8 ms·

Making games and movies are clearly as hard if not harder than making SaaS. I never understood why devs who work for game and movie studios don't quit and work

Making games and movies are clearly as hard if not harder than making SaaS. I never understood why devs who work for game and movie studios don't quit and work for companies that pay 2-3x as much - other than for the pure love of what they do. And maybe if it ultimately comes down to a decision between (1) being paid well but giving up on your dreams vs (2) doing what you love but being exploited, what you need is not a union but a reality check.

mschuster91 3y ago
> I never understood why devs who work for game and movie studios don't quit and work for companies that pay 2-3x as much - other than for the pure love of what they do. A very real aspect is credits. If you're developing some SaaS product or whatever, you stay a nameless cog in the wheel, and in the worst case your entire work was for nothing because the company goes down in flames anyway. In contrast, games, movies and (at least it used to be) music? That's for eternity, even if you're an accountant or someone else with barely a tangential role to the production, your name will still be somewhere on the credit rolls. Something to one day show your grandchildren and say them "that was stuff I worked on, these were my colleagues, and these were the best war stories". And your grandchildren can brag to their friends at school "my gramps used to make Marvel movies, one he worked at is still in the top 10 of highest grossing movies ever". You leave actual legacy behind, and the jobs that offer this opportunity are rare. This is why people keep going to entertainment.
- jfim 3y ago
  Videogame programming is also pretty fun. It's unfortunate however that credit screens for software went away in the late 90s/early 2000s. It would be interesting to be able to see who made the software that I use daily, or even other physical objects like appliances.
- echelon 3y ago
  > your name will still be somewhere on the credit rolls. In time, nobody will watch it and nobody will care. So much long tail stuff is effectively forgotten to time. Kids don't want to inherit our old games and movies - they want new stuff that speaks to them. I would argue your name can live longer in SaaS, where those that come after you will continually `git blame` you and praise (or curse) your name.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > I would argue your name can live longer in SaaS, where those that come after you will continually `git blame` you and praise (or curse) your name. Nah. With the current expiration rate of JS frameworks, your code is lucky to live five years before someone decides a full rewrite. And unless you're working for a household brand like Twitter or Facebook, chances are high that no one outside your bubble knows what your product is, but everyone knows the MCU.
    - grotorea 3y ago
      Yeah and with art there's at least a chance you'll make one of the classics that don't get forgotten. Or maybe people will be playing it for nostalgia in retirement homes in 80 years.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Sure, it's for eternity. But what about food & mortgage today? This is exactly how people get convinced to work for peanuts, because they're 'a part of something' or 'supporting the arts'. But in the end if the result is a for profit thing you should simply be paid.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    You're completely correct, I just wanted to provide some context on why many people choose to work in entertainment. IMHO it's high time labor law enforcement starts cracking down hard on entertainment. Shit pay is one thing, but at least everyone knows what they're dealing with signing the contract - for me the worse issue is the blatant ignorance of working hour limits, break requirements and (at least in location shooting) ignorance of workplace safety rules, that routinely gets people injured and sometimes even killed.
  - P_I_Staker 3y ago
    Reminds me of working on a ranch for community service for high school. I assumed I was working for some charity. The truth is that the ranch charged for service. I don't think it was even a non-profit, but even if so, it was basically just a business this one asshole owned. I have no clue why it was helpful for the community to service it.
- mikrl 3y ago
  >That's for eternity As Marcus Aurelius frames it, everyone who cares now and will care in the future will themselves die and go to nothing in time. What is a blink of glory in this life is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Two generations of glory is nothing really, and the glory you bequeath is itself somewhat worthless since it appears more to be resting on the laurels of another rather than going towards good acts. If it is in your nature to work on such things, then do so and take your due as it comes. If that is truly what aligns with your nature, and the common good, a 2-3x bonus elsewhere won’t concern you, nor should your own trials beyond which is necessary for continuing along one’s path.
