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Just to have a bit of a counter argument from me, a game developer who loves games and has worked in the US games industry for the majority of my 20 years caree

Just to have a bit of a counter argument from me, a game developer who loves games and has worked in the US games industry for the majority of my 20 years career: If your argument is "You can make more at a FAANG company" - well yeah, you can. You don't work in gaming because you want to make the top salary. You work in gaming because you love games and you enjoy having all your coworkers also love games and being able to talk to all of them about games and having your company culture revolve around games and gaming. It's games all the way down! It's a completely different work environment. As someone who loves games, the best years of my working career were when I was working on game teams, not at tech companies. Also, developer salaries in games is still plenty good. It's still great money. I never felt like I was losing out. Also the argument that it's "grueling 80+ hour weeks day in and day out is" is bullshit! The only time I ever worked 80 hours in a single week was when I was starting out in Quality Assurance and I was getting paid hourly so I was happy to make the extra overtime. As a salaried developer I don't think I was ever expected to work more than 60 hours a week, and then after the crunch was over we always got 1 or 2 weeks of extra vacation ("comp time"). To be clear, the normal working schedule was 40 hours per week. Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time. And like I said, depending on how much you crunch, you would get extra paid time off afterwards. So for me, that was a pretty good trade. I'd much rather work my ass off for a couple months and then get an extra 2 week vacation at the end of it. Maybe some game companies treat their employees like dirt and work them into the ground, but the ones I've worked for, I never felt that way. Don't work at those terrible companies! There are plenty of "good" game companies out there who pay good salaries and have good working conditions. As someone who is older now with kids, my priorities are definitely different than when I worked in games during my 20s and early 30s. I would no longer be happy working those 60 hour weeks. I want a better work life balance. So I don't know if I could work on a game team like that anymore. But do I regret working there before I had a family? Absolutely not. #gamedev4life

