5/29/2026 at 3:58:26 PM
Can anyone comment on why "big video game" dev pay has lagged "big tech" pay so badly? Ostensibly they are doing remarkably similar engineering problem solving, so why is there such a disparity?by WarmWash
5/29/2026 at 6:20:11 PM
Game dev here, have worked on AAA and indie.First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. You need a lot more creativity and ingenuity to solve the unusual problems you run into in gaming.
From there, as others have said, it's a simple supply and demand issue. Nowadays I am a university professor, nearly every student who comes in wants to pursue one of the three fields: cybersecurity, video gaming, or recently ML/AI.
This shouldn't come as a surprise, they want to work on the things that influenced them and shaped their experiences so far. There's an absolute over supply of students who want to make video games.
Gaming, like most of entertainment, is a passion-driven industry. You trade good salary for your name in the credits. You trade nights, hobbies, marriages, and your health for this opportunity. That is unless you reach that lofty 1% of developers who are too valuable to be fired.
Not all areas of gaming are like this. Gambling, like working on slot/pachinko machines, pays very well and has pretty realistic work-life balance. However every student I've talked to about this has universally said "no I don't want to make slot machines. I only want to work on GTA/Stardew Valley/Hollow Knight/Fortnite."
There's seriously no shortage of starry-eyed students who are willing to accept minimum wage to solve SDE3 level problems. I was one of them once.
by sonzohan
5/29/2026 at 9:39:47 PM
> First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech.Yes. Having done everything from mainframe OS internals to proof of correctness to autonomous vehicles, video games are the most difficult.
At the beginning, game dev looks easy, because the tools are good and modern hardware is very capable. But as you approach a big, highly detailed, photorealistic world, the easy approaches hit a performance wall. Then the necessary optimizations become insanely complex. That's the tyranny of the frame rate. That's why I've complained about game engines in Rust. Everybody writes My First Game Engine, then hits the wall about two years in.
The metaverse problem is even worse. All the problems of game dev, plus the problems of user-created content and large scale. With all the effort and money put into metaverses, none emerged that worked as well and looked as good as an AAA game title from the GTA V era. Roblox, Improbable, and Second Life are as good as it got. You'd think there would be some good examples still around, with small user bases, but there are not. There are a whole range of problems only metaverses have, and some of them are unsolved. For commercial games, much of the work takes place during level building and optimization. Unreal Engine Editor does much of the heavy lifting. Metaverses don't have that option.
The total failure of the metaverse industry comes partly from this. It's hard to do, and the problem was underestimated. Mostly by the people who really just wanted to sell their crap NFTs and coins.
The people and wage problem comes from too many people wanting to make games. It's like Hollywood. If you've spend any time around there, you've met the actress/model/waitress types. The male version has stand up comedy levels of ego. That pushes wages down.
by Animats
5/29/2026 at 10:19:31 PM
> You'd think there would be some good examples still around, with small users bases, but there are not.Wouldn't VRChat qualify?
by xg15
5/29/2026 at 10:53:47 PM
VRchat is impressive. It predates the metaverse boom, and it's not a big-world system. The metaverse was supposed to be like Ready Player One, but we didn't get there.by Animats
5/30/2026 at 1:29:41 AM
This is very interesting, what makes video game engineering so difficult?by ziofill
5/30/2026 at 1:55:04 AM
The amount of things you're trying to simulate within the the performance contraints (games push computers to their absolute limits).An example - a 3d humanoid character. You need code to manage the mesh, the animation (probably skeletal), the animations themselves, all the blending logic, probably specialised code and data for facial animations, and then you need to make sure all of that can mesh with both input driven locomotion and AI driven locomotion - and that's just one problem domain.
