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Working in the gaming industry is a highly desirable career choice for young men. Many children grow up dreaming of making video games, boys especially. People

Working in the gaming industry is a highly desirable career choice for young men. Many children grow up dreaming of making video games, boys especially. People are willing to sacrifice a lot to achieve their childhood dreams, and willing to ignore a lot of negative aspects of that choice... for a certain amount of time. Young men are particularly vulnerable to this, which is one reason why gaming and startups both hire young men (usually fresh out of college) at an abnormally high rate. If you're 23 years old, don't have a family or strong social life, and spent the last 15 years dreaming of this job and the last 4 years training for it, you're going to pour everything you have into it. You'll move across the country for it, because again you don't have a family or strong social life. And then burnout sets in, which is one reason why gaming and startups both are dominated by 20-somethings. When you get into your 30s, having a family becomes more common. You don't want to spend 80 hours a week at the office. You want more money, more benefits. You go to Microsoft or IBM or one of the older, established companies where work is more steady and pay is more competitive. If you spend 15 years dreaming of something, it takes a while for that dream to be shattered by reality. The time between entering the workforce and the dream being shattered is where gaming companies and tech startups turn their profit.

taneq 7y ago
Luckily there's so much more scope now for individuals and small teams to build profitable indie games. Tools like Unity, Unreal Engine etc. allow people to focus on actually building games instead of implementing Yet Another Engine. Marketplaces like Steam, flawed as they are, offer market access to anyone with a decent product. It's possible to develop games without letting yourself be chewed up and spat out by traditional "commercial" game development.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  True, but that's where the discoverability issues come in. For every Supergiant Games or Drinkbox Studios, there are hundreds of titles on Steam and elsewhere that fail to differentiate themselves or become anything, and probably thousands more that are hobby projects, left in partially completed states with many hours invested and nothing to show for it. In some ways, the wide adoption of tools like GameMaker Studio have probably exasperated this, as it's now very, very fast to get to the basics of "guy moving around screen", but harder to get good art or really unique gameplay mechanics. There's an argument here that it's the role of publishers to handle the promotions side and provide that stamp of quality. Which may well be the case, but that just moves the pieces around— instead of needing to get onto the right curator's list or mentioned by the right twitch streamer, you now need to get your two minute pitch slot with someone from Devolver.

taneq 7y ago

Luckily there's so much more scope now for individuals and small teams to build profitable indie games. Tools like Unity, Unreal Engine etc. allow people to focus on actually building games instead of implementing Yet Another Engine. Marketplaces like Steam, flawed as they are, offer market access to anyone with a decent product. It's possible to develop games without letting yourself be chewed up and spat out by traditional "commercial" game development.

mikepurvis 7y ago
True, but that's where the discoverability issues come in. For every Supergiant Games or Drinkbox Studios, there are hundreds of titles on Steam and elsewhere that fail to differentiate themselves or become anything, and probably thousands more that are hobby projects, left in partially completed states with many hours invested and nothing to show for it. In some ways, the wide adoption of tools like GameMaker Studio have probably exasperated this, as it's now very, very fast to get to the basics of "guy moving around screen", but harder to get good art or really unique gameplay mechanics. There's an argument here that it's the role of publishers to handle the promotions side and provide that stamp of quality. Which may well be the case, but that just moves the pieces around— instead of needing to get onto the right curator's list or mentioned by the right twitch streamer, you now need to get your two minute pitch slot with someone from Devolver.