Impossible 5y ago
It's also possible to work on games or game like software at FAANG, not crunch (although FAANG companies have plenty of other toxic qualities that can make them worse than a game job in subtle ways) and get paid a FAANG salary.
- selestify 5y ago
  What are the toxic qualities that are unique to FAANG?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Pfhreak 5y ago
  Hope you aren't talking about Amazon Games Studios, because that place is incredibly toxic from what I understand.
paxys 5y ago
The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda that only serves to keep labor costs low. The entities on top are large multi-billion dollar corporations who are running a business, just like any other industry. And this has been more and more apparent in recent years seeing just how anti-consumer the video games industry is getting. If a Google recruiter told me "take a low salary and work 70+ hours a week because you love writing software and all your coworkers love writing software and it's a great environment" I'd (justifiably) laugh at their face – enough though I really do love everything about software. But somehow this is completely fine in gaming.
- julienb_sea 5y ago
  This is ultimately a supply and demand issue. Google pays high salaries because they have to in order to hire the talent they want. Game devs apparently do not have to, because they are able to fill their roles for lower salaries. Don't pretend like all tech companies wouldn't love to lower dev salaries, they just can't because they wouldn't be able to hire. Game companies apparently have a meaningful differentiator, which is that working in a gaming context is something people actually value and are willing to give up potential compensation for.
  - paxys 5y ago
    Well getting minimum wage at Wendy's is also a supply and demand issue, but that job isn't sold as "do it for the love of the fast food industry". Ultimately a large chunk of game developers do have the skillset to be able to get better pay and working conditions elsewhere. They like making games, sure, but the tiniest amount of collective action among workers in the industry could ensure that you get to do what you love and get paid for it.
    - bko 5y ago
      The problem then is that if the industry pays above market wages, then there will be too many prospective game developers for the roles. Then the question is how do you choose who gets to be in this industry where you can do what you love and get paid well for it? Things have a way of balancing out, and labor organizers will see this surplus and capture an ever increasing portion of it through fees or other means. This leads to nepotism or favoritism as you see in some jobs that pay above market wages.
BeetleB 5y ago
> Just to have a bit of a counter argument from me You didn't supply any kind of argument. Your comment can be reduced to "If you want a good salary, you are not one of us." As a person who loved gaming and wanted to work in that industry, you are the reason I didn't go for it.
- hn8788 5y ago
  You should take some personal responsibility and stop blaming your life choices on other people. There's also a world of difference between saying that a FAANG salary isn't the most important part of a job for some people, and saying people in game dev shouldn't have a good salary.
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    > You should take some personal responsibility and stop blaming your life choices on other people. You should stop jumping to conclusions. Nothing I said indicated I don't take responsibility for that decision. I can choose not to take a job because of crappy pay, but I can still point out why the job has crappy pay (and the reason is not me). > There's also a world of difference between saying that a FAANG salary isn't the most important part of a job for some people, and saying people in game dev shouldn't have a good salary. I don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary, but I bet I get paid more per hour than most game devs.
    - socialist_coder 5y ago
      > I don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary, but I bet I get paid more per hour than most game devs. If you don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary then you're probably making the same as what you could make as a game developer...
    - johnnyanmac 5y ago
      >I don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary, but I bet I get paid more per hour than most game devs. if you include the small studios, sure. if you are focused on the big AAA studios like most of this topic is, I would doubt it. Blizzard may not be paying Google money, but the engineers there aren't making peanuts either.
whoisjuan 5y ago
This is a fair take, but modern gaming companies have similar margins as other consumer tech companies since they are operating on profitable business models such as subscription and micro-transactions. The gaming industry has been playing the same card movie studios play which is “This is a passion industry. Come and work for us but we can only offer this range of compensation and this type of contracts because we are making this single thing that needs to first break even before it can even generate a profit”. The problem with that idea is that gaming in general doesn’t operate that like that anymore. Game developers can now tap into scalable royalty programs like Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Now and Apple Arcade. Or they can build free games with micro-transactions. Building AAA games is still a huge investment. But gaming companies nowadays have way more avenues to generate revenue. So it’s sad that they still play that card to pay lower wages than in other tech-verticals. If your love for games is such that you are willing to get a lower salary just to be part of that creation process, that’s fair. But expect to be dealt the same “do it for the experience, not for the money” card even when you reach levels of proficiency and skill that deserve higher wages.
- oreally 5y ago
  > The gaming industry has been playing the same card movie studios play FWIW, the mobile games industry takes a different route. Unfortunately the media loves to shit on them while not being too hard on how the AAA movie-like industries operate.
  - socialist_coder 5y ago
    I would also argue freemium mobile games aren't nearly as fun as PC/premium games. Freemium developers are a different crowd and more like a typical SW engineer. I've done both. I'm looking forward to going back to premium games from freemium.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  >they are operating on profitable business models such as subscription and micro-transactions. some do, many don't. Not even all AAA companies have gone this route. Let alone all the mid sized studios out there contracted to make games. I'm sure Rockstar and Blizzard could, but the industry isn't just those two companies.
