> The best thing was that the player base appreciated every one of us, and constantly thanked us for making things better.
I work in games and this is honestly one of my biggest drivers. I of course love the game as well and want to make it better, but community praise is just next level energy for me.
Over the last few years many of us at our studio have been doxxed, threatened, called on our personal phones, etc. and that can really take the wind out of my sails. But when you get some positive or constructive feedback about trying to make the game better it really helps.
Working in games has the opportunity to be such a collaborative process with coworkers and community and it is awesome when it works well.
It's a simple supply/demand calculation. "Game dev" is high on the dream-job list -- "internal framework developer for MegaCo" is not. Game engines have made game dev more accessible than ever, the raw talent pool is bigger than its ever been.
It's a lot like being a professional musician. The hours suck, the environment is usually crap, it spills into your home life all the time... and the pay sucks unless you're the 0.1% (or a business person in the field instead of a performer) but lots and lots of people want to do it and will grind away at being a pro musician, because they're passionate about it.
If there's any set of devs that needs a union or is most like other fields where unionization is beneficial, it's game devs.
Indeed. There's even a term for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential
NGL, because this is actually my dream job.
Ultimately, that place was enormously engaging, but I was never going to buy a house and retire on what I was making there, so I left for a better paying gig. Our users really loved the product and eagerly engaged with us. I got several trips to races, including pit and garage access passes, several drivers visited our studio while in town for the NH race, and I learned a ton about both coding and racing.
I'm really glad I did it, but I'm also glad I quit it.
I understand this rationally and yet at every job I've worked at I've still felt pretty secure until the moment I've been laid off (which for the record has happened to me 4 times in the last 8 years).
If you're a hard worker and you're providing a lot of value you learn the risk is never that anyone would want to lay you off individually, but that some higher up who has very little care or understanding for who is providing value will decide that you're no longer needed.
It's something that I've only really came to terms with over the last few years – that no amount of effort will save you from layoffs. The only thing that will save you is luck. When I was in my twenties I honestly thought that if I just provide enough value my job would always be safe.
I guess I'm just saying that I understand it from an emotional perspective. Rationally I understand you can go from feeling like the most valuable person in your department to unemployed in 24 hours. But emotionally the fact that this can happen still messes with me.
You've been laid off on average once every 2 years. I've been laid off once in 19 years. Did I just get lucky? Does it really just all come down to luck like you claim? Or is there more that goes into it? Maybe someone could do the math - if everyone had the same "luck" as you, what are the odds that I made it 19 years with only 1 layoff?
I think there is this idea that under-performers are the ones that lose their jobs in layoffs – or at least that's what I used to think. Yet, despite always being one of the most valuable people in my team, this has never protected me, or the majority of people I've seen who have lost their jobs. That's really my point.
That said, if you are an under-performer you probably will increase your odds of being laid off. I have seen a number of downsizings before where people are cut because they were performing as well as others. So maybe I should have clarified that a bit more, but I would still stand by my overall point that assuming you're not under-performing you're probably not at any increased risk of layoffs vs someone who's outperforming.
And perhaps one final caveat here is that if you are an out-performer and you are laid off you will probably find it easier to find work in the future because at the very least the people you've worked with in the past will want to work with you again.
Yep. The computer games industry has had a well-deserved reputation for being awful to work in for decades.