3 ms·

I used to work for big game studios in the bay area, and changed careers to big tech because of this. Games don't bring in enough revenue to sustain employees

I used to work for big game studios in the bay area, and changed careers to big tech because of this. Games don't bring in enough revenue to sustain employees in high-cost-of-living areas ($7B revenue for EA versus $305B for Google in 2023). From the business perspective it doesn't make sense for a game company to pay SF Bay Area tech salaries when it's making so much less revenue, so the result is more and more game development shifts overseas. Then from the employee perspective, it's already a brutal nights-and-weekends industry. "Crunch time" is normal. If you add to that poor relative pay for where you live, it's just not worth it anymore to chase a dream you once had as a kid. I personally am much more satisfied with my life as a result of the shift. But it is a sad trend for the US.

bitmasher9 2y ago
As a consumer, how can I ethically purchase games in such a way that the developers can have a good life?
- pizzathyme 2y ago
  This is a very kind question. The long answer is I'm not sure. Crunch time is driven by the fact that making games is one of the coolest businesses you could be in, which means everyone wants to do it. Supply is overwhelming against limited demand and it's winner-take-most. There are hundreds of games released every day. In that environment, who rises to the top? It's the studios who are willing to make it their life's purpose to make the best game possible, which means 70+ hour weeks. What they produce is awe inspiring but it's a sweatshop. I literally interviewed once at a game studio that told me, "You will not do well here if you have a family." Kudos to them for being upfront about it. A friend who took their offer told me they expected him to work Thanksgiving and Christmas day.
  - bitmasher9 2y ago
    Is this also true of European and Japanese game studios?
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      EU will still crunch, but they have much better holiday scheduling. I was always jealous at Unity on how the EU branches would take an entire month vacation as mandated by their national law. Much harder to layoff but not impossible. EU's been hit a bit by the last year and a half as well. Japan is on a whole other level of "crunch" however. Not in the case that they rush last minute (but it's not unheard of, far from it), but in that the regular is 60 hours a week, along with any "workplace activities" that take place after work. They will almost never have layoffs in the tradiional sense due to their labor laws, but they have kind (very big severance) and creative (isolate you from the team to do useless busywork) ways to make people quit if pushed to that point.
- ChoHag 2y ago
  [dead]
- _aavaa_ 2y ago
  Look into the business practices of the companies that make the games and refuse to support those which perpetuate problems (looking at you Blizzard Activision).
- disambiguation 2y ago
  you can hire a personal at-home game developer that serves you fresh never-frozen artisanal games every week.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  you can't, to be frank. As a TL;DR: don't worry about saving the AAA or even AA productions. The biggest impact you can have is to buy indie games. And not just the few popular ones, really look into your favorite genre and seek out some solo/small team gems to pursue. Your $5-20 will go much much further there than $70 for any AAA GaaS. If comfortable, try to avoid Steam in lieu of other platforms so those platforms have a chance to flourish, since it'll let them grow and most other platforms take a much smaller cut than Steam; your dollar goes much further for devs on something like Itch.io, for example. ----------------------- Look at the level of scale between EA (who's about as far on the "unethical scale" as you can get) and even mid-tier tech companies. There's just too much money in factors like ads to ever bridge that gap with "just good games". That's why mobile makes more money than console/PC. There just aren't enough of the latter to support an entire studio whlie expecting each devs to have cushy 6 figure