5 ms·

Is it as simple as supply/demand? People love games and game-loving developers are willing to take lower compensation to be in the industry? As a former obsesse

Is it as simple as supply/demand? People love games and game-loving developers are willing to take lower compensation to be in the industry? As a former obsessed gamer, I remember in my 20s I almost would have been willing to work at iD Software without pay if they let me.

agentgt 5mo ago
I think it is mostly just margins. Sure there are lots of people willing to work for no very little money for game dev but I would say there are tons of people willing to work for very little money for FAANG companies because they want that on their resume. In fact since we are on hackernews that is kind of thing people wanting to be entrepreneurs do. Work at recognizable big tech company for a few years. Leave to be a founder of a startup. Investors ... well that guy came from google they must know what they are doing etc (the irony is they probably have less of the skills to start a company going that path).
- yCombLinks 5mo ago
  They want it on their resume primarily to make more money and have a better career in terms of getting hired, etc. Very different motivation. They'd only work at a FAANG for free long enough to get that bump. Game devs however would work for many years underpaid because they like what they're creating.
  - agentgt 5mo ago
    ~~Perhaps now especially since these companies are predominately hiring oversees contractors but circa 2009-2015 when I was around entrepreneurs and startups this was discussed.~~ ~~Ultimately the goal is the same: make more money. So I disagree the motivation is "very different" its just a lot harder now to do a startup.~~ You kept editing your comment so disregard the above. I misread it the first time and then it changed. I left my response thats makes no sense now.
    - yCombLinks 5mo ago
      Sorry, I didn't make the point I was aiming for initially
      - agentgt 5mo ago
        Your new point is excellent btw. I should have considered that. I also hope it doesn't sound like I don't care for these developers who are being taken advantage of. They should be compensated fairly for their work. EDIT I should add why I think it is a great point especially since I make recruiting software. The greatest increases in salary for most people is done by switching companies or jobs. If you don't want to leave the company because you really like what you do it would skew it so that salaries are lower.
  - deanCommie 5mo ago
    You're not wrong, but it's also so sad. FAANG used to be the _dream_. Change the world. Work on groundbreaking tech. Solve harder problems than anywhere else. Get Paid incredibly well. Then I guess a generation focused exclusively on that last part flooded the zone. I still believe that The Great Resignation of 2021 did more harm to our industry than COVID or any interest rate or VC changes. It polluted the brains of most of the people in our industry from a missionary mindset to a mercenary, and it decimated big company's established cultural memory all to prop up a bunch of unicorns who will probably all slowly die over the next decade. So now half of the people can't get a job, and the half that can are miserable. This was true BEFORE AI.
    - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
      Interesting choice to blame FAANG demise on its workers
      - zem 5mo ago
        I was going to post a more extended rant but really yeah, this says it all
      - nixon_why69 5mo ago
        Its not like the CEOs unilaterally said "we want to suck now". It's the cumulative effect of many people optimizing for the promotion process within the company and then coaching their mentees to do the same.
        keybored 5mo ago
        Are not the CEOs responsible for cumulative/emergent effects?
        nixon_why69 5mo ago
        They should be but its very hard. It's a culture and you can't exactly order a chain of command that grew into it and hold all the levers to just he different. I'm not lionizing Sundar Pichai here, just saying the cumulative attitudes of 10k L7/L8 is really what sets the culture.
  - tcfhgj 5mo ago
    sounds very much like open source maintainers too
- Negitivefrags 5mo ago