inopinatus 5y ago
Don’t get suckered by this argument, folks. It’s the start of an abusive relationship. Whatever your sector, you should expect to be paid for your time and your skill. No-one pulled this shit at my FAANG or global ISP gigs, despite the fact I love working on high scale infrastructure. There is no special magical wonderland industry that intrinsically bathes its staff in so much joy that you can lowball their pay and it’s just fine.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  TBH a lot of people don't have that many choices. I mean if a dream company gives me an offer with a reasonable salary, I'd jump for it without hesitation. A lot of people are OK with median salary.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - inopinatus 5y ago
    Putting my hiring manager’s hat on, I recommend asking for more, without hesitation. There is practically no downside. Especially if it’s your dream company, because you are likely to be extra motivated, and this is a case you can genuinely make. Once an offer’s already on the table, the worst possible outcome from asking will be “sorry, that’s as high as we can go right now” without any rancour. If instead the response is in any way affronted, then run the fuck away because that’s a clear early warning sign of toxic, bullying management; avoiding such environments is also on my list of good outcomes. The only exception context being, if you don’t currently have any income at all.
    - Dracophoenix 5y ago
      In your previous experience with FAANGs, were your requests for a higher offer taken as an affront? Also, what was your role with regards to ISP infrastructure?
      - 5y ago
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Outside of HN, most senior engineers understand that they can relocate to an area with a FAANG office and earn more money. It's not a secret. Many choose not to pursue this option, despite knowing it exists. And that's okay. The incessant drive to obtain FAANG employment and FAANG salaries at any cost is not common outside of internet forums like HN or Blind. For many people, there is more to life than chasing the highest paying careers. FAANG is absolutely a great option for anyone who can make it work. Some FAANG companies are opening up more offices and even considering remote work, but for many of us who aren't willing to relocate our families to FAANG office cities, it's not really an option any more. And of course, it's fine if someone willingly chooses to work a lower paying job to work on something they enjoy. We shouldn't criticize people for not seeking out the maximum salary they can find if they're actually happy with what they're doing. Careers are not one-size-fits-all. It's fine to share options with other people, but let's not criticize people for choosing career paths that differ from our own personal priorities.
- Pfhreak 5y ago
  I think you misunderstand the parent's post. It's not about critiquing someone's choices, it's about recognizing when you are being exploited. And yeah, maybe the game devs being exploited think the situation is fine. The long hours for low pay is paid back by the intangibles of working on a game. The point isn't that the dev made the choice, it's that it was ever framed as a choice in the first place. Many games studios are making billions in profits and absolutely could pay FAANG salaries and still turn profits. So it's less about individual choices, and more about ensuring the workers are getting compensated fairly for the work they love doing.
kelnos 5y ago
> Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time. So, at worst, one-third of the time is crunch time. That's... a lot. Even a full month of crunch time per year isn't nothing.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  Yeah - plenty of SW jobs that pay as much and more, with 0 crunch time per year. A month is a lot for subpar pay.
jayd16 5y ago
>Also the argument that it's "grueling 80+ hour weeks day in and day out is" is bullshit! This is just your experience. There are plenty good studios but plenty of grueling ones! If you're working on a AAA title, crunch can be all year long.
taternuts 5y ago
60 hour work weeks as the norm is still crazy to me, though I am in my mid thirties as well and might have been able to pull that off in my 20's as you said. Maybe that's why start-ups usually end up burning me out because I've never really cared that much about the product like I imagine game devs care about theirs, and 50-60+ hours a week is kind of normal for a small start up.
egypturnash 5y ago
This instantly raises a question for me: what companies did you work for that did not leave you feeling like you were being abused? Do they still exist, do you have any impression of how their work environment has changed since then? I know my friend who worked at Popcap sure did like it a lot less once EA bought them, for instance. 60h + 1-4mo of crunch sure sounds like more than I'd wanna do for anything. Maybe if I got a piece of the IP/profits - as someone with 'socialist' in your username I'd assume you'd be interested in companies that let the workers own more of what they produce; were any of your workplaces unusual in that regard?
vvanders 5y ago
> Also the argument that it's "grueling 80+ hour weeks day in and day out is" is bullshit! The only time I ever worked 80 hours in a single week was when I was starting out in Quality Assurance and I was getting paid hourly so I was happy to make the extra overtime. Sorry but I'm going to call bullshit on your bullshit. Spent ~5 years in the industry and every place I worked crunched like hell and every place that my coworkers came from crunched like hell. There are companies that limit crunch but they are few and far between. My experience was that those who survived crunch perpetuated a culture of needing to "pay your dues" and you weren't a "team player" if you didn't put in the extra hours on salary.
- Pfhreak 5y ago
  I also worked in the industry and would agree with your assessment. Many of the senior folks I talked to even agreed that crunch was a 'mandatory, necessary' part of game development.
- mssundaram 5y ago
  You can even perceive it from the vernacular of how you refer to "crunch" - it has a feeling of something often talked about, a term used in the industry.
- socialist_coder 5y ago
