As someone who worked at EA for eight years, I think you are viewing the world with pretty jaded glasses. Yes, most game dev is not a magical utopia of coding

As someone who worked at EA for eight years, I think you are viewing the world with pretty jaded glasses. Yes, most game dev is not a magical utopia of coding whatever you feel like and watching the magic happen. But it's also not a horrific grind where you are treated entirely as a code monkey for someone else's art. There is an entire continuum between these points and different companies and teams will lie at different points on it. I have worked on games where I was so deep in the bowels of tools and tech that I couldn't even tell you how the game was played (maintaining the UI editor for Madden, which was actually a lot of fun). And I've worked on games where I sat right next to the designers and artists and had a lot of influence on the game itself (Henry Hatsworth, where I wrote the level/animation editor and in-game AI engine). I think overall, most game dev jobs do have a few things going for them compared to other domains: * You get a greater opportunity to work on cross-discipline teams. During my time at EA, I worked closely with artists, UI designers, producers, technical artists, sound designers, etc. It was wonderful to not be in a programmer monoculture. It's good for the soul to be around people who think differently. * People outside of your work have a more immediate understanding and appreciation for what you do. There is some prestige to being a game dev and at the very least most people can at least visualize a video game. If you work at a typical non-famous non-FAANG software company, your job is almost totally invisible. * You're working on a game. You might not spend much time literally playing it, but it's still more fun when debugging to poke around a football field or dungeon than a spreadsheet full or insurance rates or whatever stuff most typical CRUD devs are dealing with. Game development often feels concrete and tangible in ways that other software doesn't. But there are some downsides: * The market factors the intrinsic rewards above into compensation, so game dev pays less than other software fields. The massive number of young people who want to do it also drives salaries down. * The overtime is often awful. * A side effect of the above two is a constant brain drain. Experienced devs age out and leave when they want to start a family and have sane hours, to be replaced by another crop of fresh-faced kids who will work for peanuts for the cachet of being a real game dev. That means there is often a large lack of software engineering maturity on teams. Tons of spaghetti code, broken processes, poor estimation, and other self-inflicted wounds. I really enjoyed my time at EA (except for the overtime and often crappy code), but I'm also glad to not be working full time in games any more.