The industry is at its most wealthy and yet it feels like its on fire.
Yup thats capitalism. Always need to make more money than previous year, or we have a depression… Lol.
You don’t get rich paying a ton of people 200k. You get rich not paying them. So what you are saying is actually not a contradiction!
You don’t get rich paying a ton of people 200k.
You literally do, though. Because wealth isn’t a function of the volume of currency you’ve amassed, it is the quality of goods and services that the currency can purchase. When you’ve got a ton of highly educated people working as a team to accomplish something exceptional, what you get back is far more than what you put in.
Just ask Billie Beane, a guy who is a testament to what the upper limit of $200k/player gets you in terms of a baseball team. Yeah, you can beat the average for a little while by one exceptional administrator squeezing the system on the margins. But the only way you win that final game of the season is with a budget like what the Red Soxes or the Dodgers or Astros bring to bare.
And in that triumph, you do - in fact - get rich. You fill more stadium seats. You sell more cars or phones. You build more elaborate buildings. You send people to the bottom of the sea (without them getting crushed to death) and up to the moon.
At some point, you’ve got to put forward an investment. You can’t run an advanced economy on poverty-level wages. And if you don’t have those advances in medicine and engineering and logistics and technology, what the fuck kind of rich are you?
Do you want to pay competitive salaries in Heaven or run a robber barony in Hell?
It’s a wonderful idea but it’s just not how the gaming industry is run. The gaming industry runs more like war machine production facility.
You pay some very good people lots of money to set things up, design how things are going to go, make up some prototype work. Then you set up for production, hire on tons of people to finish all the work. Once everything is up and running and all the products are out the door you cut back to a maintenance staff while you have the very well paid, highly talented core working on the next big thing. People are dying to get into the gaming industry so bad, the job pool waxes and wains in quality a little but there’s never truly a lack of new talent when you need it.
The saving grace for the industry is live cadence games. The whole subscription side of things that we don’t really want to see as gamers keep this ebb and flow of employment from happening. You stretch your production schedule out a little longer to begin with. You don’t hire up quite so heavily and then for the life of the game you keep releasing features and options, You run events to keep people subscribing.
I like the ideas you’re proposing, It just not a method that game companies are willing to try to entertain.
Software engineer (luckily not in games) here. Definitely feeling it in terms of looking for a new job. Everyone’s only looking for senior engineers and they’re SUPER picky because there are so many unemployed engineers applying, even in my country where there are a lot fewer layoffs.
