I got into video game development. It is mostly fun and interesting work and I have never regretted it. Sometimes when I was younger I was exploited for my pass

I got into video game development. It is mostly fun and interesting work and I have never regretted it. Sometimes when I was younger I was exploited for my passion with long hours or poor pay but the game industry largely grew out of that. It can still be tough especially on triple A games with huge marketing budgets... nothing puts pressure on managers and a team like a 7-8 figure marketing spend or a launch deadline that cannot be moved (sports seasons, movie releases, thanksgiving) Video games are software and software does not like to be told to finish in the next N weeks no matter how many bugs or how complex they are, or new features that have been dreamed up and must be implemted. This is where tales of long death marches come from. Even those are not ubiquitous. Anyway finally I get to your point: games are online now and they often don’t finish at launch. You can now continue to fix bugs and tweak gameplay after launch and have users update. Not only that but work begins on downloadable expansions and some games have live stores and other online services like leaderboards. I switched to the mobile game industry which is a lot less punishing on staff because you rarely have hard deadlines and games ramp up more slowly. They tend to run for 3-5 years so there is no final release. This means more career stability because AAA teams tend to have layoffs after launch and sometimes disband entirely.