  You could be right, my game industry career could be an outlier. I never worked at a big AAA studio like EA or Ubisoft. I worked on MMOs.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  anecdotes are just that. They vary wildly. Me: I worked 3 years, had a total of 6 weeks of crunch @50-55 hours/week, compensated 1.5x and with "free" dinner (AKA they actually complied to state law due to staying after 6PM). This was after literally cutting the content of the game in half due to client deadlines (A certain Big Tech company was not going to delay their product just because they set unreasonable deadlines to the studio). Attitude wise, no one liked it. Manager didn't pretend to be pleased with the discussions. No extra vacation, but overall it wasn't one of those death grinds people talk on the internet about. I think both tales are valid, but of course one of them gets a lot more attention.
NamTaf 5y ago
> As a salaried developer I don't think I was ever expected to work more than 60 hours a week, and then after the crunch was over we always got 1 or 2 weeks of extra vacation ("comp time"). To be clear, the normal working schedule was 40 hours per week. Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time. And like I said, depending on how much you crunch, you would get extra paid time off afterwards. So for me, that was a pretty good trade. I'd much rather work my ass off for a couple months and then get an extra 2 week vacation at the end of it. Just to be clear, you're saying that crunch time can be up to 1/3 of the year, and you get maximum 4 weeks of additional leave off as a result. Compare that to anywhere overseas, where 4-6 weeks leave per year is the minimum. Moreover, if you're working 50 hours a week on average during that crunch time, and you get 1 week off per month of crunch, you're already marginally behind on equivalent compensation since there's more than 4 weeks per average month. That sounds like an awful agreement and I don't understand why you're trying to hold it up as a great opportunity. I'd instead describe it as an abusive working relationship that further shifts the benefit to the corporation at the employee's expense.
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  I wonder why you got downvoted as you're basically spot on. Can someone check my calculations, because I'm getting ridiculous numbers, not "marginally behind" He remembers 1-2 times of 1-2 months of crunch of "not being expected to work _more_ than 60 hours". My bet is that this means people usually stayed _at least_ 60 hours during the crunch time due to social pressures created by the employees themselves. Sort of like "unlimited vacation" usually means that on average everyone takes less vacation, because they don't want to be the one with the most vacation taken. So to me this means the _lower_ bound is 60 hours, not the 50 you put as the average. 1-2 in this context tells me: it's definitely 2, if not more, but let's take the lower bound, i.e. 2. The following uses some generous rounding: That's 4 months, so the 1/3 of the year you mentioned of 60 hour weeks. 4.33 weeks per month on average times 4 months is 17.3 weeks of at least 60 hour weeks =~ 1040 hours of work over a period of time that they should've worked ~690 hours. That's an extra of about 345 hours of work they did, which is a whopping 43 8-hour days. Even if after each of the crunches they got 2 weeks off, that's 20 days of vacation to compensate for 43 days of unpaid crunch time that also wreaked havoc with their actual lives. Is my math off somewhere? Because otherwise as this was the lower bound from an idealized remembering of "the good old times" I'd call that exploitative.
Pfhreak 5y ago
I've worked in games, I've worked out of games. The workers in games are absolutely being exploited because they think the work environment is unique. And yes, there's something cool to see people at PAX or elsewhere praising a project you worked on. But saying people are making a tradeoff, or giving up salary to work on games is a defeatist attitude -- big game devs should be paying what big tech companies pay. You should not have to give up pay to work in games, and it absolutely kills me every time I see an engineer claim that it's somehow noble to do so. In the indie space, sure, pay is going to be weaker. But there are thousands working for Blizzard, Activision, EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, CDPR, etc. etc. etc. who are all being grossly underpaid for the value they bring to their company.
souprock 5y ago
Since you are a game developer with kids, I have to ask... what about the addiction? Have you seen your kids getting addicted to games? Does that bother you? Have you pondered your own contribution to that problem?
- oreally 5y ago
  Just saying, I'd rather have kids be addicted to games than drugs. At least there's a high possibility you can recover game addiction without major effects to your health. And you learn very abstract things in games you can use IRL too.
rewgs 5y ago
This is on point and similar to my experiences in game companies. That said, I'm in music/audio, and from my side of the fence there seemed to be a sort of higher respect from management for programmers (and to a certain extent, art) in that they really tried to slowly ramp up their crunch and not keep it sustained for too long. In my experience, the truly crazy crunch tends to be borne by audio and QA. Audio is hardcore, Naughty Dog being the most hardcore (but they wear this as a badge of honor and everyone who works there knows it before going in).
ecmascript 5y ago
> Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time. If it is 2 times per year and extends for a period of 2 months, that is almost half of the entire year. That sounds crazy to me, I would never ever work 60 hours a week without getting paid for it. Many game companies make ridicolous amounts of money, there is no reason why they shouldn't pay a reasonable salary for it. 60 hour work weeks are insane and you should never accept that.
omega3 5y ago
Maybe that was true 20, 30 years ago. Right now outside of a handful of studios that release quality games the rest aren't that good or innovative. I find it hard to believe people are happy to work on games with heavy elements of microtransactions or reheated elements (e.g. Ubisoft games are basically the same)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ManlyBread 5y ago
>You don't work in gaming because you want to make the top salary. You work in gaming because you love games That's just rationalization. Gaming companies earn ridiculous amounts of money, especially the ones that do it through microtransaction model. These companies would have no problem paying FAANG-like salaries if they had to do so, but they pay less because they can get away with it.

