5 ms·

Game development is an interesting industry where both happen to be true: 1. It's too expensive to make a game 2. Employees in the industry don't get paid eno

by bko 2y ago

Game development is an interesting industry where both happen to be true: 1. It's too expensive to make a game 2. Employees in the industry don't get paid enough Similar industries include childcare, where you hear politicians decry the cost of childcare in the same breath and how little the workers in their field are getting paid. Maybe the costs are somewhere else, not employees? Nope. From the article: > That cash flow is essential because a studio's operational costs remain fixed (or even increase) while revenue fluctuates up and down. Like most software companies, game development operating costs are derived almost entirely from salaries. And in the United States, there are dozens of factors that drive salaries upward. So I guess the article is arguing salaries are too high, which is not something you hear too often in the game industry context.

jandrese 2y ago
It might not be salaries directly but things like healthcare costs and retirement savings. So a developer can still be "poorly paid" but costing the company a fortune in benefits.
- bko 2y ago
  Are there any unique characteristics to game development workforce related to healthcare costs or retirement savings? If not, it's not particularly meaningful to bemoan games as expensive compared to any other labor intensive industry.
  - jandrese 2y ago
    Probably not, healthcare costs are eating America alive. As a country America is willing to try anything except the one thing that has worked everywhere else.
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      I'm all for universal healthcare and think the system we have in place is idiotic, but other developed countries are struggling with healthcare as well (they'll say their system is the worst, just not as bad as America's). But universal healthcare is one way we can really fix our labor market: by making it a public benefit with mean-based contributions, labor markets would relax a lot: more jobs become viable even if they otherwise don't economically meet the bar to provide healthcare, because they don't need to. No one stresses about losing their healthcare when they lose a job, or want to switch, or have to switch. Similar support for retirement savings would help also.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    The only unique characteristic is how relatively new games are. And as a result any tech leads the US had was quickly closed by EU/Asian markets. So there's more allure than usual to try and tap into that cheaper but still talented labor compared to suffereing in America (even though everyone wants to tap into the American consumers and the USD. But alas).
- hansvm 2y ago
  Typical Bay Area game devs with under 5-10yrs of experience are making something like $80k-$140k/yr and working 80 hr weeks, without a cushy stock package, taking a pay cut if they agree to rev share, and getting normal healthcare benefits, sometimes retirement. That's not nothing, or even bad per se, but those same people have much better options. Even for normal people at a normal startup and not fishing around till they get lucky they ought to be in the $140k-$200k range, working 30-60hr weeks. Separately, it's slightly bad. Working at Trader Joe's and McDonald's double full time gets you better pay and benefits than the $80k/yr game dev, especially if they still have any student loans. After taxes, getting lucky with a cheap apartment, and utilities, they're banking $22k/yr. Their chunk of healthcare, either car expenses if they drive in or extra rent if the live close to work, food, ..., makes the situation a lot worse. It's mostly fine starting out if you're single, pretty good even, but adding in any other dependents puts them under water, and they definitely don't have the financial headroom to weather any kind of financial emergency.
  - PeterHolzwarth 2y ago
    "same people have much better options" No, no they don't: people seem to forget that at a game company, the minority of people are engineers. The extremes are designers: there is pretty much no equivalent to, say, level design outside of the games industry. Other design disciplines - it takes a bit of mental gymnastics to find a way their game work could translate into something out of that industry. Art? There's a bit of fleeing of hollywood VFX going on - it's no more attractive for 3D artists that the gaming industry. Other forms of art in games as well pretty much only have an overlap with hollywood as well (audio too). Game industry QA? Doesn't really exist in that form anywhere else, but it's a minimum wage job either way. All this to say that many of the jobs in the games industry don't translate to much outside of it.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      You're right, but most of the complaints about low paying salaries focus mostly on the programmers. Management is paid about as well as in/out the industry (many from out the industry. Which explains modern game dysfunction). Art is underrespected but that's across all the industry except maybe animation (the article even links to a NYT article titled "Trump Proposes Eliminating the Arts and Humanities Endowments". Even the government doesn't respect it, and it's not a new trend). Other places like Sound, VA, and design do transfer but are traditionally gig economies instead of a full time employment.
thriftwy 2y ago
That's just the regions with best economics getting treats of Baumol's effect[1] Countries with mediocre economies often afford child care and gamedev without much trouble, since their productivity is also mediocre hence their wages and spendings don't run off. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  For games (I have zero authority to speak on the economics of childcare), productivity has very much increased though. I think it tapered off a bit in the PS3 era, but the available tech lets single or small teams deliver games of similar graphical fidelity to a Gen X-1 AAA game. The main differences tend to be polish (not so much these days, sadly) and scale of games. But some people are learning bigger games don't equal more sales, nor a better game even. But if you choose to chase that cutting edge tech unchecked, the tech available is growing faster than the tools nor talent needed (especially when you can't retain your talent).
  - thriftwy 2y ago
    The target for AAA is also moving fast so they're not catching their breath.
FredPret 2y ago
So games are too cheap. For $50 you can get near-endless dynamic content created by passionate people. For the same price you can watch a pre-made movie out (granted, usually movies have higher production value and it's a night out), or two nice hamburgers.
- thriftwy 2y ago
  Most games do not give you near-endless dynamic content anymore. Gone are the days of Master of Magic/Orion. Most "single player" games are basically interactive movies. There's maybe 20 hours of content and that's that. 40 if you are slow. But it is not as great as a good movie, which are also scarce. Even if there's randomly generated world (roguelike-like), you can usually see all the content in the first 20 hours or so. Sometimes faster than that. Even if the game was amazing, there's no reason to play it once you've figured out ins and outs. For some reason people keep paying for that stuff, incidentally I've never enjoyed it and only recognized that fact in my 30s - I've never played these most popular genres at all!
  - FredPret 2y ago
    Master of Orion 2 was the peak. Some games like Factorio have minimal content but endless combinations of it in interesting ways. One that stands out is Europa Universalis, which both encodes and presents a crazy amount of history. But even a paper-thin game with 20 hours of value is cheap at $50. That's $2.5 per hour, ~one-third the rate of a movie, and kind of on par with a new book.
    - thriftwy 2y ago
      The problem is that they are competing with TV series and books. Why pay $200 for a game when that buys a year of premium Netflix subscription or smth like that? Or ten e-books? Only huge hits will be sellable that way. Also, imagine what world looked like when books were as hot sell as games two decades ago. Any books, really, were inifinitely sellable because they provided a dozen hours of mild entertainment and often were the only option.
toast0 2y ago
Modern game development requires an awful lot of people. It's not so much that individual salaries are too high, but that there are too many individuals involved. If you ever watch the credits for a game, they've gotten so much longer than in decades past. Games are more complex, and have a lot more detailed content, and all that, so it's not that people are less productive, but still. The same thing happened in movies as well --- most movies with any sort of effects are going to have ten minutes of credits.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
> Similar industries include childcare, where you hear politicians decry the cost of childcare in the same breath and how little the workers in their field are getting paid. Childcare is heavily regulated, so it is impossible to increase productivity. In fact, local childcare boards tend to force lesser productivity by reducing the number of kids one staff can look after, while crunches are impossible. There really is no way to cheaper more accessible childcare because it is legally not allowed (for perhaps well justified reasons). Game development is the opposite of that, GenAI could take over and as long as ChatGPT can produce a fun game, it is allowed to do so.