And I'm grossly oversimplifying what's involved even in that particular area.
by abcde666777
5/30/2026 at 3:45:24 AM
>> games push computers to their absolute limitsThe overwhelming majority of games actually don’t. Even 5+ year old rigs can run most modern games just fine.
by enraged_camel
5/30/2026 at 6:45:48 AM
> Even 5+ year old rigs can run most modern games just fineAI-hardware demand is responsible for slowing down the AAA graphics frame-rate treadmill. Back when Nvidia and AMD were releasing improved mid-range consumer GPUs at a steady clip, there was incessant pressure on AAA games to have ever-increasing frame-rates and "photorealistic" graphic-fidelity. Making a game update at 144Hz at 4k resolution/max graphics quality, with no upscaling shortcuts would be a challenging problem, were it a common target.
In an alternate universe where the LLM boom didn't happen, we probably would have 24GB midrange GPUs (and 32GB/48GB Nvidia 5090 Ti), allowing for humongous textures, and likely games rendering at 8k, which 5+ y.o. rigs would struggle with except at low-quality settings.
by overfeed
5/30/2026 at 1:43:45 PM
Not on max quality. They can just run the game.by lobocinza
5/30/2026 at 2:33:12 AM
And many a game developer doesn't have to write any of this because it already is commodity software.by justinhj
5/30/2026 at 6:11:09 AM
AHahahahah.Yeah that's other part. What was PhD level computer graphics becomes table stakes a few years later and not only do you have to do that, but you have to top it a few years later.
Oh and all of these systems have to be aware of each other, because the higher fidelity they become, the harder it is to keep the seams hidden, because the seam between them become more jarring.
Sure, you have skeletal bone animation and all that stuff in 2003, but do your characters adapt their footstep placement to the terrain height? Does the run animation blend smoothly between states? Oh it blends smoothly but now player inputs feel unresponsive because you had the clever idea to make it inertial? Oh now do it all over a network at minimum latency because esports are a hundred million dollar industry.
by kaibee
6/1/2026 at 4:27:42 PM
It depends on what you're comparing to. Most game devs have no idea the complexity of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Maps, Search, etc... Sure, compared to a CRUD app, games are generally more complex. Compared to those others they aren't even close.by socalgal2
5/30/2026 at 4:23:23 PM
It's a highly competitive field in which edge is sometimes obtained by better code, so everyone is constantly outdoing each other with new tricks.by mike_hearn
5/30/2026 at 2:45:47 PM
The irresistible temptation to add more.by DonHopkins
6/1/2026 at 7:56:14 AM
> At the beginning, game dev looks easy, because the tools are good and modern hardware is very capable. But as you approach a big, highly detailed, photorealistic world, the easy approaches hit a performance wall. Then the necessary optimizations become insanely complex. That's the tyranny of the frame rate.This is really a self inflicted problem though because game developers insist on making easily marketed games (=pretty screenshots) over fun ones. You don't need insane optimizations to make the next Minecraft or whatever. And let's be honest, most games run like dogshit because they leave very easy optimization opportunities like unaddressed.
by account42
5/30/2026 at 2:22:34 PM
Roblox does not have a small userbase all kids are on itby conceptme
5/29/2026 at 11:39:44 PM
As a former game dev who later got a PhD in CS, I can say I definitely did the equivalent of research as part of my job: I had to solve tough new problems that no one else was and verify they worked better than existing approaches. It's definitely more difficult than anything I worked on in industry and was certainly not paid commensurate with the skill required.Now I've branched off on my own as I've been disillusioned with academia as well. Can't win'em all.
by nsagent
5/30/2026 at 12:34:20 AM
Former gamedev here. This matches my experience. However, working in the games industry from 2000-2011 did wonders for my ability to thrive in big tech. It is easy mode compared to games.by cmpxchg8b
5/30/2026 at 6:35:34 AM
i spent 2 years learning c by fucking with carmacks idtech3 engine. game dev is incredible. i found myself even in such an old engine in awe of the incredibly creative ways problems are solved to get things drawn on screen, the event journals and everything that marry it together, the client server architectures... bruh game dev is next level.* this doesnt even include graphics programmers who are also awesome. and are just a different breed than i am, for whatever reason my brain just won't process the world of graphics pipelines
by trueno
5/30/2026 at 1:19:02 AM
I work in the slot game industry. Plenty of ex-video game devs in this space. Much better work-life balance, but it's very clearly not the same as making video games.by arsenide
5/30/2026 at 5:13:22 AM
There's also the moral factor, but I've definitely considered switching in the past should money ever be a problem for me.by rf15
5/29/2026 at 6:52:44 PM
I'm the opposite. BigCorp distributed systems guy.I'd agree with all of this from what I've seen though. The problems that some of my buddies solved straight out of college, while very different than 'hard problems' at bigcorp, are... hard.
