Not in gamedev (and not planning to change that), but this is excellent advice applicable to many other domains.

That is so true

The more I look into Gamedev the more it looks like a very ungrateful and daunting task

You can put all your energy (and money) into a game and it might just... flop

With a startup you can always try to pivot, or make something of what was developed. And your costs with creative productions (which are harder to reuse) are much smaller.

That's a good point. How would you go about solving this? Just release minimal playable demos and iterate based on feedback?

> With a startup you can always try to pivot

You can do this in gamedev as well.

A high budget example would be Fortnite which pivoted to a Battle Royale version of the original, vastly less successful, game. A lower budget example would be Proteus, originally a failed attempt to write an RPG that pivoted into something quite different.

Discord is an example of a game company pivoting from a failed MOBA to a more traditional tech company.

Slack was literally created by a team trying to make a game.

As was Flickr.

Discord, too.

As was Mattermost.

> Be realistic about failure. It’s a high risk, high reward business with tons of uncertainty

Excellent point to which I’d add: be very critical of how the risk is presented by your potential employer.

> It’s a high risk, high reward business with tons of uncertainty.

What's the high reward side of that for a typical dev? Do you get a percent of the game sales or something?

I thought it was infamously overworked and underpaid - because so many are game fans and will put up with it for the thrill of work being games too.

I think GP must mean indie game development, i.e. yes you get 100% of game sales (minus costs and partners' share if applicable of course), which isn't really worth distinguishing from advice for start-ups? That's just a start-up that makes games isn't it?

I interpreted this as the product had a high risk/high reward profile.

Presumably for the developer the reward for the high reward path is continued employment, and the penalty for the high risk path is loss of job

This is indeed what I meant. I wasn’t clear. Entertainment products in general have a strong Power Law Curve to their relative revenues. Games are expensive to produce and have a high variance on their returns.

So, the rewards for a profitable game for most game employees is that the studio doesn’t shut down! Though I have heard of rare cases where people on a team hit a truly large royalty check from a game they worked on. Usually, the profit from a successful game goes into the war chest to cover the next failure.

Lead developers can get a percentage of sales or profits. We’re taking the John Carmacks and Sid Meiers of the world.

It’s about as likely as becoming an L9 IC at a FAANG however.

Profit share? In AAA, yes. In Indie, no. (At least not usually)

High risk as in, most people are "gamers" or love games, unaware that they either hate or are bad at making them, aka wasting about 5 years of their lives learning how to. You really have to love making them, the constant interation will kill you otherwise.

Salary wise, from someone who has worked in Indie and now works in AAA as a Technical Narrative Designer and absolutely loves it, game dev salary is about 60% of a regular UX/UI Designer salary for traditional tech companies. This is the same for Engineers or Programmers. So still a lot, but just not life changing money like some of the salaries in Silicon Valley.

Riot and Valve pay best by far, they're the FAANG equivalent. (Excluding the mobile and web3 market)

You are usually rewarded with stock options - and if your team makes a game that's very successful, it'll show in the stock price.

Bonuses are also easy to dish out if the studio has a few successful games already operating and bringing in constant revenue.