by bko 2y ago

jandrese 2y ago

It might not be salaries directly but things like healthcare costs and retirement savings. So a developer can still be "poorly paid" but costing the company a fortune in benefits.

bko 2y ago
Are there any unique characteristics to game development workforce related to healthcare costs or retirement savings? If not, it's not particularly meaningful to bemoan games as expensive compared to any other labor intensive industry.
- jandrese 2y ago
  Probably not, healthcare costs are eating America alive. As a country America is willing to try anything except the one thing that has worked everywhere else.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    I'm all for universal healthcare and think the system we have in place is idiotic, but other developed countries are struggling with healthcare as well (they'll say their system is the worst, just not as bad as America's). But universal healthcare is one way we can really fix our labor market: by making it a public benefit with mean-based contributions, labor markets would relax a lot: more jobs become viable even if they otherwise don't economically meet the bar to provide healthcare, because they don't need to. No one stresses about losing their healthcare when they lose a job, or want to switch, or have to switch. Similar support for retirement savings would help also.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  The only unique characteristic is how relatively new games are. And as a result any tech leads the US had was quickly closed by EU/Asian markets. So there's more allure than usual to try and tap into that cheaper but still talented labor compared to suffereing in America (even though everyone wants to tap into the American consumers and the USD. But alas).
hansvm 2y ago
Typical Bay Area game devs with under 5-10yrs of experience are making something like $80k-$140k/yr and working 80 hr weeks, without a cushy stock package, taking a pay cut if they agree to rev share, and getting normal healthcare benefits, sometimes retirement. That's not nothing, or even bad per se, but those same people have much better options. Even for normal people at a normal startup and not fishing around till they get lucky they ought to be in the $140k-$200k range, working 30-60hr weeks. Separately, it's slightly bad. Working at Trader Joe's and McDonald's double full time gets you better pay and benefits than the $80k/yr game dev, especially if they still have any student loans. After taxes, getting lucky with a cheap apartment, and utilities, they're banking $22k/yr. Their chunk of healthcare, either car expenses if they drive in or extra rent if the live close to work, food, ..., makes the situation a lot worse. It's mostly fine starting out if you're single, pretty good even, but adding in any other dependents puts them under water, and they definitely don't have the financial headroom to weather any kind of financial emergency.
- PeterHolzwarth 2y ago
  "same people have much better options" No, no they don't: people seem to forget that at a game company, the minority of people are engineers. The extremes are designers: there is pretty much no equivalent to, say, level design outside of the games industry. Other design disciplines - it takes a bit of mental gymnastics to find a way their game work could translate into something out of that industry. Art? There's a bit of fleeing of hollywood VFX going on - it's no more attractive for 3D artists that the gaming industry. Other forms of art in games as well pretty much only have an overlap with hollywood as well (audio too). Game industry QA? Doesn't really exist in that form anywhere else, but it's a minimum wage job either way. All this to say that many of the jobs in the games industry don't translate to much outside of it.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    You're right, but most of the complaints about low paying salaries focus mostly on the programmers. Management is paid about as well as in/out the industry (many from out the industry. Which explains modern game dysfunction). Art is underrespected but that's across all the industry except maybe animation (the article even links to a NYT article titled "Trump Proposes Eliminating the Arts and Humanities Endowments". Even the government doesn't respect it, and it's not a new trend). Other places like Sound, VA, and design do transfer but are traditionally gig economies instead of a full time employment.