  People haven’t responded to your very first point, and I want to really stress it because I don’t think most people really get it. Margins. Game development doesn’t pay more because game development companies can’t afford to pay more. Sure, an individual game dev company may make a lot due to the hit driven nature of the field, but the totality of the market simply makes less money per developer than big tech does. In order for that to change, the market has to increase in size by appealing to a more casual audience, or existing gamers have to pay more. Not something I think most gamers would like. And these are the people who the workforce of game developers form from.
  - appreciatorBus 5mo ago
    > In order for that to change, the market has to increase in size by appealing to a more casual audience, or existing gamers have to pay more. The fun part of all this is that when union demands start forcing the industry in the opposite direction - higher cost, higher prices, smaller market. In a sane world, we would connect this, but in this world, we will just blame management. The union will forever have an invincible PR shield no matter how crazy the demand.
    - andybak 5mo ago
      In what world are unions never criticised? I'm in the UK and they are often reviled in the press and among people who don't work in a unionised sector. America has an even stronger tradition of anti-union feeling (maybe partly due to historic links between unions and organised crime but also because the US has often had a stronger collectivisation than most European countries - consider that the political centre in the US would be considered into right wing in most Western countries on most issues)
    - Scaled 5mo ago
      While I fundamentally agree with the concern about unions raising costs in a market where most titles cannot absorb them, GTA/Rockstar definitely can. Especially since the union is fighting for basic quality of life like no crunch instead of (for now at least) increased pay. I am generally not prounion but crunch -- especially at studios that are guaranteed to be profitable (GTA) -- needs to be curbed.
- fny 5mo ago
  You have the causality inverted. People want big tech on their resume because it makes them look qualified. People with top qualifications work at big tech because of pay. If low quality engineers worked in big tech, it wouldn't be a coveted qualification.
  - agentgt 5mo ago
    The causality of what? I'm probably missing something obvious here. The cause of people getting paid less in game development I said has to do with margins (although I now think there is more to it than that). > People want big tech on their resume because it makes them look qualified. I think I said that? > People with top qualifications work at big tech because of pay. Actually I am not sure if that is true. I think top qualification people work at these places because of other reasons than just money. I'm talking Carmack working at Facebook for example is because of more possibilities and less the pay. Like FB is we have this really smart team for you and this tech for you and you can make your own products etc. After all there is academia and that mostly pays shit and plenty of qualified people there. > If low quality engineers worked in big tech, it wouldn't be a coveted qualification. And I think that is probably happening more now. The 10x developer was kind of a myth. More people for less money these days particularly with AI is becoming more of the norm.
    - cloverich 5mo ago
      Carmack level folks are the exception. the vast majority of faang interest is money. In fact if youve been in dev long enough, youd see even the makeup of the tyipical eng has changed, there are quite a few normies in the field these days, many of whom im not sure even like coding at all. Its seen as a reliably high paying field worth steering towards regardless of interest. It has lately reminded me of the kinds of people id see in medicine. smart, capable, not particularly interested in the field as such.
- cloverich 5mo ago
  begs the question why there is a good supply of eng on low margin business though, given the skills transfer cleanly to higher margin businesses.
petterroea 5mo ago
I think this is part of it. I have heard some people turn to prostitution to afford working for the mickey mouse company in Tokyo. Second hand accounts. People go to insane lengths just to work at their dream place.
slg 5mo ago