One buddy ended up moving to the worst of both worlds... backend infra for a large video game and ended up getting video game salary for bigcorp distributed systems problems.
by cheeze
5/29/2026 at 7:14:30 PM
Do you tend to see a high drop out rate or general dissatisfaction from graduates when they come to the realization that making a game is a very different experience than playing the games?by al_borland
5/29/2026 at 7:50:58 PM
Dissatisfaction yes, although it doesn't manifest how you'd expect.It comes in the form not so much in dropouts, but in bad course feedback and bad professor reviews.
"The professor made the class unfun."
"The professor said she's made games but clearly has never done that before with how she taught the class"
I'm a woman so, unsurprisingly, I experience a fair amount of misogyny from students in the class who have never made a game nor have they worked in industry but believe they know how it works.
by sonzohan
5/30/2026 at 4:52:23 PM
Calling your students misogynists is a shamefully harsh attack on them without any evidence to back it up. That feedback is exactly what a male teacher would get if he had the same career history as you.You say in a post below that your total games industry experience was a single internship at Blizzard and then a second stint where you "quickly realized" you didn't want to be a games dev at all, and went back into academia where you have been ever since. You say you made a game as part of your PhD, but it's actually a speech therapy program you describe as research. There's nothing wrong with that project for what it is, but your students aren't criticizing you because you're a woman, they're saying they wanted a teacher who spent time in the games industry making the sort of games they themselves would play.
I wouldn't bother pointing this contradiction out normally, but it's just so socially destructive to ask students for feedback and then attack them with the nastiest accusation you have access to, just because they requested a more experienced teacher. Poor kids! It's this kind of thing that results in recommendations to just avoid university entirely. Why sign up for being abused by a teacher like that?
by mike_hearn
5/30/2026 at 9:18:21 PM
> You say in a post below that your total games industry experience was a single internship at Blizzard and then a second stint where you "quickly realized" you didn't want to be a games dev at allThat is not my entire games experience. I have 15 years total, spanning Game Master, lead gameplay engineer, game engineering director, and CTO. I was asked my route to academia, not my entire Gaming Industry CV.
> they're saying they wanted a teacher who spent time in the games industry making the sort of games they themselves would play.
Nearly all of them have played games I've worked on, and can even find my name in the credits.
> Calling your students misogynists is a shamefully harsh attack on them without any evidence to back it up
You're going to make a bunch of assumptions based on a summary of my academic career and then try to insist that misogyny doesn't exist in tech?
by sonzohan
5/31/2026 at 2:39:53 PM
Yes, I've never seen any misogyny in tech, if anything it's the other way around where men are told there are too many of them and their employer would prefer more women. But my criticism of your post isn't related to you being a woman, it's to do with you immediately leaping to the worst possible interpretation of your student feedback. Why assume bad faith immediately? Where's the evidence to support that? Do you just assume any negative feedback always has a hidden agenda?Look - you say you have made games, and that your students have all played games where they could find your name in the credits. You also get feedback that your students don't believe you. This is a weird problem to have and should be trivial to fix if true. Just... boot up the games and show them where you're credited as the lead gameplay engineer? What do they say when you do that?