thriftwy 2y ago

That's just the regions with best economics getting treats of Baumol's effect[1] Countries with mediocre economies often afford child care and gamedev without much trouble, since their productivity is also mediocre hence their wages and spendings don't run off. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

johnnyanmac 2y ago
For games (I have zero authority to speak on the economics of childcare), productivity has very much increased though. I think it tapered off a bit in the PS3 era, but the available tech lets single or small teams deliver games of similar graphical fidelity to a Gen X-1 AAA game. The main differences tend to be polish (not so much these days, sadly) and scale of games. But some people are learning bigger games don't equal more sales, nor a better game even. But if you choose to chase that cutting edge tech unchecked, the tech available is growing faster than the tools nor talent needed (especially when you can't retain your talent).
- thriftwy 2y ago
  The target for AAA is also moving fast so they're not catching their breath.

FredPret 2y ago

So games are too cheap. For $50 you can get near-endless dynamic content created by passionate people. For the same price you can watch a pre-made movie out (granted, usually movies have higher production value and it's a night out), or two nice hamburgers.

thriftwy 2y ago
Most games do not give you near-endless dynamic content anymore. Gone are the days of Master of Magic/Orion. Most "single player" games are basically interactive movies. There's maybe 20 hours of content and that's that. 40 if you are slow. But it is not as great as a good movie, which are also scarce. Even if there's randomly generated world (roguelike-like), you can usually see all the content in the first 20 hours or so. Sometimes faster than that. Even if the game was amazing, there's no reason to play it once you've figured out ins and outs. For some reason people keep paying for that stuff, incidentally I've never enjoyed it and only recognized that fact in my 30s - I've never played these most popular genres at all!
- FredPret 2y ago
  Master of Orion 2 was the peak. Some games like Factorio have minimal content but endless combinations of it in interesting ways. One that stands out is Europa Universalis, which both encodes and presents a crazy amount of history. But even a paper-thin game with 20 hours of value is cheap at $50. That's $2.5 per hour, ~one-third the rate of a movie, and kind of on par with a new book.
  - thriftwy 2y ago
    The problem is that they are competing with TV series and books. Why pay $200 for a game when that buys a year of premium Netflix subscription or smth like that? Or ten e-books? Only huge hits will be sellable that way. Also, imagine what world looked like when books were as hot sell as games two decades ago. Any books, really, were inifinitely sellable because they provided a dozen hours of mild entertainment and often were the only option.

toast0 2y ago

Modern game development requires an awful lot of people. It's not so much that individual salaries are too high, but that there are too many individuals involved. If you ever watch the credits for a game, they've gotten so much longer than in decades past. Games are more complex, and have a lot more detailed content, and all that, so it's not that people are less productive, but still. The same thing happened in movies as well --- most movies with any sort of effects are going to have ten minutes of credits.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago

> Similar industries include childcare, where you hear politicians decry the cost of childcare in the same breath and how little the workers in their field are getting paid. Childcare is heavily regulated, so it is impossible to increase productivity. In fact, local childcare boards tend to force lesser productivity by reducing the number of kids one staff can look after, while crunches are impossible. There really is no way to cheaper more accessible childcare because it is legally not allowed (for perhaps well justified reasons). Game development is the opposite of that, GenAI could take over and as long as ChatGPT can produce a fun game, it is allowed to do so.