salaries. more napkin math: for a $60 game, every $100k/yr dev would need 2000 sales a year to break even on their labor. multiply it by 100* and that's 200k sales a year. add in platform cuts and health care and we're easily breaking 400k sales a year for this break even point. and of course we're talking about 4-5 years cycles of no game revenue, so you need 2m sales just to pay back the initial dev cost. There's simply no "ethical" way to reliable hit those kinds of figures. So outside of "making a good game", the "ehitcal" choices are: 1. Make games more expensive 2. Reduce platform cuts 3. Make games faster (aka, smaller and/or leaner, if we're talking ethically) 4. Reduce costs of living (which can help justify lower dev salaries since they have less expenses) 1) already happened with the $70 price increase, and that's still irritating to gamers despite being a mere 16% increase after 16 years (an increase that doesn't even keep up with inflation). 2) happens behind closed doors all the time with platform holders so that does help alleviate some of the sales needs. 3) isn't popular in AAA productions but a few (like Obsidian, in this article) do employ this strategy of making smaller games between the big releases. 4) is basically a pipedream that's far outside the industry, unless the industry starts hiring in lower CoL areas. But some of these do imply some grey area solutions: 5. make games with less people 6. make studios located in cheaper areas 5) is basically trying to happen right now with the same elephant in the room as the rest of tech: AI. Generative AI in the case of games. This can be exciting, but the way early adoption has happened so far isn't much better than all the lawsuits being brought forth due to OpenAI's reckless abandonment. Companies don't want to streamline their current talent, they want to replace them, and that only spells bad news if you don't like the current slop out there right now. It will get a lot worse before it gets better, and I can only hope that when the dust settles that there's at least some proper attribution solution (at a moral minimum, there'd be some sort of kickback/residual based on what the AI prompt sources to generate. But that's far from certain). 6) is the same. A great opportunity to not have this industry turn into Hollywood by expanding and nurturing talent nationwide or globally. But they aren't giving modest wages to lower CoL states, they are using it to drive costs down to salaries that high CoL states would barely be able to live on. There's So yeah, it's a lost cause beyond the fault of even the industry, let alone a single gamer. But 5) does have a healthy caveat: actually smaller but more tightly made games. AKA indie teams or studios. 1m sales may be a bust for a AAA title these days, but it'd be absolutely life changing for a team of 5-10 devs staying lean. So take some steps to at least explore your favorite genres past the most popular releases. Support smaller teams whose individual sale goes a lot further (even $5 for a team of 10 is a more money than $70 for a team of 500. And the former doesn't usually ask for more money unless it's a decent expansion). Follow their feeds and wishlist and comment about your excitement for interesting upcoming indies. You can't help everyone, but collectively more attention and demand to indie productions would at worst show a path as a side hustle for more potential developers. And as a maybe controversial piece of advice: try looking outside Steam as well. Steam has had a bit of an unhealthy counter effect as of late on indies, and their strategies make it clear that they are focusing on relieving AAA studios of platform cuts instead of smaller game. Basically the reverse model of what unity/unreal engine do with their compensation schemes. Many games are on Steam only, but it's another note of consideration that can put more money in an indie's hand. Itch IO has a "choose your own cut model" and its default cut is only 10%. GOG still has a 30% cut but they offer (or at least, used to) offer a few other payment options. *(so a sizeable but still "small studio", compared to the hundreds in a AAA title. I believe Destiny 2 had at least 600 devs on boat at one point)

