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Aside the medical misfortunes your story is absolutely typical. The games industry has a tragic problem with churn. I see eager CS graduates go off to "get into

Aside the medical misfortunes your story is absolutely typical. The games industry has a tragic problem with churn. I see eager CS graduates go off to "get into games". Within a few years they get out, bitter and burned, and go into more regular jobs in medicine, defence, finance or whatever. It's called the 20:20:20 rule. Only 20 percent of creative projects ever get to the production stage Of those, only 20 percent complete production. And of those, 20 percent get through marketing and publishing to become "titles". That means if you are put into a team on a new creative project it has a roughly 0.8% chance of being sold online, and then you can tell all your friends about it. There are two further problems. One is that projects like games or films take about 2 years to complete. That means it's likely your first project will get canned. And your second. And your third. I have spoken to devs in the game business 6 or more years into their careers who have never seen a title release. If you are lucky to have a successful title and get into the "pop" stream, then it's more likely you'll get onto a team destined to have another success, and a positive success loop can begin. Just like the film or music business, that can take you 10 or 15 years. The second is that creative people really need validation and feedback. Each time a management team kill a project it's a gut-wrenching experience for creative developers. Unlike music or the theatre where you might play out a few bad nights before a show is pulled you lose everything in a single stroke. Often for "intellectual property" or "reputational" reasons they want to bury the entire project assets and act like it never even happened. This leads creatives to get depressed. I've seen a lot of it and now warn students about "getting into games" or any other industry that subsidises 99.2% of dead-end misery with obscene profits it makes on 0.8% of mega-successes. But that's just the Pareto mathematics of high-risk creative work.

kingcharles 5y ago
My whole childhood in the 80s was writing video games at home. It's all I wanted to do. I was really fucking good at it. First job out of school - writing video games professionally. It sucked. Really sucked. This was back in the mid-90s when the profession was in a really bad place. I got out within 2 years and never went back :( I heard the industry was much better now, though? This is the game I worked on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abomination:_The_Nemesis_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abomination:_The_Nemesis_Proje...
- zabzonk 5y ago
  > I heard the industry was much better now, though? Perhaps get a hearing aid? It's extremely toxic.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  I hope, as with the original article author, that you find a way to rediscover your childhood passion in a form that works for you today. It's not hard to understand what happened to our generation as teenage geeky culture turned into a multi-billion global business in less than a decade. A ton of brilliant programmers got left behind and left out. Not just because there's only room for a few John Carmacks or Tim Sweenys, (there's a good deal of luck in navigating an unfolding culture), but because rapid industrialisation changes the very nature of what it touches. Industrialisation of games had many unfortunate and unexpected effects. It made creativity a liability. Gaming is one of the most conservative industries on the planet, way, way ahead of music or film production for having cast itself in stone. Coincident with formulation and industrialisation came specialisation and a great deal of deskilling. I knew guys in the late 90s who built their own 3D engines, knew quaternion geometry, how to mix, reverberate and filter multi-channel audio in C++. Now you just grab and Unreal or Unity engine, plug in and go. In some tragic ways, the smarter those hackers were the quicker they found themselves on the margins, or out on the scrap heap. Like the music business, in the past 20 years the industry has functioned by burning through a lot of aspirational talent. It leaves a trail of broken hearts and dreams. As educators we have been complicit in overselling it, and feeding it with souls. You can always tell an industry is a hustle when the marketing machine harps-on about how to "break into" it. Young people are made to feel that if they were privileged to get a job it would have little to do with their merits and talents, but their guile and grit. If you wanted a job you had to "break in to", become a burglar. The hours and the pay are much better. Maybe that's why many of the kids I taught to code switched from chasing that rainbow to being hackers.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    It's also not unusual that even someone absolutely in the top 1% of the industry by one or more measures when relatively young just doesn't recapture the magic as companies change, consumer tastes change, etc. And even if they stay in the industry and talk at GDC and so forth, it's just not the same thing.
derekdahmer 5y ago
I believe the first and second 20% but you’re saying 80% of completed games are never released? I’m curious why this would be the case if the bulk of the cost is already sunk.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  I think it depends on what you think "games" means. If you think it means AAA titles, then no, 80% of AAA titles don't fail at the last step. 80% of all games created, including all the absolute garbage, fail. At least, that's how I read it. It's like when they say "90% of new businesses fail." Sure, but most of those were bad ideas in the first place.

kingcharles 5y ago

My whole childhood in the 80s was writing video games at home. It's all I wanted to do. I was really fucking good at it. First job out of school - writing video games professionally. It sucked. Really sucked. This was back in the mid-90s when the profession was in a really bad place. I got out within 2 years and never went back :( I heard the industry was much better now, though? This is the game I worked on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abomination:_The_Nemesis_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abomination:_The_Nemesis_Proje...

zabzonk 5y ago
> I heard the industry was much better now, though? Perhaps get a hearing aid? It's extremely toxic.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
I hope, as with the original article author, that you find a way to rediscover your childhood passion in a form that works for you today. It's not hard to understand what happened to our generation as teenage geeky culture turned into a multi-billion global business in less than a decade. A ton of brilliant programmers got left behind and left out. Not just because there's only room for a few John Carmacks or Tim Sweenys, (there's a good deal of luck in navigating an unfolding culture), but because rapid industrialisation changes the very nature of what it touches. Industrialisation of games had many unfortunate and unexpected effects. It made creativity a liability. Gaming is one of the most conservative industries on the planet, way, way ahead of music or film production for having cast itself in stone. Coincident with formulation and industrialisation came specialisation and a great deal of deskilling. I knew guys in the late 90s who built their own 3D engines, knew quaternion geometry, how to mix, reverberate and filter multi-channel audio in C++. Now you just grab and Unreal or Unity engine, plug in and go. In some tragic ways, the smarter those hackers were the quicker they found themselves on the margins, or out on the scrap heap. Like the music business, in the past 20 years the industry has functioned by burning through a lot of aspirational talent. It leaves a trail of broken hearts and dreams. As educators we have been complicit in overselling it, and feeding it with souls. You can always tell an industry is a hustle when the marketing machine harps-on about how to "break into" it. Young people are made to feel that if they were privileged to get a job it would have little to do with their merits and talents, but their guile and grit. If you wanted a job you had to "break in to", become a burglar. The hours and the pay are much better. Maybe that's why many of the kids I taught to code switched from chasing that rainbow to being hackers.
- ghaff 5y ago
  It's also not unusual that even someone absolutely in the top 1% of the industry by one or more measures when relatively young just doesn't recapture the magic as companies change, consumer tastes change, etc. And even if they stay in the industry and talk at GDC and so forth, it's just not the same thing.

derekdahmer 5y ago

I believe the first and second 20% but you’re saying 80% of completed games are never released? I’m curious why this would be the case if the bulk of the cost is already sunk.

wccrawford 5y ago
I think it depends on what you think "games" means. If you think it means AAA titles, then no, 80% of AAA titles don't fail at the last step. 80% of all games created, including all the absolute garbage, fail. At least, that's how I read it. It's like when they say "90% of new businesses fail." Sure, but most of those were bad ideas in the first place.