Impossible 5y ago

It's also possible to work on games or game like software at FAANG, not crunch (although FAANG companies have plenty of other toxic qualities that can make them worse than a game job in subtle ways) and get paid a FAANG salary.

selestify 5y ago
What are the toxic qualities that are unique to FAANG?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Pfhreak 5y ago
Hope you aren't talking about Amazon Games Studios, because that place is incredibly toxic from what I understand.

paxys 5y ago

The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda that only serves to keep labor costs low. The entities on top are large multi-billion dollar corporations who are running a business, just like any other industry. And this has been more and more apparent in recent years seeing just how anti-consumer the video games industry is getting. If a Google recruiter told me "take a low salary and work 70+ hours a week because you love writing software and all your coworkers love writing software and it's a great environment" I'd (justifiably) laugh at their face – enough though I really do love everything about software. But somehow this is completely fine in gaming.

julienb_sea 5y ago
This is ultimately a supply and demand issue. Google pays high salaries because they have to in order to hire the talent they want. Game devs apparently do not have to, because they are able to fill their roles for lower salaries. Don't pretend like all tech companies wouldn't love to lower dev salaries, they just can't because they wouldn't be able to hire. Game companies apparently have a meaningful differentiator, which is that working in a gaming context is something people actually value and are willing to give up potential compensation for.
- paxys 5y ago
  Well getting minimum wage at Wendy's is also a supply and demand issue, but that job isn't sold as "do it for the love of the fast food industry". Ultimately a large chunk of game developers do have the skillset to be able to get better pay and working conditions elsewhere. They like making games, sure, but the tiniest amount of collective action among workers in the industry could ensure that you get to do what you love and get paid for it.
  - bko 5y ago
    The problem then is that if the industry pays above market wages, then there will be too many prospective game developers for the roles. Then the question is how do you choose who gets to be in this industry where you can do what you love and get paid well for it? Things have a way of balancing out, and labor organizers will see this surplus and capture an ever increasing portion of it through fees or other means. This leads to nepotism or favoritism as you see in some jobs that pay above market wages.

BeetleB 5y ago

> Just to have a bit of a counter argument from me You didn't supply any kind of argument. Your comment can be reduced to "If you want a good salary, you are not one of us." As a person who loved gaming and wanted to work in that industry, you are the reason I didn't go for it.

hn8788 5y ago
You should take some personal responsibility and stop blaming your life choices on other people. There's also a world of difference between saying that a FAANG salary isn't the most important part of a job for some people, and saying people in game dev shouldn't have a good salary.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  > You should take some personal responsibility and stop blaming your life choices on other people. You should stop jumping to conclusions. Nothing I said indicated I don't take responsibility for that decision. I can choose not to take a job because of crappy pay, but I can still point out why the job has crappy pay (and the reason is not me). > There's also a world of difference between saying that a FAANG salary isn't the most important part of a job for some people, and saying people in game dev shouldn't have a good salary. I don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary, but I bet I get paid more per hour than most game devs.
  - socialist_coder 5y ago
    > I don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary, but I bet I get paid more per hour than most game devs. If you don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary then you're probably making the same as what you could make as a game developer...
  - johnnyanmac 5y ago
    >I don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary, but I bet I get paid more per hour than most game devs. if you include the small studios, sure. if you are focused on the big AAA studios like most of this topic is, I would doubt it. Blizzard may not be paying Google money, but the engineers there aren't making peanuts either.

