other industries don't have such crazy crunch times...
It's completely rational behavior that has nothing to do with games, just look at MMO's for a more reasonable development process.
Edit: as for crunch times, I expect this is to do with the interactive element of gaming. There is whole lot more work involved when the client has the ability to break your product.
Please stop lying.
Of course most people care if you're being overworked for a small amount of compensation. Your statement is a bit ridicolous.
I don't want to sign in though, since that service offers nothing for me as a non american.
And yet academia.
This breaks the HN guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
I think some may do it anyway by free will or by social pressure, but these people are probably pretty rare. In my country (Sweden) we don't really have a culture where companies pressure people into working more in general so those who do often meet a lot of social uproar and protests.
Once I had a boss that wanted me to work overtime "unofficially" but I refused. Needless to say, I left that place pretty quickly.
I don't work in the game industry, but I know some people who do and they never work overtime.
Not necessarily easier... but definitely a different set of difficulties.
It's genuinely hard to do this kind of code so you'd think they take care not to scare away the few people who can do it.
I recall at one point Goldmans was bragging to my team about how they'd hired a game dev to do their click-to-trade currency UI. Seemed like the guy found an easier job for more pay.