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Since I don't often see UE4 related posts on the HN front page but love the technical community here, gonna go ahead and take the opportunity to ask what people

Since I don't often see UE4 related posts on the HN front page but love the technical community here, gonna go ahead and take the opportunity to ask what people in the industry think about current job opportunities for entry level folks transitioning from web development work. I know the old story about conditions being worse and avoiding turning your passion into your job/hell, but anyone able to chime in? I'm working on a VR game as a learning experience and using UE4 with the hope that as AR/VR grows more popular over the next decade I'll have set myself up for moving to the field, but I don't know how early I might be able to make that move or how quickly opportunities are growing. A few years ago my hope was that by now VR would have grown to the point that some of the digital agencies here in NY would have work doing branded VR experiences or some type of VR work for non-gaming related VR uses / for non-technology companies. But I haven't necessarily seen VR roles popping up at agencies / marketing firms. Anyone with any insight on VR or UE4 job market general trends?

throwaway3699 6y ago
I'm an indie developer, so limited perspective for sure. Focusing on games and the consumer market. The main issue I can see with VR is the same pattern that played out in mainstream PC gaming -- where 20% of the market takes the vast majority of the market's dollars. That means that the VR market can sustain far far less companies, even though games cost more and are primarily developed by indies. I'll bet Half-Life: Alyx and Beat Saber took in more than a third of all money spent on VR last year, whereas everyone else is left competing for scraps. If you make or find a game studio that is breaking into that upper category then you may be in a very comfortable position for the riding future growth.
- avereveard 6y ago
  vr is going to be an inherently smaller market not just for the cost of entry but because it's inherently hard to make it casual
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    tbh, The Quest 2 selling like hotcakes as a portable Beat Saber machine makes me think otherwise. The same issues apply to regular consoles too.
  - arduinomancer 6y ago
    I think that for VR: buyFactor = price / howGoodTheTechIs If either the denominator increases or the numerator decreases it could more popular in the future.
1-6 6y ago
“I know the old story about conditions being worse and avoiding turning your passion into your job/hell, but anyone able to chime in?” I think you already know the general culture of the work you want to get involved in. VR projects are usually side projects and considered nice to have rather than need to have. There haven’t been “killer apps” recently which has driven massive adoption from industries with deep pockets such as infrastructure or transportation. As much as I respect media and entertainment, the pool of dollars are hotly contested. It better to work for other industries.
Animats 6y ago
2019 was the Year of VR.
HellDunkel 6y ago
Dont shift your professional life towards vr or ar. You will be disappointed. I see lots of opportunities popping up with UE4 at the moment. If you enjoy that and have web design or coding skills go ahead. You probably dont want to dive straight into character animation but there are lots of other interesting fields around UE4.
bobajeff 6y ago
I'm not convinced VR is set to grow a whole lot. I think that the VR that we were looking forward to back in the The Lawn Mower Man / Matrix days is a long way off. All we have today is just TVs that you glue to your eyes which aren't really close to what we've been fantasizing about in sci-fi for decades. * Most headsets probably aren't good enough to not cause headaches after about 2 hours. I also think they could lead to eye problems. * Right now we only have a very limited subset of senses available. (Touch, Taste and Smell are still a long ways away from being available.) * The way to interface with VR is still very crude. Still uses a traditional controller or at best some Kinect like interface. Which would have the problem of needing a expensive treadmill like device to prevent you from bumping into walls. * The headsets are still expensive. The hardware it takes to run games capable of taking advantage of the headsets is expensive. The cost of developing those games is also crazy expensive.
- throwaway34241 6y ago
  > Still uses a traditional controller or at best some Kinect like interface. Which would have the problem of needing a expensive treadmill like device to prevent you from bumping into walls. > The headsets are still expensive. The hardware it takes to run games capable of taking advantage of the headsets is expensive. The most popular VR device right now is the Oculus Quest 2, which is $299, needs no additional hardware, and uses fully motion tracked controllers (along with hand tracking). There's a boundary tracking system to prevent running into walls. Also, it is growing a lot on a year-over-year basis, although of course the base is still tiny compared to cell phones etc. So some of your info is out of date. I think that some of the challenges being worked on right now are content, device size/weight, and also integrating eye and face tracking into headsets. [1] [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-on-mind-reading-apple-and-the-race-to-mainstream-vr https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-on-m...
  - seoaeu 6y ago
    $300 is not cheap for a lot of people. It is more than I've ever spent on a computer monitor, and I use those every day!
void_mint 6y ago
