Game companies apparently have a meaningful differentiator, which is that working in a gaming context is something people actually value and are willing to give up potential compensation for.
That's a fallacy, no one goes to work at Wendy for the love of it. Some people do really want to work in video game for the love of it, they know that their salary will be lower, and they still do it.
And it's crazy to hold up the restaurant industry as some kind of model of reasonable work hours and fair compensation.
If anything, game developer war stories pale in comparison with fine dining kitchens.
I don't know, there are a lot of jobs that are worse than Wendy's out there. "Love" is a strong word, but the same forces are at play.
There are some jobs people really want to do and would do to some degree anyways even if they weren’t employed to do them. This is not the same idea as ‘there are worse jobs out there’.
Making games is one of these things. Working at a fast-food joint is not.
It's not, it's simply reality.
When deciding where to work, people don't just myopically look at the $ amount on the salary and nothing else. The company reputation, industry, culture etc. all have intrinsic value.
That's why SpaceX and some game dev's studios can get away with lower salaries than the market rate, because working there in itself has value for some people. And that's why Morgan Stanley and Facebook can't.
Good old supply and demand.
A bunch of people already responded to this, but I'm going to add my two cents anyway:
I currently make 6 low figures in a relatively boring but non-stressful systems administration job. The company is a dinosaur in Internet Years and has its idiosyncrasies but is ultimately a very decent place to work. My manager gives me my priorities and then gets out of my way to let me do my work. I work 40 hours a week, sometimes less. The company is mostly software devs and QA, so there's no such thing as on-call because nothing we manage needs 24x7 uptime. In 10 years, there have been about 3 times I've gotten a call on the weekend to help bring something back online.
I could very easily double my salary in under a year if I really buckled down and tried to pivot to DevOps role in some rapidly growing biotech or fintech (read: crypto) company instead. The tradeoffs being: 1) sacrificing basically all my free time and time with my family in order to adequately grok the ever-changing world of DevOps 2) that feeling of being out of my depth for 6 months to a year that comes with moving to a new company 3) almost certainly being part of an on-call rotation 4) taking a risk on a new company that may go bankrupt or get bought out a few years down the road, and so on.
I'm making an active choice to keep my stability and work/life balance while making what I consider to be a reasonable wage.
No thanks.
But hey, each to their own, I guess. If a game dev wants to work more and get paid less because they love building games, that's their choice.
For context, I was contacted by a game dev company recently. The max they could pay me was 5 figures.
Doing a gaming job for 40 hours a week for low 6 figures is fine. However, it's not the reality for many, if not most, game devs.
Or you could just value things about work apart from salary. No need to shame people for going for not doing for the absolute highest paying job. You can try to do the best you can comp wise, but if you're only chasing money your whole life, it won't lead to much satisfaction and is generally bad advice
This is why groups like actors needed a union. There is an endless supply of wide eyed actors out there willing to work for nothing just for the chance of maybe becoming famous one day. The union keeps the big players from taking advantage of this endless supply.
Even with their union, actors make a median salary of around $40k. The top 25% best paid make closer to $60k median.
As a former dev (but I still work games adjacent), I'd never tell someone about the industry without telling them about pay and work hours. But at the same time I feel people who are interested in this are likely somewhat aware of this already, and ultimately experience will be a better teacher than me saying X is better. It's not like kids these days can't google.
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Ironically enough, google and the like is likely the biggest reason gamedevs don't have unions. Despite the stigma, most devs aren't trapped the same way a fast food worker may be. I've had several friends laid off (including myself) and we then pivot to a "boring job" making more money than we were making before being laid off. few other industries can boast this. Even a similar industry like VFX can't just pivot to a whole other sector of work once they get laid off (after making a movie billions).
Given a situation where labor supply is in excess, one could say "let them work for pennies because they love the craft, i.e. let the company pay them nothing because they're easily replaceable." Or one could say "they should unionize so they can bargain for better salaries, and still do what they love."
I suspect that since game devs still make above the national average for salaries, there's less incentive to unionize and demand wages that actually reflect the value they bring to those multi-billion dollar game publishers. It's like "well 50k-60k is good enough" even though the industry they work for is flush with cash and could easily compensate more if they were made to do so.
80+h weeks will absolutely kill any love or value you can get unless you're also a masochist.