by mike_hearn
5/29/2026 at 8:03:52 PM
I guess because they also learn there’s still plenty of money to be made in other engineering domains.And to be honest, I think games are a good stepping stone towards a career in software engineering / computer science. Especially back in the day when getting a game to run required you to mess around with the computer haha
by Insanity
5/29/2026 at 9:14:56 PM
My first real interaction with a computer in any technical way was trying to get Age of Mythology to work after I lost my activation key. I won't say that I miss those experiences, but they were foundational as h*ck for me.by jakeydus
5/29/2026 at 7:25:01 PM
My first AAA game industry boss said to me only 10% of people make it 10 years in games. This has been, if anything, optimistic, with there being a sharp drop-off at 2~5 years.(And in indie it's way worse, it's more like 1% making it one year)
by Scaled
5/29/2026 at 8:23:33 PM
I mean, when you're getting paid 40-60% for doing more complex work than app/web development...yeah, the drop-off is almost inevitable. Eventually people (unless they just really love making games) just go "f this, my career is more important".If you wanna do low-level code, you can go into embedded, sponsored OSI-companies, Microsoft, etc and get paid the same to more than gamedev with 10% of the stress and no crunch. If you wanna get paid much more and do more "vibe"/fun coding, you can go into app/web dev. If you want stability, you go into fintech/medtech/onsite/etc.
Gamedev offers the worst of all worlds and then constantly posits "why is there so much turn over?"...because you made the industry suck to work in.
by deaddodo
5/30/2026 at 2:55:28 AM
Why write a line of code for a car's fuel injection and go back home at 5pm to your wife and kids when you could stay overnight and be hacking on an ill-designed networking protocol for an AAA game while eating 5% discount cheetos?by avadodin
5/31/2026 at 8:29:53 AM
> because you made the industry suck to work in.What do you mean they "made" the industry suck to work in?
by ranguna
6/1/2026 at 2:45:22 AM
Just read everything that came before that line.by deaddodo
5/30/2026 at 1:04:11 AM
I taught a “gifted children” university level course that kids between 13 and 17 attenddd. We lost about half of the people on the first few days when they actually had to write code.by maccard
5/30/2026 at 6:38:48 AM
This description absolutely checks out, even from ~30 years ago when I graduated.I worked on games for several years early on but quit after going through an EA spouse experience.
In some ways it’s too bad, because the great thing about games is that there is such a great variety of different kinds of problems to solve. Even so, I quit cold turkey and never looked back. It is what it is.
by usefulcat
5/29/2026 at 7:17:22 PM
What was your route to teaching like? I kinda am considering putting my hat in a similar ring on a part time, evening class type basis if I can get away with it.by RobRivera
5/29/2026 at 7:39:11 PM
I graduated in 2011, went straight to work at Blizzard entertainment. At the same time I had gotten accepted into graduate school so I opted for an internship at Blizzard to try both. I went back to Blizzard in 2012, but quickly realized I wanted to do my PhD. So I left Blizzard and went full-time as a student. I didn't have funding so I TAd classes. Eventually my advisor and I scored a big NSF grant, so she used the funds to buy out a course and have me teach it as the instructor.From there, I wound up at a community college running a bachelor's level degree. They hired me because I was the only candidate with NSF experience. They proceeded to fire their grant manager and have me manage the whole grant without extra pay.
Actually used to hire people for exactly what you want to do: be an adjunct for night classes in tech.
If you want to go that route you need to make friends with the Dean and the head of program. It's rare that we hire someone from the general application process, because most people who work in tech do not make good instructors.
by sonzohan
5/30/2026 at 10:11:00 PM
Since I'm getting a lot of hate for this post and having "only 2 years"I have 15 years of experience and counting in games and entertainment. I had 6 years of experience as a game master and software dev (in-game purchasing and balancing) before Blizzard offered me an internship. I also worked in gaming throughout all of grad school, just as a contractor instead of full time.
Those of you who have gone to grad school know stipends don't pay crap and you need a second job to make rent.
Also I continue to contract as a professor. Those of you who have worked as teachers know that teaching also doesn't pay crap.