All else being equal, the cooler a job is, the less it will pay. It's why unions have been so successful in other "cool jobs" like professional athlete and working on movies and TV. There are some people who would do those jobs for free which completely destroys the market power of most individuals requiring collective action to prevent exploitation.
- charcircuit 5mo ago
  Working for the amount of money one agrees to is not exploitation.
  - vouwfietsman 5mo ago
    It would be prudent if you would dig a bit deeper into how unions came to be. Long story short, capitalism can easily create situations where you agree to be exploited to some degree, to avoid being exploited to another, worse, degree.
  - wat10000 5mo ago
    "Agrees" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Agreeing to $100/hour because you think it's fair and agreeing to $1/hour because you're starving may both qualify, but they're quite different.
  - antiframe 5mo ago
    That would be true if there weren't a power and information imbalance.
    - simondotau 5mo ago
      What would be the downside of all salaries in all corporations being pseudonymously public?
javier123454321 5mo ago
It is actually quite a common occurrence in the arts and other creative fields, where there is a level of idealization for the work in itself outside of the remuneration. Musicians, architects, illustrators, cinematographers are all dealing with the same thing the more the work resembles their ideal type of artistic work, the less to pay usually.
- JadoJodo 5mo ago
  I would guess a big part of this is because the art _itself_ is a form of compensation: Artists have a passion for the end result in a way that organizations (e.g., corporations, collectives, movements, etc.) harness and take advantage of in lieu of financial compensation.
  - mikepurvis 5mo ago
    This is usually framed in terms of greedy corporations cynically exploiting young workers, but having interviewed for a Sony studio myself a few years ago (and ultimately going back to my native robotics field for almost exactly double the pay), I think there is something tangible about the compensation that is working on something normal people encounter, especially in the leisure spaces of their lives. It may not pay the rent or put food on the table, but seeing your name in the credits of a movie your friends watched or a game they played is a perk that has real value. Writing a technical book rarely pays the bills either but it's the same story of getting to see your name on the shelf, and maaaybe it leads to getting on a conference panel or something at some point but really you're doing a lot of labour for far below minimum wage just to be able to say you did (as I did for Apress when I was 20 years old... and it landed me an internship at Google, so there you go).
    - jakeydus 5mo ago
      I've always said that being an engineer is a classic choose two out of three options situation. You can: - be well compensated - work on something interesting - work on something ethical Obviously there's the rare unicorn out there where you get all three, but those are the exception, not the rule.
paulddraper 5mo ago
This is the answer to all price questions, including this one. There are a large number of people that are passionate about games. Moreso than say, ERP software. And this holds true relative to demand (gaming is ~$300B/year globally). --- Additionally, most software engineering is not FAANG. That is the upper end of it.
spike021 5mo ago
as a student back in 2012, the CS program i was in was mostly people who wanted to make games. that's just one person's POV but most people i knew at the time weren't really into anything else in software.
Sharlin 5mo ago
That’s exactly what supply and demand is. They didn’t let you work for them because they had a huge pool of candidates to pick from. It doesn’t matter what the cause of the s/d imbalance is.
Agentlien 5mo ago
This is why, after spending my whole youth learning programming to become a game developer I had a crisis of faith and spent a few years working on something else (surgical training simulations) after graduating. I had done summer jobs at a game studio and all I saw was the leadership treating people like shit, paying almost nothing, and then laughing about how easy it was to got away with - they even did so towards me in one breath then offered me a full time contract in the next. However, I joined EA in 2015 and have been in game development since. They offered really good pay and now at my current job I even get great pay and no overtime.