(I am not a game dev but work at a games startup with a bunch of big industry people) To be successful at finding employment in games with UE4, you have to be able to use create game systems without using their blueprint feature. It's insanely powerful, and people really like it for rapid prototyping, but relatively frequently blueprint devs can't transition to C++/"raw" game code. The same is true for pretty much any game engine - the ability to make games beats the ability to use editor features. If you're looking for entry level work, I would say having a wealth of items in your portfolio is helpful (across several genres/styles, meaning get some work out there that isn't VR/AR related). Also remember that paying gamedev work is usually nothing like making games for yourself. Think hard about what and why you enjoy making games. Are you comfortable working on something like a desktop version of Candy Crush? Or a poker game? In my experience (on the internet) you hear most about A.) AAA Crunch, and B.) Massively successful or massively failed games. The middle is where most employment happens. Mediocre games making modest sums of money. If I was interested in working with UE4 for games I would kinda just tailor my resume to working at Riot. Valorant is written in UE and they're a huge name/very established business, so you'll be shielded from some/most of the garbage of the games industry. The job market is good. Lots of AAA studios are moving away from custom engines into UE/Unity because of the advancements in the engines making them more hireable/popular. Just my 2 cents, and I'm certain others have wildly different experiences.
- HellDunkel 6y ago
  >> To be successful at finding employment in games with UE4, you have to be able to use create game systems without using their blueprint feature. It's insanely powerful, and people really like it for rapid prototyping, but relatively frequently blueprint devs can't transition to C++/"raw" game code. You make it sound as if you would inevitably hit a brick wall when using blueprint. This is not true. Game design is different to programming and some coding skills are almost a requirement for blueprints. Lots of game logic is better implemented as blueprint than c++.
  - void_mint 6y ago
    > You make it sound as if you would inevitably hit a brick wall when using blueprint. This is not true. In my experience, devs that spent all their time with blueprints did not transition well away from blueprints. YMMV.
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
The only companies making serious money in gaming are: Epic, Apple, Google, Steam, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft. National Governments who charge 10-20% sales taxes on customer spending. Game/app development would be ok if not for the huge taxes that Platform Owners and Governments charge. You're typically left with about 50% of what customers actually spent on your app.
- mrec 6y ago
  Was the store's cut really lower back in the boxes-on-shelves days?
  - SeanBoocock 6y ago
    The margin on digital sales is a lot better than physical sales, and every large publisher has been pushing the transition to digital as fast as possible. A publisher is getting ~70% on every digital sale compared to ~50% for physical.
  - LanceH 6y ago
    I think a major complaint is that for 30%, people expect some sort of marketing, but really it's nothing more than payment processing and download. A store literally provided a box on a shelf for browsing and brought in customers to browse. The digital "stores" don't offer much in that respect.
    - mrec 6y ago
      Steam has the promoted carousel, "players like you" suggestions, curator suggestions, the discovery queue, reviews, new release announcements, the startup splash, seasonal sales, wishlist alerts, screenshots and promo videos... It doesn't perform the same hard editorial winnowing as brick and mortar, no, and in a digital world it's hard to see why it should. The long tail has fans too and they were terribly served by the old system. But it's hardly fair to call Steam marketing "nothing". Edit to add: the digital stores also provide an update channel, something which had no real equivalent back in the brick and mortar world. That has real business value.
SeanBoocock 6y ago
Been in the industry for a decade and am a hiring manager for engineers. Overall, the industry has never been better and there are plenty of job opportunities available to work on a wide variety of games. In terms of general advice for junior engineers, I wouldn't get too caught up on technology (ie engine). The sorts of things I am looking for are: do you have strong computer science fundamentals? have you taken game related projects from conception to completion? how well do you work within inter-disciplinary teams? and do you evaluate your work from a user's (ie player's) perspective? Unreal dominates AAA for third party studios and I don't think that will change in the near future. Whether Unreal expands its dominance to mobile is an open question, but with more HD games going to mobile (or starting development with HD and mobile as platforms) I would probably bet on it. Unity probably isn't going anywhere in the near future but I don't expect it to shake Unreal's hold on large game production; they're simply too far behind. I am fairly pessimistic on VR as a whole, but there will likely still be a small market there for the foreseeable future. With Sony recommitting to VR for PS5 and Oculus continuing to pump some (albeit much smaller) money into the space, I expect VR to remain a stable niche. AR is a lot harder to predict as Apple is the big unknown. There are a lot of companies ready to jump on that opportunity (ie Niantic) if someone can figure out the right hardware.
devwastaken 6y ago
VR is at its peak due to Oculus quest. VRChat has to turn off server features to handle the surge of users on the weekends now. There's competing social games like chilloutVR, xbox and playstation are coming out with new VR this fall (in conjunction with valve so these are probably real headsets). Consoles can finally run VR, so I expect there to be a big boom there. Lenovo has some sort of prototype office vr glasses that allow you to have a bunch of virtual screens you work in. One use for VR I would have is such an infinite screen feature. I'd like to be able to have multiple windows open when debugging so I can see all data at once. I don't believe this exists yet.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 6y ago
Thanks for asking this question, I'm in a similar situation and have had almost the same conundrum on my mind.