Finally, I still work in industry. Most recent game released on Steam in 2022.
by sonzohan
5/29/2026 at 9:00:55 PM
I'll prospect that way, thank you for the insight. I have a unique background AND teaching experience (military leadership for my first career, and then taught as a full time visiting professor for 2 years) but having spent a decade in industry as a software engineer, yes I concur, teaching is not a common skill among the labor force (anecdotal ofc). I hope after I launch my first indie game I could knock on the doors of say Digipen or similar. Will see tho, thats more a 2027 thing.What kind of PhD research did you do? I considered going back for a PhD program focusing on simulation as it relates to discoverability within AI research, but kept ruling out it was a bad career decision and should be left as a retirement thing
by RobRivera
5/29/2026 at 9:31:51 PM
> I could knock on the doors of say Digipen or similar.Seattle based? If so toss me your email or contact and I'll see if I can help you break into teaching if you're interested.
> What kind of PhD research did you do?
Assistive technology. I primarily worked with kids who had cleft lip and palate to improve their at-home speech therapy exercises. Trained some offline ASR models, built a therapy game, and automated metrics. I passed the research onto another student once I got my PhD, but the project lives on as https://spokeitthegame.com/
by sonzohan
5/30/2026 at 1:49:53 AM
I'd love to! I am currently more east coast based (NYC) and rotate into Seattle monthly, hence looking at it being more a 2027/2028 target. I can drop my email hereRobjrivera23 at gmails
I will have to check out that speech therapy game. Before I entered pilot training, I had received new fake teeth implants that introduced a lisp (new airflow) and as a 20yrold, had to go through speech therapy drills with a military doctor for a whole semester to get my qualification back. Jokes on me, cockpit wasnt for me haha.
by RobRivera
5/30/2026 at 2:46:05 AM
> most people who work in tech do not make good instructorsGuilty as charged, despite my best attempts to the contrary. I wish I had time to go back to school for some kind of teaching degree. Is there something else I can do or read or watch or something to make me a better teacher? Knowledge transfer is probably the most important aspect of my job.
by xenophonf
5/29/2026 at 8:12:38 PM
> They proceeded to fire their grant manager and have me manage the whole grant without extra pay.This is such a bullshit thing to experience. I had a version of this where I took on extra work that I was interested in which became a new revenue stream but was told "let's see how you do and then we'll see about salary bumps". Never saw an extra dime from it. I used the experience learned to land a new job six months later with a salary bump while dumping the other job responsibilities. It's truly the only way to get that bump you deserve.
by dylan604
5/30/2026 at 2:10:40 AM
Not to downplay your experience, but from your prior students' comments, they aren't wrong to question your industry credentials? You had maybe less than two years of "gaming" industry experience 14 years ago before going into academics?Seems like you found an opportunity that you really wanted to pursue, but unfortunately at the same time sort of became a stat of those that can't do, teach.
I had plenty of professors along the way that touted their credentials, but they were so stale in what they were teaching. I know I know, a Computer Science degree doesn't match industry expectations, but so many professors definitely did not keep up with what was going on outside of their bubble.
by leovander
5/30/2026 at 9:53:56 PM
I have 15 years of experience and counting. My most recently released game was 2022 on Steam. Around 80k sales.Also I still work in industry.
by sonzohan
5/31/2026 at 11:47:15 PM
Great seeing where Speech with Sam and, more generally, you ended up.by adinisom
6/1/2026 at 4:25:31 PM
That's one frame. Another frame is video games is like movies, music. You start a band and think you're going to be the next hit band and be famous but the reality is only a few bands a year are successful. Movies are closer because most movies require a crew and a budget. How many movies are hits? The issue is not that game companies are evil, the issue is that it's a hit driven industry.I worked on AAA and indie as well. I crunched for years. That crunch was on me because I was being paid to make MY games and like any creator, I wanted my game to be great.