  - labster 3y ago
    Yeah but who cares about what Marcus Aurelius said, that dude’s already dead.
    - esafak 3y ago
      A lot of people apparently; Meditations is Amazon's top selling book in modern philosophy. https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/11057/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/11057/
      - mikrl 3y ago
        Ironically enough, it was never even intended to be a magnum opus or a legacy. Just some jottings, and notes to help him think things through while on campaign or holding court. Yet we read them 1800 years later and aside from the parts about the gods, can still apply it to life.
- vvanders 3y ago
  > A very real aspect is credits. If you're developing some SaaS product or whatever, you stay a nameless cog in the wheel, and in the worst case your entire work was for nothing because the company goes down in flames anyway. That really depends on the studio and publisher. I saw all sorts of credit shenanigans in my time in industry, hell I spent ~3 years on a title and because I left before ship due to insane crunch all I got was "Special Thanks". I saw people from the publisher that did almost nothing get top billing while art/dev get near the bottom. I won't even get into "developer interviews" where a large majority were from the publisher who weren't working directly on the title. IMO if you like the space do it as a side project or gamejam/indy angle, I know of very few places from my time in the industry that were "sane".
- rewgs 3y ago
  > your name will still be somewhere on the credit rolls This is unfortunately not true. All too often people are left uncredited or are given highly inaccurate credits that completely fail to convey the impact they had. Source: I worked in Hollywood as a composer for about the past decade.
DizzyDoo 3y ago
I make games for a living, I deeply enjoy the creative freedom of working on projects independently. After university I got my start with a SaaS accounting business, backend Python stuff - I liked it, I learned a lot and worked with some very talented and experienced programmers. Still, I love that with games I get to do deep systems work, animation work, I get to paint and design, write silly jokes, and make something a bit strange that no one else is going to make. Now, I work independently, there's no publisher or licensing partner, perhaps if I were working for Ubisoft or Activision Blizzard or Rockstar Games I might not enjoy it so much? But I found lots of things to like working on an accounting SaaS project, so if I ever did try it, perhaps it would be just fine.
headcanon 3y ago
Yet we enjoy the products of those who choose this path. I would rather them be doing what they love rather than sitting back and just optimizing difficulty vs paycheck. Put another way, the "get another job" argument is basically saying that the people who have that job, who put in the hard work to create these things that we enjoy, they don't deserve to get paid a fair wage.
- bruce343434 3y ago
  I disagree with your last point. If enough people get another job, the industry they are leaving will adapt or die. Since people still want to be distracted from life (big demand) the industry will more likely adapt.
  - xboxnolifes 3y ago
    > If enough people get another job, the industry they are leaving will adapt or die. The point is, people don't want the dying option here. That's why they stay.
  - cogman10 3y ago
    Moreso than other software industries, I think gaming is one that faces a real threat from indie companies. For example, simcity basically died because of cities skylines.
    - bruce343434 3y ago
      It wouldn't have died if it was of actual quality. In a free market competition between two parties, both are responsible for the shared future.
  - vharuck 3y ago
    >If enough people get another job, the industry they are leaving will adapt or die. That's essentially a union. A large group of people say they'll leave unless things improve.
esafak 3y ago
You explained it: they're willing to take a pay cut to work on what they love. That is an expression of the value they assign to what they are doing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential Why they value it so is obvious; they are creating entertainment that they can enjoy themselves. They can easily show and explain their work. Contrast that with your average B2B SaaS backend. You probably don't use your own product. You can't show anyone what you personally did. Explaining it would invite confusion and tears of boredom. And your work will be refactored away or deprecated with no way for you to keep a memento, unlike software from the shrinkwrap era. Even the crummiest VFX work lives on in Youtube.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Shawnj2 3y ago
  Yep, only a smaller number of people in the world have the luxury of enjoying what they do for a living anyways