throwaway3699 6y ago

I'm an indie developer, so limited perspective for sure. Focusing on games and the consumer market. The main issue I can see with VR is the same pattern that played out in mainstream PC gaming -- where 20% of the market takes the vast majority of the market's dollars. That means that the VR market can sustain far far less companies, even though games cost more and are primarily developed by indies. I'll bet Half-Life: Alyx and Beat Saber took in more than a third of all money spent on VR last year, whereas everyone else is left competing for scraps. If you make or find a game studio that is breaking into that upper category then you may be in a very comfortable position for the riding future growth.

avereveard 6y ago
vr is going to be an inherently smaller market not just for the cost of entry but because it's inherently hard to make it casual
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  tbh, The Quest 2 selling like hotcakes as a portable Beat Saber machine makes me think otherwise. The same issues apply to regular consoles too.
- arduinomancer 6y ago
  I think that for VR: buyFactor = price / howGoodTheTechIs If either the denominator increases or the numerator decreases it could more popular in the future.

1-6 6y ago

“I know the old story about conditions being worse and avoiding turning your passion into your job/hell, but anyone able to chime in?” I think you already know the general culture of the work you want to get involved in. VR projects are usually side projects and considered nice to have rather than need to have. There haven’t been “killer apps” recently which has driven massive adoption from industries with deep pockets such as infrastructure or transportation. As much as I respect media and entertainment, the pool of dollars are hotly contested. It better to work for other industries.

Animats 6y ago

2019 was the Year of VR.

HellDunkel 6y ago

Dont shift your professional life towards vr or ar. You will be disappointed. I see lots of opportunities popping up with UE4 at the moment. If you enjoy that and have web design or coding skills go ahead. You probably dont want to dive straight into character animation but there are lots of other interesting fields around UE4.

bobajeff 6y ago

I'm not convinced VR is set to grow a whole lot. I think that the VR that we were looking forward to back in the The Lawn Mower Man / Matrix days is a long way off. All we have today is just TVs that you glue to your eyes which aren't really close to what we've been fantasizing about in sci-fi for decades. * Most headsets probably aren't good enough to not cause headaches after about 2 hours. I also think they could lead to eye problems. * Right now we only have a very limited subset of senses available. (Touch, Taste and Smell are still a long ways away from being available.) * The way to interface with VR is still very crude. Still uses a traditional controller or at best some Kinect like interface. Which would have the problem of needing a expensive treadmill like device to prevent you from bumping into walls. * The headsets are still expensive. The hardware it takes to run games capable of taking advantage of the headsets is expensive. The cost of developing those games is also crazy expensive.

throwaway34241 6y ago
> Still uses a traditional controller or at best some Kinect like interface. Which would have the problem of needing a expensive treadmill like device to prevent you from bumping into walls. > The headsets are still expensive. The hardware it takes to run games capable of taking advantage of the headsets is expensive. The most popular VR device right now is the Oculus Quest 2, which is $299, needs no additional hardware, and uses fully motion tracked controllers (along with hand tracking). There's a boundary tracking system to prevent running into walls. Also, it is growing a lot on a year-over-year basis, although of course the base is still tiny compared to cell phones etc. So some of your info is out of date. I think that some of the challenges being worked on right now are content, device size/weight, and also integrating eye and face tracking into headsets. [1] [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-on-mind-reading-apple-and-the-race-to-mainstream-vr https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-on-m...
- seoaeu 6y ago
  $300 is not cheap for a lot of people. It is more than I've ever spent on a computer monitor, and I use those every day!

void_mint 6y ago

(I am not a game dev but work at a games startup with a bunch of big industry people) To be successful at finding employment in games with UE4, you have to be able to use create game systems without using their blueprint feature. It's insanely powerful, and people really like it for rapid prototyping, but relatively frequently blueprint devs can't transition to C++/"raw" game code. The same is true for pretty much any game engine - the ability to make games beats the ability to use editor features. If you're looking for entry level work, I would say having a wealth of items in your portfolio is helpful (across several genres/styles, meaning get some work out there that isn't VR/AR related). Also remember that paying gamedev work is usually nothing like making games for yourself. Think hard about what and why you enjoy making games. Are you comfortable working on something like a desktop version of Candy Crush? Or a poker game? In my experience (on the internet) you hear most about A.) AAA Crunch, and B.) Massively successful or massively failed games. The middle is where most employment happens. Mediocre games making modest sums of money. If I was interested in working with UE4 for games I would kinda just tailor my resume to working at Riot. Valorant is written in UE and they're a huge name/very established business, so you'll be shielded from some/most of the garbage of the games industry. The job market is good. Lots of AAA studios are moving away from custom engines into UE/Unity because of the advancements in the engines making them more hireable/popular. Just my 2 cents, and I'm certain others have wildly different experiences.

