The flip side, however, is the creativity. At my last job but one I worked with writers who I've respected and whose work I've enjoyed since I was 18. I work with artists who do stuff that blows me away. It's the only industry where I get to be involved with that kind of creativity on a daily basis, and that is more emotionally satisfying for me than (say) search.
Oh, and the stability is no worse than startups. I've worked at two studios that are more than ten years old at this point, one that cratered, and one middleware company that probably doesn't have a ton of life left in it. All four of the companies I worked at in Silicon Valley in the 90s are gone, and two of those were serious business (Sun and AltaVista).
And I am conflicted, because my son is one of these goobers who want to make video games. :) But if I can use that desire to get him to focus on skills that would enable him to succeed there (and, by association, anywhere), then I'm OK with it.
I think I remember dave chappelle saying in an interview that his father told him you need to name your price early. And when people demand more than that from you, it's time to get out or get away from them. I feel like that's relevant. I bailed on the video game industry recently because I was miserably depressed, sickly and malnourished. But hardship builds character and there's something to be said for a person who doesn't shy away from what they believe they're really passionate about even if other people found it to be horrible.
Can someone describe to a newb what's wrong about this?
Ideally, you want to calculate all the changes, and then write to disk. In practice, you don't know when the changes 'end', so you want to write periodically to disk.
If you are using the RDBMS, you are relying on the optimizer to correctly guess what you are doing. When it gets it wrong, it will write continuously to disk.
The difference in speed is orders of magnitude, so this one change can easily make your server logic go 10 times slower for no good reason.
The problem is worse than this because the RDBMS is not just paging to disk, it's also doing locking/synchronization, thread pooling, tree building and call backs in the background.
In every case, it's trying to guess what features are just overhead, and what you really need ... and whenever it gets this wrong, it could be making a pointless system call, which gives you all the overhead of a context switch for nothing.
Whereas the gamedev doing this at a low level does not need to guess his own intentions, and uses (and pays cycles for) only those features he needs.
You might get away with a database-centric design if your gamedev is really good with databases (dubious) and if you have an appropriate database platform (nigh impossible).
But if you have the average gamedev (talented but schlubby and theory-averse) running on the average database (garbage MySQL, ugh!) your performance will DIE.
Hobby game dev is a Real Thing now and can be picked up by people without coding skills(via tools like Twine or Game Maker). Those tools are only going to get better, and the market for readymade assets is only going to grow. The cost of video game creation is likely to go down so sharply in years to come that we won't have anything resembling the industry status quo, which is tainted all over by cost and financing issues that drive all of the things we currently rail against(crunch, risk-aversion, socially detrimental profit-seeking, monocultural demographics).
As well, if we treat "gamification" as a core organizational goal, instead of a consultant's buzzword, then one can imagine a future in which new, forward-thinking organizations will find reasons to keep game designers on staff.
The transition towards low-budget indie efforts is a great immediate improvement. Although most who try won't be able to afford to do it full-time for very long, in that case crunch is self-enforced. We'll have a lot of passionate moonlighters instead of angry worker drones.
The sad fact is that a lot of higher education is a scam right now at the price charged. The NYTimes would suggest if your high schooler is considering becoming a lawyer it may be just as bad http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/opinion/sunday/an-existent...
This discussion shouldn't be limited to just video game "schools", it has a broad application to any high school student considering what the hell they want to do. I think we a doing a disservice for not pointing this out, because (gasp) your child, or you, could just as easily end up going pursuing (insert expensive degree that will take most of your 20s to complete) and end up worse than had you gotten a mediocre 2 year video game degree.
My suggestion: spend as little as possible so you are able to make choices when you change your mind. (I went to school free and still dropped out.)
