Oh, I'm sure there are differences between companies. However, your measure of "people love working there" might be misleading. All of my ex-colleagues loved wo

Oh, I'm sure there are differences between companies. However, your measure of "people love working there" might be misleading. All of my ex-colleagues loved working on games, and almost all were pretty happy at the company, because, you know, the previous company they worked for had worse death marches - 7 days a week, not 6! and from the start of the project, not just the last year of development! - and wow, our company paid up to GBP 7.50 for takeaway dinners when you worked more than 11 hours that day! Plus, the previous company went out of business and didn't pay the last 3 months of salary, whereas this one was still hanging on. I don't know exactly how it happens, either that people talk themselves into being grateful for their situation, or they just drink enough game industry Kool-Aid to not see how it's completely broken. Don't get me wrong, I don't regret working in games for a year - I'd almost certainly be wondering what professional game development was really like if I hadn't. I also don't know if the leap into self-employment had come so soon or at all if my quality of life had been better at some other job. In any case, I'm glad to have left that behind, and glad to have done it when I did. Plus, I discovered I like programming more than I like game development, which means that I'm actually working on more fun and interesting stuff now - although my job at the time was tech/engine programming, most of it wasn't actually that challenging; I wasn't solving interesting problems. There's a lot of reinventing the wheel (and the bugfixing that goes with it) in the game industry... Oh, and by the way: getting into game development as a competent programmer isn't nearly as hard as they like to make it out to be. (I was also involved with recruitment) I'm guessing they have to maintain that air of elitism to keep people interested. If you're itching to work on games, I'm not going to try and talk you out of it; you'll have to decide for yourself if that kind of life is for you. If you have a wife or girlfriend you'd like to hang on to, I'd make sure your notice period is short, though...