HellDunkel 6y ago
>> To be successful at finding employment in games with UE4, you have to be able to use create game systems without using their blueprint feature. It's insanely powerful, and people really like it for rapid prototyping, but relatively frequently blueprint devs can't transition to C++/"raw" game code. You make it sound as if you would inevitably hit a brick wall when using blueprint. This is not true. Game design is different to programming and some coding skills are almost a requirement for blueprints. Lots of game logic is better implemented as blueprint than c++.
- void_mint 6y ago
  > You make it sound as if you would inevitably hit a brick wall when using blueprint. This is not true. In my experience, devs that spent all their time with blueprints did not transition well away from blueprints. YMMV.

ArkanExplorer 6y ago

The only companies making serious money in gaming are: Epic, Apple, Google, Steam, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft. National Governments who charge 10-20% sales taxes on customer spending. Game/app development would be ok if not for the huge taxes that Platform Owners and Governments charge. You're typically left with about 50% of what customers actually spent on your app.

mrec 6y ago
Was the store's cut really lower back in the boxes-on-shelves days?
- SeanBoocock 6y ago
  The margin on digital sales is a lot better than physical sales, and every large publisher has been pushing the transition to digital as fast as possible. A publisher is getting ~70% on every digital sale compared to ~50% for physical.
- LanceH 6y ago
  I think a major complaint is that for 30%, people expect some sort of marketing, but really it's nothing more than payment processing and download. A store literally provided a box on a shelf for browsing and brought in customers to browse. The digital "stores" don't offer much in that respect.
  - mrec 6y ago
    Steam has the promoted carousel, "players like you" suggestions, curator suggestions, the discovery queue, reviews, new release announcements, the startup splash, seasonal sales, wishlist alerts, screenshots and promo videos... It doesn't perform the same hard editorial winnowing as brick and mortar, no, and in a digital world it's hard to see why it should. The long tail has fans too and they were terribly served by the old system. But it's hardly fair to call Steam marketing "nothing". Edit to add: the digital stores also provide an update channel, something which had no real equivalent back in the brick and mortar world. That has real business value.

SeanBoocock 6y ago

Been in the industry for a decade and am a hiring manager for engineers. Overall, the industry has never been better and there are plenty of job opportunities available to work on a wide variety of games. In terms of general advice for junior engineers, I wouldn't get too caught up on technology (ie engine). The sorts of things I am looking for are: do you have strong computer science fundamentals? have you taken game related projects from conception to completion? how well do you work within inter-disciplinary teams? and do you evaluate your work from a user's (ie player's) perspective? Unreal dominates AAA for third party studios and I don't think that will change in the near future. Whether Unreal expands its dominance to mobile is an open question, but with more HD games going to mobile (or starting development with HD and mobile as platforms) I would probably bet on it. Unity probably isn't going anywhere in the near future but I don't expect it to shake Unreal's hold on large game production; they're simply too far behind. I am fairly pessimistic on VR as a whole, but there will likely still be a small market there for the foreseeable future. With Sony recommitting to VR for PS5 and Oculus continuing to pump some (albeit much smaller) money into the space, I expect VR to remain a stable niche. AR is a lot harder to predict as Apple is the big unknown. There are a lot of companies ready to jump on that opportunity (ie Niantic) if someone can figure out the right hardware.

devwastaken 6y ago

VR is at its peak due to Oculus quest. VRChat has to turn off server features to handle the surge of users on the weekends now. There's competing social games like chilloutVR, xbox and playstation are coming out with new VR this fall (in conjunction with valve so these are probably real headsets). Consoles can finally run VR, so I expect there to be a big boom there. Lenovo has some sort of prototype office vr glasses that allow you to have a bunch of virtual screens you work in. One use for VR I would have is such an infinite screen feature. I'd like to be able to have multiple windows open when debugging so I can see all data at once. I don't believe this exists yet.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 6y ago

Thanks for asking this question, I'm in a similar situation and have had almost the same conundrum on my mind.