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  Yep, working on what you love can make you do things way beyond reason. It didn't matter that you are effectively working for half of minimum wage - at least you were doing that thing of passion... until absolute total burn out. That was 9 years I will never get back, but whatever, I am in a much better place now. Just chill out and take it easy when you can.
frozenfoxx 3y ago
Hi, I work in the games industry. I worked on a still-running and popular MMO, shipped another popular and still-running MMO, and now work for a popular game tooling company. I do primarily systems work in the DevOps sphere. I’m underpaid. My hours aren’t great. I also find it pretty difficult to find a new job. Why? I’m pretty good at my job most of the time (I’ve spoken at tech and hacker conferences, built a lot of “first ever” things, led teams, that sort of thing) but a lot of CICD work and building pipelines is “sysadmin first, programmer distant second” type of work that requires knowing the ecosystem and how all the various pieces and priorities from hardware limitations all the way through to customer deliverables works. That is to say I do a lot of Bash, Ansible, Salt, Puppet, Terraform, GH Actions, Jenkins, all that stuff, not rip out Go for a living. Guess what a bunch of tech companies require you to do live in an interview now? And, shock upon shocks, it gets you people who do my job poorly and burn out. Whenever we’ve onboarded a new engineer it takes about six months before they even BEGIN to be able to contribute meaningfully and we EXPECT them to be around for the long haul. If you’re doing something that’s easy to onboard a DevOps person onto then someone else has already done it for you, typically better than you can. That’s kind of the point. So why stay in games? I’ve previously worked for non-profits, governments, militaries…and I hated it. I was still very good at what I did and I hated every second of it. No amount of monster slaying ever makes the world better, people just keep inventing new monsters. I couldn’t do it anymore as I don’t want my legacy to be a lot of highly durable, flexible, and simple-to-run systems used for violence and oppression. My work, directly, put a lot of (admittedly TERRIBLE) people in prison. But games, up until recently anyway, are something different. I love games, always have. I love building them, playing them, buying them, sending them to people, helping make them, being around them, hearing about how they change people’s lives. I adore them. They helped me stay alive. They saved friends and even myself from suicide. They got us through the pandemic. They gave me and so many people GOOD experiences that make the world undeniably BETTER. I’ve had Make-A-Wish kids come into my old studio before because even facing down terminal illness every single day they wanted NOTHING more than to meet the people that made them happy. I DID that. I can do this job. I can wake up in the morning and feel my work is GOOD and makes the world BETTER, safer, HAPPIER because people can build, play, and share games. Nothing any of my friends making triple my salary will EVER do at their jobs will ever exceed that level of public good. When’s the last time you heard someone doing GOOD at Oracle? When’s the last time you talked to a teenager who wanted to make a game and made it POSSIBLE? I do that every single day. It’s not about the money. Give me a decent, reliable paycheck, a flexible schedule, remote work, and a mission and I will BUILD THE SHIT out of whatever you need automated. Games are the only way I’ve been able to live with myself when I stopped needing to survive and needed to start finding out how to live. It’s not just a dream, it’s LIFE SUPPORT for me. And now that industry, too, has no more bright spots outside of tiny indie studios. I cannot describe how much that hurts me personally. Now it really is just awful corps the whole way down, just like every other big tech industry player. Why stay? Where can I GO? To do what? Make some awful rich people even more rich? Doesn’t matter how much I open source, doesn’t matter how many talks I give, doesn’t matter what tools I make and give away, none of it will ever save the only thing that made my work worthwhile in the face of a depressing sinkhole of greed. So yeah, I can’t speak for everyone but I can speak as a vet for quite a few years.
netbioserror 3y ago
Supply vs. demand. The line for game development and VFX work extends around the block. You will never ever ever find good pay or treatment in those conditions. If your dream is the same as everybody else's dream, consider the cost of pursuing it. If your goal is stable and well-paid employment, the other, much more practical option to unionizing is developing a different skillset that is valuable and in-demand. Jumping into a seller's market for labor is much better than jumping into a buyer's market.

