Gaming software engineers, relative to a FAANG engineer for example, are willing to work for less money, work in worse conditions due to a tradeoff for working in a field they are fanatically passionate about. It doesn't matter whether they should or should not be, it just is. That's what those engineers are willing to do. Gaming companies exploit this for profit. If you were a for-profit organization you would do the same - the market is telling you to do it. Whether that is evil or not is up for you to decide.

Same thing happens in fashion, media and entertainment.

>Same thing happens in fashion, media and entertainment.

And many of those industries unionized to prevent the systematic abuse!

If there was a headline

"Abuser abused many girlfriends in a row" you'd excuse their behavior saying there are plenty of other guys out there they could go with instead.

> you'd excuse their behavior saying there are plenty of other guys out there they could go with instead.

Where was I excusing it? I was simply laying out the market reality. If you want to say certain classes of professions "deserve" less or more money, then shouldn't we expand this discussion to all professions (teachers, doctors, lawyers, etc.)? No one is really saying they deserve less, but rather that this is the market reality.

If gaming devs want to unionize then that's their prerogative.

The answer is as simple as supply and demand.

If there are 200,000 devs who want to work in game dev and 4,000 roles then wages will be depressed by over-supply. This is observable in all sorts of industries, often bordering on exploitation of people who desperately want to work in a specific area and are willing to work on low/no wages to get experience.

You'll also see companies over-paying when key skills are hard to source as the natural complement.

You're reaching into "cosmic justice" territory, which is a really bad place to be. It's not up to you or anyone else to fix the fact that the universe is inherently "unfair" (re: people with different passions, dispositions, and life situations), and certainly giving any entity sufficient power to attempt to solve for cosmic injustice is simply paving a road to tyranny with golden intentions.

Well right now there are existing entities with too much power, unions provide a second (less) powerful entity to balance the unchecked power of corporate leaders.

It’s not about correcting a cosmic wrong, it’s about people wanting more power and using a tool to get it.

It really is, though, about correcting cosmic wrongs, because it is the world view you must first hold to believe something "unjust" is occurring when someone voluntarily bargains to work long hours for lower pay to be able to work their dream job. The next step is to pass legislation or push for judicial or executive action to try to "correct" for the injustice. The U.S. already has several very counter-productive pro-union labor laws it has accumulated over the years, and, under democrat presidents like Obama and Biden, the NLRB rules heavily in favor of unions:

https://cei.org/blog/biden-says-he-wants-to-be-the-most-pro-...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/12/adversarial-labor-law...

These laws and actions don't make the world more just. On the contrary, they just add new injustices on top of the old ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzYgiOC9cj4

Not at all. I just object to the toxic idea that professions should pay more or less based on how much much people like doing them. Justify salaries based on supply and demand, and value creation.

"Your job is fun/cool/meaningful whereas my work makes me hate myself. Therefore, I deserve more money than you" is an awfully sour worldview.

Working conditions or health and safety, are not up for debate no matter how amazing or terrible the job is.

> should pay more or less based on how much much people like doing them. Justify salaries based on supply and demand, and value creation.

Reread your sentence and think real hard about it because you're saying the same thing, you're just conflating the premise. Gaming devs ARE based on supply and demand. As one of the other comments points out, the demand is outsized relative to other developer positions (e.g. SaaS dev). Simple supply and demand tells us if the demand is higher, then the price goes down. There ya go.

> Therefore, I deserve more money than you

No one is saying this.

> you're saying the same thing, you're just conflating the premise

I understand the effect of passion on supply. You might think I'm making a distinction without a difference but I disagree. We shouldn't normalize the idea that well-paying work has to be unpleasant. "It's called 'work' because it's not fun" is a harmful idea.

> No one is saying this.

Read the comment I originally responded to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34245152

Should they be paid less is not the right question. The question is would they be willing to do it for less, and the answer is probably yes.