bitmasher9 2y ago

As a consumer, how can I ethically purchase games in such a way that the developers can have a good life?

pizzathyme 2y ago
This is a very kind question. The long answer is I'm not sure. Crunch time is driven by the fact that making games is one of the coolest businesses you could be in, which means everyone wants to do it. Supply is overwhelming against limited demand and it's winner-take-most. There are hundreds of games released every day. In that environment, who rises to the top? It's the studios who are willing to make it their life's purpose to make the best game possible, which means 70+ hour weeks. What they produce is awe inspiring but it's a sweatshop. I literally interviewed once at a game studio that told me, "You will not do well here if you have a family." Kudos to them for being upfront about it. A friend who took their offer told me they expected him to work Thanksgiving and Christmas day.
- bitmasher9 2y ago
  Is this also true of European and Japanese game studios?
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    EU will still crunch, but they have much better holiday scheduling. I was always jealous at Unity on how the EU branches would take an entire month vacation as mandated by their national law. Much harder to layoff but not impossible. EU's been hit a bit by the last year and a half as well. Japan is on a whole other level of "crunch" however. Not in the case that they rush last minute (but it's not unheard of, far from it), but in that the regular is 60 hours a week, along with any "workplace activities" that take place after work. They will almost never have layoffs in the tradiional sense due to their labor laws, but they have kind (very big severance) and creative (isolate you from the team to do useless busywork) ways to make people quit if pushed to that point.
ChoHag 2y ago
[dead]
_aavaa_ 2y ago
Look into the business practices of the companies that make the games and refuse to support those which perpetuate problems (looking at you Blizzard Activision).
disambiguation 2y ago
you can hire a personal at-home game developer that serves you fresh never-frozen artisanal games every week.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
you can't, to be frank. As a TL;DR: don't worry about saving the AAA or even AA productions. The biggest impact you can have is to buy indie games. And not just the few popular ones, really look into your favorite genre and seek out some solo/small team gems to pursue. Your $5-20 will go much much further there than $70 for any AAA GaaS. If comfortable, try to avoid Steam in lieu of other platforms so those platforms have a chance to flourish, since it'll let them grow and most other platforms take a much smaller cut than Steam; your dollar goes much further for devs on something like Itch.io, for example. ----------------------- Look at the level of scale between EA (who's about as far on the "unethical scale" as you can get) and even mid-tier tech companies. There's just too much money in factors like ads to ever bridge that gap with "just good games". That's why mobile makes more money than console/PC. There just aren't enough of the latter to support an entire studio whlie expecting each devs to have cushy 6 figure salaries. more napkin math: for a $60 game, every $100k/yr dev would need 2000 sales a year to break even on their labor. multiply it by 100* and that's 200k sales a year. add in platform cuts and health care and we're easily breaking 400k sales a year for this break even point. and of course we're talking about 4-5 years cycles of no game revenue, so you need 2m sales just to pay back the initial dev cost. There's simply no "ethical" way to reliable hit those kinds of figures. So outside of "making a good game", the "ehitcal" choices are: 1. Make games more expensive 2. Reduce platform cuts 3. Make games faster (aka, smaller and/or leaner, if we're talking ethically) 4. Reduce costs of living (which can help justify lower dev salaries since they have less expenses) 1) already happened with the $70 price increase, and that's still irritating to gamers despite being a mere 16% increase after 16 years (an increase that doesn't even keep up with inflation). 2) happens behind closed doors all the time with platform holders so that does help alleviate some of the sales needs. 3) isn't popular in AAA productions but a few (like Obsidian, in this article) do employ this strategy of making smaller games between the big releases. 4) is basically a pipedream that's far outside the industry, unless the industry starts hiring in lower CoL areas. But some of these do imply some grey area solutions: 5. make games with less people 6. make studios located in cheaper areas 5) is basically trying to happen right now with the same elephant in the room as the rest of tech: AI. Generative AI in the case of games. This can be exciting, but the way early adoption has happened so far isn't much better than all the lawsuits being brought forth due to OpenAI's reckless abandonment. Companies don't want to streamline their current talent, they want to replace them, and that only spells bad news if you don't like the current slop out there right now. It will get a lot worse before it gets better, and I can only hope that when the dust settles that there's at least some proper attribution solution (at a moral minimum, there'd be some sort of kickback/residual based on what the AI prompt sources to generate. But that's far from certain). 6) is the same. A great opportunity to not have this industry turn into Hollywood by expanding and nurturing talent nationwide or globally. But they aren't giving modest wages to lower CoL states, they are using it to drive costs down to salaries that high CoL states would barely be able to live on. There's So yeah, it's a lost cause beyond the fault of even the industry, let alone a single gamer. But 5) does have a healthy caveat: actually smaller but more tightly made games. AKA indie teams or studios. 1m sales may be a bust for a AAA title these days, but it'd be absolutely life changing for a team of 5-10 devs staying lean. So take some steps to at least explore your favorite genres past the most popular releases. Support smaller teams whose individual sale goes a lot further (even $5 for a team of 10 is a more money than $70 for a team of 500. And the former doesn't usually ask for more money unless it's a decent expansion). Follow their feeds and wishlist and comment about your excitement for interesting upcoming indies. You can't help everyone, but collectively more attention and demand to indie productions would at worst show a path as a side hustle for more potential developers. And as a maybe controversial piece of advice: try looking outside Steam as well. Steam has had a bit of an unhealthy counter effect as of late on indies, and their strategies make it clear that they are focusing on relieving AAA studios of platform cuts instead of smaller game. Basically the reverse model of what unity/unreal engine do with their compensation schemes. Many games are on Steam only, but it's another note of consideration that can put more money in an indie's hand. Itch IO has a "choose your own cut model" and its default cut is only 10%. GOG still has a 30% cut but they offer (or at least, used to) offer a few other payment options. *(so a sizeable but still "small studio", compared to the hundreds in a AAA title. I believe Destiny 2 had at least 600 devs on boat at one point)