mschuster91 3y ago

> I never understood why devs who work for game and movie studios don't quit and work for companies that pay 2-3x as much - other than for the pure love of what they do. A very real aspect is credits. If you're developing some SaaS product or whatever, you stay a nameless cog in the wheel, and in the worst case your entire work was for nothing because the company goes down in flames anyway. In contrast, games, movies and (at least it used to be) music? That's for eternity, even if you're an accountant or someone else with barely a tangential role to the production, your name will still be somewhere on the credit rolls. Something to one day show your grandchildren and say them "that was stuff I worked on, these were my colleagues, and these were the best war stories". And your grandchildren can brag to their friends at school "my gramps used to make Marvel movies, one he worked at is still in the top 10 of highest grossing movies ever". You leave actual legacy behind, and the jobs that offer this opportunity are rare. This is why people keep going to entertainment.

jfim 3y ago
Videogame programming is also pretty fun. It's unfortunate however that credit screens for software went away in the late 90s/early 2000s. It would be interesting to be able to see who made the software that I use daily, or even other physical objects like appliances.
echelon 3y ago
> your name will still be somewhere on the credit rolls. In time, nobody will watch it and nobody will care. So much long tail stuff is effectively forgotten to time. Kids don't want to inherit our old games and movies - they want new stuff that speaks to them. I would argue your name can live longer in SaaS, where those that come after you will continually `git blame` you and praise (or curse) your name.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > I would argue your name can live longer in SaaS, where those that come after you will continually `git blame` you and praise (or curse) your name. Nah. With the current expiration rate of JS frameworks, your code is lucky to live five years before someone decides a full rewrite. And unless you're working for a household brand like Twitter or Facebook, chances are high that no one outside your bubble knows what your product is, but everyone knows the MCU.
  - grotorea 3y ago
    Yeah and with art there's at least a chance you'll make one of the classics that don't get forgotten. Or maybe people will be playing it for nostalgia in retirement homes in 80 years.
jacquesm 3y ago
Sure, it's for eternity. But what about food & mortgage today? This is exactly how people get convinced to work for peanuts, because they're 'a part of something' or 'supporting the arts'. But in the end if the result is a for profit thing you should simply be paid.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  You're completely correct, I just wanted to provide some context on why many people choose to work in entertainment. IMHO it's high time labor law enforcement starts cracking down hard on entertainment. Shit pay is one thing, but at least everyone knows what they're dealing with signing the contract - for me the worse issue is the blatant ignorance of working hour limits, break requirements and (at least in location shooting) ignorance of workplace safety rules, that routinely gets people injured and sometimes even killed.
- P_I_Staker 3y ago
  Reminds me of working on a ranch for community service for high school. I assumed I was working for some charity. The truth is that the ranch charged for service. I don't think it was even a non-profit, but even if so, it was basically just a business this one asshole owned. I have no clue why it was helpful for the community to service it.
mikrl 3y ago
>That's for eternity As Marcus Aurelius frames it, everyone who cares now and will care in the future will themselves die and go to nothing in time. What is a blink of glory in this life is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Two generations of glory is nothing really, and the glory you bequeath is itself somewhat worthless since it appears more to be resting on the laurels of another rather than going towards good acts. If it is in your nature to work on such things, then do so and take your due as it comes. If that is truly what aligns with your nature, and the common good, a 2-3x bonus elsewhere won’t concern you, nor should your own trials beyond which is necessary for continuing along one’s path.
- labster 3y ago
  Yeah but who cares about what Marcus Aurelius said, that dude’s already dead.
  - esafak 3y ago
    A lot of people apparently; Meditations is Amazon's top selling book in modern philosophy. https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/11057/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/11057/
    - mikrl 3y ago
      Ironically enough, it was never even intended to be a magnum opus or a legacy. Just some jottings, and notes to help him think things through while on campaign or holding court. Yet we read them 1800 years later and aside from the parts about the gods, can still apply it to life.
vvanders 3y ago
> A very real aspect is credits. If you're developing some SaaS product or whatever, you stay a nameless cog in the wheel, and in the worst case your entire work was for nothing because the company goes down in flames anyway. That really depends on the studio and publisher. I saw all sorts of credit shenanigans in my time in industry, hell I spent ~3 years on a title and because I left before ship due to insane crunch all I got was "Special Thanks". I saw people from the publisher that did almost nothing get top billing while art/dev get near the bottom. I won't even get into "developer interviews" where a large majority were from the publisher who weren't working directly on the title. IMO if you like the space do it as a side project or gamejam/indy angle, I know of very few places from my time in the industry that were "sane".
rewgs 3y ago
> your name will still be somewhere on the credit rolls This is unfortunately not true. All too often people are left uncredited or are given highly inaccurate credits that completely fail to convey the impact they had. Source: I worked in Hollywood as a composer for about the past decade.

DizzyDoo 3y ago

I make games for a living, I deeply enjoy the creative freedom of working on projects independently. After university I got my start with a SaaS accounting business, backend Python stuff - I liked it, I learned a lot and worked with some very talented and experienced programmers. Still, I love that with games I get to do deep systems work, animation work, I get to paint and design, write silly jokes, and make something a bit strange that no one else is going to make. Now, I work independently, there's no publisher or licensing partner, perhaps if I were working for Ubisoft or Activision Blizzard or Rockstar Games I might not enjoy it so much? But I found lots of things to like working on an accounting SaaS project, so if I ever did try it, perhaps it would be just fine.

headcanon 3y ago

Yet we enjoy the products of those who choose this path. I would rather them be doing what they love rather than sitting back and just optimizing difficulty vs paycheck. Put another way, the "get another job" argument is basically saying that the people who have that job, who put in the hard work to create these things that we enjoy, they don't deserve to get paid a fair wage.

bruce343434 3y ago
I disagree with your last point. If enough people get another job, the industry they are leaving will adapt or die. Since people still want to be distracted from life (big demand) the industry will more likely adapt.
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  > If enough people get another job, the industry they are leaving will adapt or die. The point is, people don't want the dying option here. That's why they stay.
- cogman10 3y ago
  Moreso than other software industries, I think gaming is one that faces a real threat from indie companies. For example, simcity basically died because of cities skylines.
  - bruce343434 3y ago
    It wouldn't have died if it was of actual quality. In a free market competition between two parties, both are responsible for the shared future.
- vharuck 3y ago
  >If enough people get another job, the industry they are leaving will adapt or die. That's essentially a union. A large group of people say they'll leave unless things improve.