agentgt 5mo ago

I think it is mostly just margins. Sure there are lots of people willing to work for no very little money for game dev but I would say there are tons of people willing to work for very little money for FAANG companies because they want that on their resume. In fact since we are on hackernews that is kind of thing people wanting to be entrepreneurs do. Work at recognizable big tech company for a few years. Leave to be a founder of a startup. Investors ... well that guy came from google they must know what they are doing etc (the irony is they probably have less of the skills to start a company going that path).

yCombLinks 5mo ago
They want it on their resume primarily to make more money and have a better career in terms of getting hired, etc. Very different motivation. They'd only work at a FAANG for free long enough to get that bump. Game devs however would work for many years underpaid because they like what they're creating.
- agentgt 5mo ago
  ~~Perhaps now especially since these companies are predominately hiring oversees contractors but circa 2009-2015 when I was around entrepreneurs and startups this was discussed.~~ ~~Ultimately the goal is the same: make more money. So I disagree the motivation is "very different" its just a lot harder now to do a startup.~~ You kept editing your comment so disregard the above. I misread it the first time and then it changed. I left my response thats makes no sense now.
  - yCombLinks 5mo ago
    Sorry, I didn't make the point I was aiming for initially
    - agentgt 5mo ago
      Your new point is excellent btw. I should have considered that. I also hope it doesn't sound like I don't care for these developers who are being taken advantage of. They should be compensated fairly for their work. EDIT I should add why I think it is a great point especially since I make recruiting software. The greatest increases in salary for most people is done by switching companies or jobs. If you don't want to leave the company because you really like what you do it would skew it so that salaries are lower.
- deanCommie 5mo ago
  You're not wrong, but it's also so sad. FAANG used to be the _dream_. Change the world. Work on groundbreaking tech. Solve harder problems than anywhere else. Get Paid incredibly well. Then I guess a generation focused exclusively on that last part flooded the zone. I still believe that The Great Resignation of 2021 did more harm to our industry than COVID or any interest rate or VC changes. It polluted the brains of most of the people in our industry from a missionary mindset to a mercenary, and it decimated big company's established cultural memory all to prop up a bunch of unicorns who will probably all slowly die over the next decade. So now half of the people can't get a job, and the half that can are miserable. This was true BEFORE AI.
  - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
    Interesting choice to blame FAANG demise on its workers
    - zem 5mo ago
      I was going to post a more extended rant but really yeah, this says it all
    - nixon_why69 5mo ago
      Its not like the CEOs unilaterally said "we want to suck now". It's the cumulative effect of many people optimizing for the promotion process within the company and then coaching their mentees to do the same.
      - keybored 5mo ago
        Are not the CEOs responsible for cumulative/emergent effects?
        nixon_why69 5mo ago
        They should be but its very hard. It's a culture and you can't exactly order a chain of command that grew into it and hold all the levers to just he different. I'm not lionizing Sundar Pichai here, just saying the cumulative attitudes of 10k L7/L8 is really what sets the culture.
- tcfhgj 5mo ago
  sounds very much like open source maintainers too
Negitivefrags 5mo ago
People haven’t responded to your very first point, and I want to really stress it because I don’t think most people really get it. Margins. Game development doesn’t pay more because game development companies can’t afford to pay more. Sure, an individual game dev company may make a lot due to the hit driven nature of the field, but the totality of the market simply makes less money per developer than big tech does. In order for that to change, the market has to increase in size by appealing to a more casual audience, or existing gamers have to pay more. Not something I think most gamers would like. And these are the people who the workforce of game developers form from.
- appreciatorBus 5mo ago
  > In order for that to change, the market has to increase in size by appealing to a more casual audience, or existing gamers have to pay more. The fun part of all this is that when union demands start forcing the industry in the opposite direction - higher cost, higher prices, smaller market. In a sane world, we would connect this, but in this world, we will just blame management. The union will forever have an invincible PR shield no matter how crazy the demand.
  - andybak 5mo ago
    In what world are unions never criticised? I'm in the UK and they are often reviled in the press and among people who don't work in a unionised sector. America has an even stronger tradition of anti-union feeling (maybe partly due to historic links between unions and organised crime but also because the US has often had a stronger collectivisation than most European countries - consider that the political centre in the US would be considered into right wing in most Western countries on most issues)
  - Scaled 5mo ago
    While I fundamentally agree with the concern about unions raising costs in a market where most titles cannot absorb them, GTA/Rockstar definitely can. Especially since the union is fighting for basic quality of life like no crunch instead of (for now at least) increased pay. I am generally not prounion but crunch -- especially at studios that are guaranteed to be profitable (GTA) -- needs to be curbed.
fny 5mo ago
You have the causality inverted. People want big tech on their resume because it makes them look qualified. People with top qualifications work at big tech because of pay. If low quality engineers worked in big tech, it wouldn't be a coveted qualification.
- agentgt 5mo ago
  The causality of what? I'm probably missing something obvious here. The cause of people getting paid less in game development I said has to do with margins (although I now think there is more to it than that). > People want big tech on their resume because it makes them look qualified. I think I said that? > People with top qualifications work at big tech because of pay. Actually I am not sure if that is true. I think top qualification people work at these places because of other reasons than just money. I'm talking Carmack working at Facebook for example is because of more possibilities and less the pay. Like FB is we have this really smart team for you and this tech for you and you can make your own products etc. After all there is academia and that mostly pays shit and plenty of qualified people there. > If low quality engineers worked in big tech, it wouldn't be a coveted qualification. And I think that is probably happening more now. The 10x developer was kind of a myth. More people for less money these days particularly with AI is becoming more of the norm.
  - cloverich 5mo ago
    Carmack level folks are the exception. the vast majority of faang interest is money. In fact if youve been in dev long enough, youd see even the makeup of the tyipical eng has changed, there are quite a few normies in the field these days, many of whom im not sure even like coding at all. Its seen as a reliably high paying field worth steering towards regardless of interest. It has lately reminded me of the kinds of people id see in medicine. smart, capable, not particularly interested in the field as such.
cloverich 5mo ago
begs the question why there is a good supply of eng on low margin business though, given the skills transfer cleanly to higher margin businesses.