GTA6 is an exception in games being the game with the biggest team (AFAIK). The bigger the team the more you're a cog.
by socalgal2
5/29/2026 at 8:46:23 PM
"You trade good salary for your name in the credits"When did that become a thing? When Gears of War bonus checks started hitting Epic's parking lot went from a random collection of reasonable vehicles to looking like an exotic car show. I'm fairly certain every dev that worked on Gears or Unreal could have retired off the bonus payouts.
by forgetfreeman
5/29/2026 at 9:37:23 PM
That’s a tiny and decidedly nonrepresentative sample of gamedevs.by Sharlin
5/29/2026 at 10:41:56 PM
Fair enough. That community is a hell of a lot larger now than it used to be.by forgetfreeman
5/29/2026 at 10:38:47 PM
If you’re working for one of the big studios making blockbusters the bonuses can still be pretty good.by bananaboy
5/29/2026 at 11:57:47 PM
> engineering in video gaming is generally more complexThis tracks with my experience. Games present so many unexpected challenges. Or, known and expected challenges that are challenging nonetheless.
The other place I've had my ass handed to me was in robotics. Translating digital models to the physical space is how physics tells you it's actually in control and your ideas are cute and all, but other things are going to happen instead.
The simulator starts out simple and gradually becomes grotesque as it contacts reality.
by steve_adams_86
5/29/2026 at 8:35:36 PM
> engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech.I always roll my eyes when I hear this from game developers. And my eyes hurt from rolling I've heard it so many times.
I've done game dev, systems, backend, frontend, all of it. It's all the same. Maybe you developed low complexity "big tech" projects but, c'mon, you're really going to argue that games are categorically MORE complex than what Google, Apple, etc develop?
They're not. It's all the same. Same complexity ceiling, same prerequisite levels of creativity.
Most frontends that I develop use the same patterns as games and the backends that I've developed recently look like game servers. Same patterns, same techniques, same level of complexity.
Game development is just development.
by miiiiiike
5/30/2026 at 1:00:08 AM
It certainly depends on what you're working on in games. Not every game pushes the envelope, but the ones that do are seriously complex. They are essentially realtime embedded systems, which push the hardware to the max.Sometimes you get similar demands at the big companies like Google and Meta, but often you have the opportunity to throw more compute at the problem. That is rarely possible in games.
Having been a game dev before getting my PhD focused on NLP, I can definitely say some of the challenges I ran into developing a first of its kind MMORTS, was seriously challenging. When I took the mandatory grad classes in distributed systems and low level architecture design, I already had first hand experience and aced those classes without any effort. I was familiar with many of the problems and their solutions because I needed to for my work. In addition to working at the lowest level debugging the memory allocators, full networking stack, database layer, you name it all in C++. Being a lead developer on a project of that scope was much more complicated than any work I did later.
My first semester of my PhD I wrote a Transformer from scratch referencing only the original paper (it was soon after the paper came out, there were few resources then). I was the only person who got an implementation that matched the results from the original Transformer (most got much worse performance). I credit the skills and abilities I gained in the game dev industry.
That isn't me throwing shade at others; as I said there are hard problems in industries other than game dev, but the skills required are not compensated at the level you'd expect given the difficulty of the work.
by nsagent
5/30/2026 at 1:49:50 PM
No the insight here is that you went _back_ and got your PhD with years of experience building professional software.Expecting a 20-year old undergrad or a 23-year old postgrad to do as well as someone who left and came back to uni to finish their degree(s) is... uncharitable.
by mickeyp
5/30/2026 at 3:04:09 PM
I became lead of that MMORTS within 4yrs of starting my career. I've worked with lots of PhD students who came back after more than 5 years working in big tech; not one had the experience and abilities I did. I've also worked with fresh grads in games who were miles ahead of 99% of the software engineers and PhDs I've encountered in my time.Again, I've also run into equally talented fresh grads in big tech, but they were much more rare.
Take my anecdotes as you will.
by nsagent
5/30/2026 at 9:24:19 PM
> the skills required are not compensated at the level you'd expect given the difficulty of the work.There it is! This is the core argument that I feel like most people here are actually making. Well said, I completely agree.
I agree that game devs are/feel undervalued and underappreciated by game studios. But I don't think that game dev is inherently more complex than other forms of development or that it requires more creativity.
Two different issues.
Instead of arguing that game devs are special I'd argue that game devs should be told that there are jobs outside of the games industry with work that's just as interesting, complex, creative, and fulfilling as game development. Jobs where you'll use the same kinds of skills but may get paid much more.