whoisjuan 5y ago

This is a fair take, but modern gaming companies have similar margins as other consumer tech companies since they are operating on profitable business models such as subscription and micro-transactions. The gaming industry has been playing the same card movie studios play which is “This is a passion industry. Come and work for us but we can only offer this range of compensation and this type of contracts because we are making this single thing that needs to first break even before it can even generate a profit”. The problem with that idea is that gaming in general doesn’t operate that like that anymore. Game developers can now tap into scalable royalty programs like Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Now and Apple Arcade. Or they can build free games with micro-transactions. Building AAA games is still a huge investment. But gaming companies nowadays have way more avenues to generate revenue. So it’s sad that they still play that card to pay lower wages than in other tech-verticals. If your love for games is such that you are willing to get a lower salary just to be part of that creation process, that’s fair. But expect to be dealt the same “do it for the experience, not for the money” card even when you reach levels of proficiency and skill that deserve higher wages.

oreally 5y ago
> The gaming industry has been playing the same card movie studios play FWIW, the mobile games industry takes a different route. Unfortunately the media loves to shit on them while not being too hard on how the AAA movie-like industries operate.
- socialist_coder 5y ago
  I would also argue freemium mobile games aren't nearly as fun as PC/premium games. Freemium developers are a different crowd and more like a typical SW engineer. I've done both. I'm looking forward to going back to premium games from freemium.
johnnyanmac 5y ago
>they are operating on profitable business models such as subscription and micro-transactions. some do, many don't. Not even all AAA companies have gone this route. Let alone all the mid sized studios out there contracted to make games. I'm sure Rockstar and Blizzard could, but the industry isn't just those two companies.

inopinatus 5y ago

Don’t get suckered by this argument, folks. It’s the start of an abusive relationship. Whatever your sector, you should expect to be paid for your time and your skill. No-one pulled this shit at my FAANG or global ISP gigs, despite the fact I love working on high scale infrastructure. There is no special magical wonderland industry that intrinsically bathes its staff in so much joy that you can lowball their pay and it’s just fine.

markus_zhang 5y ago
TBH a lot of people don't have that many choices. I mean if a dream company gives me an offer with a reasonable salary, I'd jump for it without hesitation. A lot of people are OK with median salary.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- inopinatus 5y ago
  Putting my hiring manager’s hat on, I recommend asking for more, without hesitation. There is practically no downside. Especially if it’s your dream company, because you are likely to be extra motivated, and this is a case you can genuinely make. Once an offer’s already on the table, the worst possible outcome from asking will be “sorry, that’s as high as we can go right now” without any rancour. If instead the response is in any way affronted, then run the fuck away because that’s a clear early warning sign of toxic, bullying management; avoiding such environments is also on my list of good outcomes. The only exception context being, if you don’t currently have any income at all.
  - Dracophoenix 5y ago
    In your previous experience with FAANGs, were your requests for a higher offer taken as an affront? Also, what was your role with regards to ISP infrastructure?
    - 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Outside of HN, most senior engineers understand that they can relocate to an area with a FAANG office and earn more money. It's not a secret. Many choose not to pursue this option, despite knowing it exists. And that's okay. The incessant drive to obtain FAANG employment and FAANG salaries at any cost is not common outside of internet forums like HN or Blind. For many people, there is more to life than chasing the highest paying careers. FAANG is absolutely a great option for anyone who can make it work. Some FAANG companies are opening up more offices and even considering remote work, but for many of us who aren't willing to relocate our families to FAANG office cities, it's not really an option any more. And of course, it's fine if someone willingly chooses to work a lower paying job to work on something they enjoy. We shouldn't criticize people for not seeking out the maximum salary they can find if they're actually happy with what they're doing. Careers are not one-size-fits-all. It's fine to share options with other people, but let's not criticize people for choosing career paths that differ from our own personal priorities.

