I was six years in consoles, five in a big-but-cool corporation on desktop apps, and the last year in web. - Game developers are high-energy and are there beca

I was six years in consoles, five in a big-but-cool corporation on desktop apps, and the last year in web. - Game developers are high-energy and are there because they really, really want to be doing their job. They could make more money doing something less sexy, so they're self-selected enthusiasts. - My game projects tended to be under one year, with high pressure, clear goals and a definite deadline. This, and the general culture of the industry, encouraged lots of crunch time, and made any code philosophy other than churning out code asap hard to adopt. - Driven by both their motivation and the project conditions, good game programmers are awesome at creating a lot of decent code very fast. So, judged purely on coding game programmers tend to be pretty strong. The trade-off is that there are a lot of skills they don't have to develop that you need in the web world. The whole mindset of everything (apart from the HTML rendering) running on a machine you control changes things fundamentally: - It's far easier to deploy fast and deal with problems as they arise, rather than coding and testing defensively to avoid them in the first place - Optimization is a completely different beast. You now control the hardware side of the equation too, so the old habits of improving performance can lead you astray Anyway, this isn't as clear-cut as I'm painting it (I'm sure MMORPG guys have a lot more in common with web developers for example), but who's 'better' definitely depends on which dimensions you're looking at.