esafak 3y ago

You explained it: they're willing to take a pay cut to work on what they love. That is an expression of the value they assign to what they are doing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential Why they value it so is obvious; they are creating entertainment that they can enjoy themselves. They can easily show and explain their work. Contrast that with your average B2B SaaS backend. You probably don't use your own product. You can't show anyone what you personally did. Explaining it would invite confusion and tears of boredom. And your work will be refactored away or deprecated with no way for you to keep a memento, unlike software from the shrinkwrap era. Even the crummiest VFX work lives on in Youtube.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Shawnj2 3y ago
Yep, only a smaller number of people in the world have the luxury of enjoying what they do for a living anyways
NovaDudely 3y ago
Yep, working on what you love can make you do things way beyond reason. It didn't matter that you are effectively working for half of minimum wage - at least you were doing that thing of passion... until absolute total burn out. That was 9 years I will never get back, but whatever, I am in a much better place now. Just chill out and take it easy when you can.

frozenfoxx 3y ago

Hi, I work in the games industry. I worked on a still-running and popular MMO, shipped another popular and still-running MMO, and now work for a popular game tooling company. I do primarily systems work in the DevOps sphere. I’m underpaid. My hours aren’t great. I also find it pretty difficult to find a new job. Why? I’m pretty good at my job most of the time (I’ve spoken at tech and hacker conferences, built a lot of “first ever” things, led teams, that sort of thing) but a lot of CICD work and building pipelines is “sysadmin first, programmer distant second” type of work that requires knowing the ecosystem and how all the various pieces and priorities from hardware limitations all the way through to customer deliverables works. That is to say I do a lot of Bash, Ansible, Salt, Puppet, Terraform, GH Actions, Jenkins, all that stuff, not rip out Go for a living. Guess what a bunch of tech companies require you to do live in an interview now? And, shock upon shocks, it gets you people who do my job poorly and burn out. Whenever we’ve onboarded a new engineer it takes about six months before they even BEGIN to be able to contribute meaningfully and we EXPECT them to be around for the long haul. If you’re doing something that’s easy to onboard a DevOps person onto then someone else has already done it for you, typically better than you can. That’s kind of the point. So why stay in games? I’ve previously worked for non-profits, governments, militaries…and I hated it. I was still very good at what I did and I hated every second of it. No amount of monster slaying ever makes the world better, people just keep inventing new monsters. I couldn’t do it anymore as I don’t want my legacy to be a lot of highly durable, flexible, and simple-to-run systems used for violence and oppression. My work, directly, put a lot of (admittedly TERRIBLE) people in prison. But games, up until recently anyway, are something different. I love games, always have. I love building them, playing them, buying them, sending them to people, helping make them, being around them, hearing about how they change people’s lives. I adore them. They helped me stay alive. They saved friends and even myself from suicide. They got us through the pandemic. They gave me and so many people GOOD experiences that make the world undeniably BETTER. I’ve had Make-A-Wish kids come into my old studio before because even facing down terminal illness every single day they wanted NOTHING more than to meet the people that made them happy. I DID that. I can do this job. I can wake up in the morning and feel my work is GOOD and makes the world BETTER, safer, HAPPIER because people can build, play, and share games. Nothing any of my friends making triple my salary will EVER do at their jobs will ever exceed that level of public good. When’s the last time you heard someone doing GOOD at Oracle? When’s the last time you talked to a teenager who wanted to make a game and made it POSSIBLE? I do that every single day. It’s not about the money. Give me a decent, reliable paycheck, a flexible schedule, remote work, and a mission and I will BUILD THE SHIT out of whatever you need automated. Games are the only way I’ve been able to live with myself when I stopped needing to survive and needed to start finding out how to live. It’s not just a dream, it’s LIFE SUPPORT for me. And now that industry, too, has no more bright spots outside of tiny indie studios. I cannot describe how much that hurts me personally. Now it really is just awful corps the whole way down, just like every other big tech industry player. Why stay? Where can I GO? To do what? Make some awful rich people even more rich? Doesn’t matter how much I open source, doesn’t matter how many talks I give, doesn’t matter what tools I make and give away, none of it will ever save the only thing that made my work worthwhile in the face of a depressing sinkhole of greed. So yeah, I can’t speak for everyone but I can speak as a vet for quite a few years.

netbioserror 3y ago

Supply vs. demand. The line for game development and VFX work extends around the block. You will never ever ever find good pay or treatment in those conditions. If your dream is the same as everybody else's dream, consider the cost of pursuing it. If your goal is stable and well-paid employment, the other, much more practical option to unionizing is developing a different skillset that is valuable and in-demand. Jumping into a seller's market for labor is much better than jumping into a buyer's market.