Pfhreak 5y ago
I think you misunderstand the parent's post. It's not about critiquing someone's choices, it's about recognizing when you are being exploited. And yeah, maybe the game devs being exploited think the situation is fine. The long hours for low pay is paid back by the intangibles of working on a game. The point isn't that the dev made the choice, it's that it was ever framed as a choice in the first place. Many games studios are making billions in profits and absolutely could pay FAANG salaries and still turn profits. So it's less about individual choices, and more about ensuring the workers are getting compensated fairly for the work they love doing.

kelnos 5y ago

> Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time. So, at worst, one-third of the time is crunch time. That's... a lot. Even a full month of crunch time per year isn't nothing.

BeetleB 5y ago
Yeah - plenty of SW jobs that pay as much and more, with 0 crunch time per year. A month is a lot for subpar pay.

jayd16 5y ago

>Also the argument that it's "grueling 80+ hour weeks day in and day out is" is bullshit! This is just your experience. There are plenty good studios but plenty of grueling ones! If you're working on a AAA title, crunch can be all year long.

taternuts 5y ago

60 hour work weeks as the norm is still crazy to me, though I am in my mid thirties as well and might have been able to pull that off in my 20's as you said. Maybe that's why start-ups usually end up burning me out because I've never really cared that much about the product like I imagine game devs care about theirs, and 50-60+ hours a week is kind of normal for a small start up.

egypturnash 5y ago

This instantly raises a question for me: what companies did you work for that did not leave you feeling like you were being abused? Do they still exist, do you have any impression of how their work environment has changed since then? I know my friend who worked at Popcap sure did like it a lot less once EA bought them, for instance. 60h + 1-4mo of crunch sure sounds like more than I'd wanna do for anything. Maybe if I got a piece of the IP/profits - as someone with 'socialist' in your username I'd assume you'd be interested in companies that let the workers own more of what they produce; were any of your workplaces unusual in that regard?

vvanders 5y ago

> Also the argument that it's "grueling 80+ hour weeks day in and day out is" is bullshit! The only time I ever worked 80 hours in a single week was when I was starting out in Quality Assurance and I was getting paid hourly so I was happy to make the extra overtime. Sorry but I'm going to call bullshit on your bullshit. Spent ~5 years in the industry and every place I worked crunched like hell and every place that my coworkers came from crunched like hell. There are companies that limit crunch but they are few and far between. My experience was that those who survived crunch perpetuated a culture of needing to "pay your dues" and you weren't a "team player" if you didn't put in the extra hours on salary.

Pfhreak 5y ago
I also worked in the industry and would agree with your assessment. Many of the senior folks I talked to even agreed that crunch was a 'mandatory, necessary' part of game development.
mssundaram 5y ago
You can even perceive it from the vernacular of how you refer to "crunch" - it has a feeling of something often talked about, a term used in the industry.
socialist_coder 5y ago
You could be right, my game industry career could be an outlier. I never worked at a big AAA studio like EA or Ubisoft. I worked on MMOs.
johnnyanmac 5y ago
anecdotes are just that. They vary wildly. Me: I worked 3 years, had a total of 6 weeks of crunch @50-55 hours/week, compensated 1.5x and with "free" dinner (AKA they actually complied to state law due to staying after 6PM). This was after literally cutting the content of the game in half due to client deadlines (A certain Big Tech company was not going to delay their product just because they set unreasonable deadlines to the studio). Attitude wise, no one liked it. Manager didn't pretend to be pleased with the discussions. No extra vacation, but overall it wasn't one of those death grinds people talk on the internet about. I think both tales are valid, but of course one of them gets a lot more attention.

NamTaf 5y ago

> As a salaried developer I don't think I was ever expected to work more than 60 hours a week, and then after the crunch was over we always got 1 or 2 weeks of extra vacation ("comp time"). To be clear, the normal working schedule was 40 hours per week. Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time. And like I said, depending on how much you crunch, you would get extra paid time off afterwards. So for me, that was a pretty good trade. I'd much rather work my ass off for a couple months and then get an extra 2 week vacation at the end of it. Just to be clear, you're saying that crunch time can be up to 1/3 of the year, and you get maximum 4 weeks of additional leave off as a result. Compare that to anywhere overseas, where 4-6 weeks leave per year is the minimum. Moreover, if you're working 50 hours a week on average during that crunch time, and you get 1 week off per month of crunch, you're already marginally behind on equivalent compensation since there's more than 4 weeks per average month. That sounds like an awful agreement and I don't understand why you're trying to hold it up as a great opportunity. I'd instead describe it as an abusive working relationship that further shifts the benefit to the corporation at the employee's expense.