But for anyone working normal hours with normal benefits in a decent environment you are absolutely right. Money can be an excellent goal, but so can working on something you like, or working less to spend more time on something else.
Just never work for a company for free.
> Just never work for a company for free.
Screw you, buddy, I'll do what I want to!
(Okay, my aggressive tone is a joke, but I do actually mean the underlying point. I've worked for free many times, for at least two totally different reasons in different situations, and I'll do it again, and it's ridiculous to say that people should "never" do this. Different people have different goals.)
I’d question the merits of your method if it means working a lot of overtime to make other people rich. Mostly because “experience” extremely rarely has any real value in corporate land where everyone, and I do mean everyone, is replaceable once you zoom out enough to a top management perspective. And any extra time you put in for free is really just you getting taken advantage of.
Now I did specify company, because I’m not against volunteering for NGOs. I still don’t think you should spend 80 hours a week doing it, but by all means volunteer to do things. Help your neighbour build a roof, go join a soup kitchen, knit little hats for newborn babies, whatever you want. That’s not really working for free though, it’s working to better your community.
Putting in overtime, that you are not getting paid for at Coca Cola is not only foolish, it’s downright undermining the foundation of our society. It’s you trading away pieces or your life, so that stock owners and corporate managers can become a little richer, and no, you should not really be free to do that. Exactly because it ruins it for every other worker. Especially in America, where you working 80 hours a week, means you’re quite literally keeping someone else from having a full time job and the access to healthcare it provides, and for what? So the billionaires can billion?
If that was indeed what the parent comment truly meant, would you still disagree with it?
Because I am of the same opinion as you that complete outright rejection of overtime, even if it is only once in forever during a critical time period, is not the move. I am absolutely ok with overtime once in forever and for a great reason. But I am absolutely against overtime being the norm or a regular thing.
Do you reject volunteering for non-profits? What about non-profits that have some paid employees? What about for-profit companies that you believe have a net positive effect on the world? What about jobs that you think are fun, I dunno maybe white water guiding, that happen to be for for-profit non-benevolent companies?
The whole idea of "you shouldn't work if you're not getting paid" is a category error.
If you want to do work, do it. If you're getting paid, great. If you're not getting paid but you want to do it anyway, great. If the only reason you want to do this work is because your current alternatives suck, well, I'm sorry to hear that, but you should still pursue your best alternative, which may be working unpaid overtime.
Mind you, in some cases, it makes sense to say "because I am part of a bargaining collective, I will eschew personally-beneficial options, as part of our collective negotiation strategy". Respect! But that's only sane if you're actually part of a bargaining collective. It is (usually) completely idiotic to imagine that you have solidarity with other people who do not see themselves as having solidarity with you.
All of the above comments are super generic, because moksly made some very generic comments, including "never work for a company for free", and I think moksly's advice, when taken as written, is utterly wrong. Now, specifically in the case of working paid or unpaid overtime, as with any other question about workplace environment or about compensation, the only reasonable thing to do is ask what your alternatives are, both short-term and long-term.
Tell me, if you're against overtime being the norm or a regular thing, what advice would you give to a hypothetical person who has no known alternative employment and a dependent to support, and who knows that their boss could hire others to replace them? Would you honestly say to them "never work for a company for free"? Surely instead you would say "do what you gotta do, and also btw try to find a different job, and also btw good luck buddy I feel for you".
The sentence "never work for a company for free" is utterly wrong-headed.
No, I don't. My reply was in the context of full-time employment, not part-time volunteering for some cause on your own free time whenever you choose to.
"Volunteering" for your employer isn't really volunteering, I hope you realize that.
>The sentence "never work for a company for free" is utterly wrong-headed.
It is about as wrong-headed as saying "I refuse to make extra profit for my employer on my own free time on a regular basis without receiving extra pay in return" is.
There are so many people that want to work on games, and there are many positions where these people are capable of doing the job, that that is the situation in that industry.
There are a subset of game development positions that are just like FAANG: well paid, good working conditions, with high skill requirements. Just like FAANG is a subset of the software industry. As big as FAANG is, the median software developer is not that.
There is a lot of room between that your characterization.
However, we need to stop shaming people for having different career priorities than our own, or assuming that people are only making these choices out of poor judgment. As the parent comment explained, some people really do prefer to engage in non-FAANG career paths for various reasons. For many, it's as simple as not being willing or able to relocate to a location with a FAANG office, as few FAANG companies offer remote positions even after COVID.
