When I moved from web dev to game dev, the second most surprising thing I found is how much this industry depends on proprietary solutions compared to web dev.

The most surprising thing is how little professional people get paid, again compared to web dev.

that's why I switched from gamedev to webdev :D

> The most surprising thing is how little professional people get paid, again compared to web dev.

They pay less because they can - there are many more highly motivated people who dream of making video games than there are open spots.

People are less highly motivated who dream about making Another Corporate CRUD App 2.0 (this time with Firefox support), and there are a lot more job openings.

Yes, I understand that. It's just like filmmaking industry but not that bad.

If I had had the same level of understanding of economics as I do now, I probably would have stayed in web backend development.

From an engineering perspective, are there any things you prefer, or are at least glad to have learned from, in game dev?

Not too surprising. It's built into gaming's history to work on and release a game purely woth in house tech. And then submit it to a proprietary console maker for a "seal of quality" (or what used to be that). And then other important tools (especially for artists, but a lot for programmibg) served this same mentality as AAA development grew. Support was more important than anything else as tools became more comple, and these studios weren't used to sharing to begin with.

The phenomenon of open source tools being able to even be considered by professional development is a very recent phenomenon (in the grand scheme of things). But for programmers it's still difficult because console support is so important and still extremely closed down.