You find a lot of miserable game devs who refuse to work in any other industry because non-game dev work is akin to mindlessly producing producing grey, soot covered, widgets in some dystopian factory.
If you need to be a game dev, go for it. I hope you get paid what you're worth. But, if you're and if you're miserable doing game dev, you have options outside of game dev.
In summary: If you can do game dev you can do other types of dev work. Similarly, if you can do other types of dev work you can do game dev.
The question is, whichever side you start on, can cross that divide and still be happy?
by miiiiiike
5/29/2026 at 10:49:31 PM
Not a game dev but I used to dabble in it. Quite surprised by this take honestly. Sure, each domain has its own complex things to solve. But on average, I think it's quite safe to say that game development consistently demands more creative solutions to problems compared to many other fields.by michaelsalim
5/29/2026 at 11:58:53 PM
All development requires creativity. Different types of creativity for different types of problems.Creativity isn’t narrowly defined to exclude everything but art, game mechanisms, and narrative.
You think the creation of GMail didn’t take creativity?
I’m suspicious of anyone who tries to lay a special claim to creativity for their class or type of work. Creates a false creative vs cog narrative that always seems to benefit the speaker.
by miiiiiike
5/30/2026 at 6:48:22 AM
I work in big tech but dabbled in games. Games are much harder. Lots of math and you have to process 8 million pixels in 16 milliseconds, in addition to running your physics and NPC AIs. Big tech is 90% CRUD and 90% squabbling over variable names and we somehow think pushing a bit of HTML in 500ms is both hard and acceptable performance.by 8n4vidtmkvmk
5/30/2026 at 7:02:30 AM
Is it harder because you’re less experienced with games. Your big tech job really requires no creativity?Modern sites are extremely complex. BASH, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Varnish, NGINX, Postgres, Cassandra, Elastic, Redis, Celery, CSS/Sass, Typescript. Observability, logging, build systems, testing, backups, CI, and a consistent design system. That’s all just to get to HTTP 200 “hello world”.
by miiiiiike
5/30/2026 at 10:32:29 AM
Sure they're complex but tbh they don't need to be. Sorry to bruise your professional ego but you should understand that there's a lot of decisions in bigtech/corporate that equates to 'buy it don't build it, it'll be cheaper, and (secretly) I can show it off on my resume'. And then when you use it, usually it isn't catered for the business' purposes because the tech is meant to cover a large amount of use cases. At that point they move on and the inefficiencies become the norm.And these require none of the deep math that the lower levels of gamedev stack require. It's tedious, not hard to string all of these web components.
by oreally
5/30/2026 at 8:53:49 PM
I'm at a loss when it comes to this comment section. I'm not sure why most people here seem to think that web development is just querying a database and presenting the results.I'm often doing math when working with ranking (search and otherwise) and throttling/rate-limiting. What about fraud detection and prevention? There isn't an off-the-shelf solution that you can use to build a modern site. It requires hundreds of hours of hard work and an understanding of everything from binary to color theory.
The job of a full-stack developer has a lot of complexity and requires a great deal of creativity. Game dev too.
I'm not sure why my ego would be bruised by anything you said. None of it applies to my work.
by miiiiiike
5/31/2026 at 3:23:57 AM
Are you just throwing out buzzwords at this point?What has ranking have to do with the standard website? Or fraud detection/prevention? Clearly these are out of the scope of the standard website. And I highly doubt they require deep math, just some probability, maybe a slight use of matrices.
Given the number of surface level buzzwords you throw out, I think your ego's preventing you from looking deeper.
by oreally
5/30/2026 at 2:46:08 PM
>Modern sites are extremely complex. BASH, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Varnish, NGINX, Postgres, Cassandra, Elastic, Redis, Celery, CSS/Sass, Typescript. Observability, logging, build systems, testing, backups, CI, and a consistent design system. That’s all just to get to HTTP 200 “hello world”.A lot of fancy keywords, but
1) It's the stack that you decided to put your services on, your HTTP 200 could be also served by nginx + 1 html file
2) You can make empty video multiplayer game which will sound as fancy as that HTTP 200 hello world
by tester756
5/30/2026 at 8:57:26 PM
Deliberately misunderstanding my point while making my point!Yes! Games are complex! An empty site with modern infrastructure is just as complex as an empty multiplayer video game, exactly, we agree!