tharkun__ 5y ago
I wonder why you got downvoted as you're basically spot on. Can someone check my calculations, because I'm getting ridiculous numbers, not "marginally behind" He remembers 1-2 times of 1-2 months of crunch of "not being expected to work _more_ than 60 hours". My bet is that this means people usually stayed _at least_ 60 hours during the crunch time due to social pressures created by the employees themselves. Sort of like "unlimited vacation" usually means that on average everyone takes less vacation, because they don't want to be the one with the most vacation taken. So to me this means the _lower_ bound is 60 hours, not the 50 you put as the average. 1-2 in this context tells me: it's definitely 2, if not more, but let's take the lower bound, i.e. 2. The following uses some generous rounding: That's 4 months, so the 1/3 of the year you mentioned of 60 hour weeks. 4.33 weeks per month on average times 4 months is 17.3 weeks of at least 60 hour weeks =~ 1040 hours of work over a period of time that they should've worked ~690 hours. That's an extra of about 345 hours of work they did, which is a whopping 43 8-hour days. Even if after each of the crunches they got 2 weeks off, that's 20 days of vacation to compensate for 43 days of unpaid crunch time that also wreaked havoc with their actual lives. Is my math off somewhere? Because otherwise as this was the lower bound from an idealized remembering of "the good old times" I'd call that exploitative.

Pfhreak 5y ago

I've worked in games, I've worked out of games. The workers in games are absolutely being exploited because they think the work environment is unique. And yes, there's something cool to see people at PAX or elsewhere praising a project you worked on. But saying people are making a tradeoff, or giving up salary to work on games is a defeatist attitude -- big game devs should be paying what big tech companies pay. You should not have to give up pay to work in games, and it absolutely kills me every time I see an engineer claim that it's somehow noble to do so. In the indie space, sure, pay is going to be weaker. But there are thousands working for Blizzard, Activision, EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, CDPR, etc. etc. etc. who are all being grossly underpaid for the value they bring to their company.

souprock 5y ago

Since you are a game developer with kids, I have to ask... what about the addiction? Have you seen your kids getting addicted to games? Does that bother you? Have you pondered your own contribution to that problem?

oreally 5y ago
Just saying, I'd rather have kids be addicted to games than drugs. At least there's a high possibility you can recover game addiction without major effects to your health. And you learn very abstract things in games you can use IRL too.

rewgs 5y ago

This is on point and similar to my experiences in game companies. That said, I'm in music/audio, and from my side of the fence there seemed to be a sort of higher respect from management for programmers (and to a certain extent, art) in that they really tried to slowly ramp up their crunch and not keep it sustained for too long. In my experience, the truly crazy crunch tends to be borne by audio and QA. Audio is hardcore, Naughty Dog being the most hardcore (but they wear this as a badge of honor and everyone who works there knows it before going in).

ecmascript 5y ago

> Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time. If it is 2 times per year and extends for a period of 2 months, that is almost half of the entire year. That sounds crazy to me, I would never ever work 60 hours a week without getting paid for it. Many game companies make ridicolous amounts of money, there is no reason why they shouldn't pay a reasonable salary for it. 60 hour work weeks are insane and you should never accept that.

omega3 5y ago

Maybe that was true 20, 30 years ago. Right now outside of a handful of studios that release quality games the rest aren't that good or innovative. I find it hard to believe people are happy to work on games with heavy elements of microtransactions or reheated elements (e.g. Ubisoft games are basically the same)

deleted 5y ago

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ManlyBread 5y ago

>You don't work in gaming because you want to make the top salary. You work in gaming because you love games That's just rationalization. Gaming companies earn ridiculous amounts of money, especially the ones that do it through microtransaction model. These companies would have no problem paying FAANG-like salaries if they had to do so, but they pay less because they can get away with it.