petterroea 5mo ago

I think this is part of it. I have heard some people turn to prostitution to afford working for the mickey mouse company in Tokyo. Second hand accounts. People go to insane lengths just to work at their dream place.

slg 5mo ago

All else being equal, the cooler a job is, the less it will pay. It's why unions have been so successful in other "cool jobs" like professional athlete and working on movies and TV. There are some people who would do those jobs for free which completely destroys the market power of most individuals requiring collective action to prevent exploitation.

charcircuit 5mo ago
Working for the amount of money one agrees to is not exploitation.
- vouwfietsman 5mo ago
  It would be prudent if you would dig a bit deeper into how unions came to be. Long story short, capitalism can easily create situations where you agree to be exploited to some degree, to avoid being exploited to another, worse, degree.
- wat10000 5mo ago
  "Agrees" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Agreeing to $100/hour because you think it's fair and agreeing to $1/hour because you're starving may both qualify, but they're quite different.
- antiframe 5mo ago
  That would be true if there weren't a power and information imbalance.
  - simondotau 5mo ago
    What would be the downside of all salaries in all corporations being pseudonymously public?

javier123454321 5mo ago

It is actually quite a common occurrence in the arts and other creative fields, where there is a level of idealization for the work in itself outside of the remuneration. Musicians, architects, illustrators, cinematographers are all dealing with the same thing the more the work resembles their ideal type of artistic work, the less to pay usually.

JadoJodo 5mo ago
I would guess a big part of this is because the art _itself_ is a form of compensation: Artists have a passion for the end result in a way that organizations (e.g., corporations, collectives, movements, etc.) harness and take advantage of in lieu of financial compensation.
- mikepurvis 5mo ago
  This is usually framed in terms of greedy corporations cynically exploiting young workers, but having interviewed for a Sony studio myself a few years ago (and ultimately going back to my native robotics field for almost exactly double the pay), I think there is something tangible about the compensation that is working on something normal people encounter, especially in the leisure spaces of their lives. It may not pay the rent or put food on the table, but seeing your name in the credits of a movie your friends watched or a game they played is a perk that has real value. Writing a technical book rarely pays the bills either but it's the same story of getting to see your name on the shelf, and maaaybe it leads to getting on a conference panel or something at some point but really you're doing a lot of labour for far below minimum wage just to be able to say you did (as I did for Apress when I was 20 years old... and it landed me an internship at Google, so there you go).
  - jakeydus 5mo ago
    I've always said that being an engineer is a classic choose two out of three options situation. You can: - be well compensated - work on something interesting - work on something ethical Obviously there's the rare unicorn out there where you get all three, but those are the exception, not the rule.

paulddraper 5mo ago

This is the answer to all price questions, including this one. There are a large number of people that are passionate about games. Moreso than say, ERP software. And this holds true relative to demand (gaming is ~$300B/year globally). --- Additionally, most software engineering is not FAANG. That is the upper end of it.

spike021 5mo ago

as a student back in 2012, the CS program i was in was mostly people who wanted to make games. that's just one person's POV but most people i knew at the time weren't really into anything else in software.

Sharlin 5mo ago

That’s exactly what supply and demand is. They didn’t let you work for them because they had a huge pool of candidates to pick from. It doesn’t matter what the cause of the s/d imbalance is.

Agentlien 5mo ago

This is why, after spending my whole youth learning programming to become a game developer I had a crisis of faith and spent a few years working on something else (surgical training simulations) after graduating. I had done summer jobs at a game studio and all I saw was the leadership treating people like shit, paying almost nothing, and then laughing about how easy it was to got away with - they even did so towards me in one breath then offered me a full time contract in the next. However, I joined EA in 2015 and have been in game development since. They offered really good pay and now at my current job I even get great pay and no overtime.