But is the demand for employees at game companies static? One could imagine, and I am hardly an expert, but one could imagine that as big games become bigger and bigger, indie games see more recognition among the 'mainsteam' and the industry grows in general, the number of people they employ will rise. It will always be more competitive to get into these companies compared to some other unsexy technical thing, but I think the games space is blowing up (economically and culturally) and the schools and more jobs are (will be?) a result of that. Same with the kids who want to go into the industry. The idea that there is necessarily a fundamental lack of opportunities for those who want to work in the industry doesn't feel right to me; I guess the big problem will be making a living doing it.
Its like having to found a new startup every year while having to converge 4+ major disciplines to create products (software, art, music, writing, and more).
Brilliant fun, with steep challenges on every angle. @jmomo you sound a little jaded. Glad things are going better for you.
The gaming industry wasn't something I was actively trying to get into, and I had worked in telecommunications and manufacturing prior to this. When the big telecom I was working on started losing customers back in 2001, I knew what was about to happen and wisely jumped ship. I just happened to land with a company in Denver Colorado who was producing an MMO game as a startup, and they had no clue about how to actually get their product on the internet, or where/how to buy or manage server infrastructure.
I worked for a major publisher who was booming at the time, making tons of money. I also worked for a number of startups who went ended up going chapter 7, chapter 11, and one got sold out to an Asian firm who immediately told everyone to move to South Korea or get laid off.
When I left the gaming industry, the following things immediately happened:
I made 20% more money, instantly. The gaming industry pays lower than average wages in most cases, across the board. This is a supply and demand problem: there is a huge supply of goobers who want to make video games for a living, and a limited number of employers willing to pay them to do it.
I worked 20-40% less hours. Just about in every department in every company I worked for, people kept sleeping bags under their desks, had no lives outside of work, were present on weekends, and put in 50-80 hour work weeks. I once literally lived and slept in my office for two weeks, except when I went home to shower and check on things for an hour or two per week. That is what pushed me over the edge and when I finally quit.
My psychological health improved. I was happier, less stressed out, and stopped getting angry over little things. When I think back about it, the gaming industry basically gave me PTSD.
My physical health improved. I started putting on muscle weight, I was less tired, and a number of persistent physical issues went away. For example, I had a bad habit of biting my tongue, possibly out of nervousness, which magically went away immediately.
I started working with more talented, competent, people. I didn't realize just how unprofessional and disorganized some of the people I was working with were until I had another reference point again. As I shifted from being a server monkey to programmer, I realized that most of the developer guys had never worked in another industry before, were high-school and college drop-outs, and most of their code was crap. I saw from the inside a huge multi-mullion dollar Atari-funded game studio go down in flames because the developers didn't know that you can't use disk drives as a CPU: they built almost all of their MMO item inventory logic into SQL triggers and events. Let's not even talk about sexism and anti-social behavior.
Employment stability went way up. The gaming industry is very unstable, and companies crash and burn all the time. There is a constant flow of new startups who fail every year without ever having shipped/published a product.
Unsurprisingly, most people don't want to hear this negativity about the industry.
The people who I know still work in the industry don't argue that I'm wrong, but instead argue that it's the price you pay for doing what you want (note: most of these people seem pretty miserable to me). It's not a subject that I will often bring up, less I get a hostile reaction. After all, most of these people are emotionally bought in to the idea that they are the next John Carmack.
The kids who want to get into the gaming industry just ignore me or discount what I have to say. What else are they going to do? They can't even imagine getting a job in some boring industry like finance, government, manufacturing, health care, retail, or any of that nonsense.
And that brings us to the gaming schools. Like I said before, it's a supply and demand thing. There is a huge supply of kids who want to make video games, and not enough employers for them all. It's kind of like little boys who want to grow up and be astronauts, and little girls who want to me marine biologists. The numbers say it ain't gunna happen for most of them.
There is indeed money to be made in the gaming industry, but it's not in working inside of it. It's in selling the dream that all these dumb kids have, thinking they can grow up and make video games for a living.
I don't really have much good to say about working in the gaming industry. I met some cool people there, but as a whole, it's just an immature bunch of kids who have not grown up and gotten real jobs yet.