But it's not google telling you... it's literally the rank'n'file staff telling you that there's more important things than "money".
I'll not argue that many of the big players are garbage and are "anti-consumer"... but to dismiss how workers feel because you don't like some companies seems like you're missing the trees for the forest...
depends on the studio. Everyone focuses on the EA's, but most game studios aren't these huge billionaire ventures cranking out 12 games a year. It's certainly not the modern EA or Naughty Dog or Blizzard that give devs the low salary reputation.
I worked at one for 3 years, and it was <300 employees. I was still surprised at how much money they can bring in after talking to producers (spoiler: maybe it varies in other studios, but the most profitable games worked on weren't console games), but it was very clear that this wasn't a studio that could pay everyone even 100K/year and expect to be in business next year.
> The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda that only serves to keep labor costs low
If this is good or bad is up to interpretation but some people actually enjoy different work cultures. I just joined Google after a ~5 year career at various startups, 2 of them YC backed through Work at a Startup & Bookface.
Google's culture and the culture at startups I've worked at are extremely different. Even the scales of your work are entirely different.
One of my first projects at Google was a "minor" change that resulted in migrating a majority of our users code. This involved a high level design doc, another doc sent to a committee, and for me to actually write the code which involved a series of reviews from my TL. What was essentially a very complex "find and replace" operation took ~2 weeks and it consumed a large percent of my bandwidth so I was operating at ~10% speed on other tasks while this was happening. After this we were planning another "medium sized" project and we were talking about timelines. I was confused about why we don't "just do it" and it turns out this task was going to be taking years.
This is a very different pace to what you get at a startup. At a previous job I rewrote how our entire CI worked. I essentially setup a demo, had another coworker I liked working with look at it and raise concerns, I fixed them, and then I pulled the trigger and migrated us a few days later. This also involved switching us from BitBucket to a self hosted Gitlab (which I setup runners, backups, etc for in ~1 day). We essentially changed the entire way we did development over a week because I decided it was the way to go, one other coworker agreed, and I executed on it and made it happen.
Another time we had a client identify a bug in a build we were going to ship them last minute. This was a "we're going to drop you as a client if this doesn't work" thing. Me and the same coworker had to fix this in 2 weeks or the company was screwed. I found this out as soon as I signed on to slack when my coworker who had been up till 6AM talking to our contact at the other company filled me in. I told him to go to bed and I'd start working on a fix. 1AM rolls around and he wakes up and I'm still working on a fix and feel like I've made no progress. I talk to the coworker and say "We're not going to make it, we're screwed". He tells me to go to bed and he'd work on it assuring me we'll be fine. I wake up the next day and he calls me saying we're screwed and I told him to catch some sleep and he'd I'd work on it and we'll be fine. We trade off like that every day for ~2 weeks including weekends. We pull off a fix using some new tech I was working on and by using standards we were pushing for others to use (unit testing, TDD, my automated deployment pipeline, duct tape, etc). It was exhausting and we both worked like 100hr/week for that time period. The next week the client was pleased, management was like "take whatever time you need that was amazing", and we went on our merry way. I basically vegged out for a week and, whenever I did do work, it was stuff I wanted to clean up anyway due to being bored.
You'd never get what happens at Google to happen at small company (years for a speculative project that may/may not help), and you'd never get what happens at small startups to happen at Google. Is that bad? No. Different people want different things. Honestly, the most fun I've had working in my career were those 3 weeks and working with that coworker. I still talk to him every week to catch up and about how our lives are going (he just bought a house, I'm moving, etc).
Obviously no one wants to work 100hr weeks but I want to work with people who care about the company, what we're doing, where we're going, and who are incentivized to do so (significant stock allocations, etc). I've been lucky enough to find a team like that at Google and at a few of the startups I've worked.
In short: it's not "bullshit propaganda" if you enjoy working with people who care, lack of bureaucracy, management structure, and actually like what you're building.
Imagining who those people are and how you are helping them can help provide context to what you are doing.
If a Google recruiter told me "take a low salary and work 70+ hours a week because you love writing software and all your coworkers love writing software and it's a great environment" I'd (justifiably) laugh at their face – enough though I really do love everything about software. But somehow this is completely fine in gaming.