IGN can exclusively reveal the details from IATSE’s 2023 Gameworkers.org Rates and Conditions Survey, where the organization asked hundreds of video game developers about their pay, benefits, and working conditions.
I work in architecture, a field that is also notorious for long hours, excessive crunch time, and mediocre pay. Real-time 3D graphics have started to become important to the design process over the last several years, and at a previous firm I met a 3D vis guy who’d transitioned into my industry from a job at a game developer, “because the hours and pay are so much better.” It boggled my mind that conditions could be so much worse in game dev that my own field would be an improvement.
Seems like any career that is commonly seen as a passion comes with an additional level of exploitation. Game developers and animators get a raw deal.
It’s also, imo, because it’s a relatively newer career. Nurses, teachers, mechanics all existed as industries before he decline of labor. I work in biotech, and people have these oblivious conversations on reddit that are like, “I have a masters but can’t find a job with any stability or a living wage in my city. What am I doing wrong?”
And each time I explain that what they’re doing wrong is trying to get paid under late stage capitalism in a high risk-high reward casino industry filled with foreign visa-holding indentured servants and no one who has ever heard of collective bargaining.
Not to diminish your point because all fields should be unionized, but nurses and teachers are drastically underpaid and overworked, despite many of them having unions.
Yeah, lab work has the cultural cachet of STEM and knowledge work, but looks a lot more like manual labor in practice. One of the lab planners at my current employer switched careers after getting her master’s because pipetting thousands upon thousands of well plates for her research gave her severe repetitive stress injuries that made it unbearable to continue working in the lab.
Biotech has another problem, in that the VC money --and therefore the job market – is concentrated in a small number of HCOL metros. A friend of mine founded a startup out here in the Midwest, and he struggles to attract enough funding to retain staff who are constantly being lured away to the coasts by better-funded firms offering better pay, even though that money wouldn’t go nearly as far in a place like SF or Boston compared to Kansas City.
“Oh? You hate your job? There’s a support group for that, it’s called ‘Everybody’, we meet at the bar!”
- Drew Carey
Cant blame game devs at all. Their working conditions take the absolute piss. It’s sweatshop conditions compared to other types of tech work.
Is any career sustainable anymore?
I was considering making the jump from film and television to the video game industry until a year or two ago. I am really passionate about video games, and I really think there’s a lane for me. Unfortunately, after reading so many horrible stories about crunch culture and learning just how demanding the industry can be (even as somebody who worked on some pretty grueling Hollywood sets) I decided not to go that route. It still makes me upset to think about. I just feel like the industry is so terrible it’d be irresponsible and unfair to my family to go down that route. Reading Significant Zero really put the last nail in the coffin for me on that dream, even though it wasn’t the intention of the book. 
I know it’s not much, but I hope that if you don’t already, you find some time for yourself to just make games for the fun of it.
Not if you’re already dealing with overwork stress, but if you have free time that you’d like to spend on something. No one has to play them or you could do game jams (even though that’s inherently crunch, it’s the choice of the dev rather than their boss and more of a self-imposed limitation) or do otherwise random stuff and just let people muck about with whatever you’ve created. No pressure, no deadlines, no expectations.
And since you know already know how production in general works, you’re well aware of the iterative process and won’t fall into the trap of “why is this taking so long and why can’t my graphics be as good as GTA V” or whatever, which a lot of new developers (and programmers and pretty much everyone) encounter.
It would be nice. I just need structure and it’s hard to find structure when I can only do it during my little free time i have around my toddlers :/
It would need to at least partially pay the bills to be viable.
I really appreciate the encouragement, by the way. It’s tempting!
I’m 10 years into my games career and one of the main reasons I’m still in it is that I’ve worked for indie studios for most of my career.
I’ve worked rarely for AAA studios and they are soulless and long hours. It’s not fun, it’s not creative, it’s not about creating personal art. It’s about creating a product to make profits. They’re really fun games a lot of the time but they get there by limiting who can contribute to what.
An engineer trying to give feedback on design gets shut down. A lot of smaller studios are the opposite and people wear multiple hats daily. I love wearing multiple hats and it helps me understand my own art creation process.
Some folks in the industry as well only see this like a job not an expression of themselves through art. That’s fine but limits them to studios who only want workers not artists.
That said, the average has came up. About 10 years ago that average time in the industry was 5 years. Now it’s 7. People are finding the industry more and more stable but the industry does have a problem keeping juniors. I almost left the industry several times but as I got over 5 years I started to see a change in job offers. Lots more recruiters contacting me. At 10 years I’ve started to see a lot more people wanting to pay me for an hour talk. It becomes easier to stay in the industry as you gain experience but those first 5 years are really rough.