However, NGINX+a file isn't going to get you very far. You know that.
by miiiiiike
5/30/2026 at 8:39:02 AM
Games often have inherent technical complexity. Big tech has mountains of unnecessary complexity just to get to "hello world", as you said. These are different things in nature.by baobabKoodaa
5/30/2026 at 8:30:59 AM
Complex in the way you're using it (a sea of technologies that looks daunting) doesn't automatically mean "hard". I've worked in big tech on distributed systems, with most of the things in your list, and worked on some difficult problems, but I could absolutely believe that cutting-edge game dev is harder, even significantly so.by kelnos
5/30/2026 at 9:07:57 PM
I think you're underestimating your own creativity.My argument is that you can put most good developers into game development and with a little time and experience those devs will find that the work isn't much harder than any other kind of complex development.
Most of the questions in game dev like other forms of development are solved. Building a game is like developing any other kind of complex modern system, integrating disparate solutions into a cohesive whole.
by miiiiiike
5/30/2026 at 7:17:33 AM
Well yes sure, but those infrastructure questions come with games as well on top of the whole inherent complexity described in this comment familyby chrystalkey
5/30/2026 at 9:33:12 PM
Could be. I've been using most of the technologies you listed for over 20 years so none of that is really hard for me anymore.by 8n4vidtmkvmk
5/30/2026 at 8:17:25 AM
> You think the creation of GMail didn’t take creativity?Disclaimer: i've barely ever programmed video games
Not the same kind of creativity, for sure. Gmail has no performance constraints (and its performance is horrible), has no UX constraint (and its UX is horrible). It pushed the free tier some time ago and was arguably a decent webmail at the time, but nothing about it was revolutionary.
The hacks required to get a game to react and push pixels in real time on specific hardware are very interesting. That's closer to proper software engineering than many things we find in startups. That said, more and more games use Unity and other all-in-one engines and are not engineering anymore… and as a player, i can certainly feel the difference in the constant stuttering which mostly was not there when playing console games >10 years ago.
by selfhoster1312
5/30/2026 at 2:45:23 AM
In web dev there is little creativity because everything has been done and there is a library / service to solve every problems, none of that exists in major games. Try Claude in your frontend/backend service, then try that in a game client.by Thaxll
5/30/2026 at 6:51:19 AM
Games have engines that provide so much. Unreal, Gadot, Unity.Have you tried doing modern frontend work? Creativity is required.
I played with Claude recently. It wasn’t able to refactor a CSS one liner into simple sass mixin.
by miiiiiike
5/30/2026 at 6:14:30 AM
I think the differentiator is the amount of deep Math that goes into it.A simple card game is on par with standard app development.
But if you're working at lower levels of a world simulation engine that require linear algebra, computer graphics knowledge? Camera and joint manipulation? Animation? Navmeshes? Physics? That's a notch harder than a REST app and microservices infrastructure. Some robotics, ML areas touch on this too.
The only tough topics at these adtechs that might match would be graph manipulation, or currently ML knowledge. I suspect leetcode isn't very applicable in everyday usage.
by oreally
5/30/2026 at 2:43:12 AM
[dead]by Thaxll
5/29/2026 at 8:59:33 PM
It probably depends on the level in the stack your at.At a high level the engines and frameworks don't feel any different.
Work with graphics and models feels more difficult though then most networked application work I've done.
by tayo42
5/30/2026 at 10:38:08 AM
> There's an absolute over supply of students who want to make video games.To be fair, you don't have to be a teacher / lecturer to notice this. One trip to an AI reddit thread asking what people are working on will reveal that it's either porn, role-play, or game development.
by neonstatic
5/29/2026 at 7:18:34 PM
I'd say it has nothing to do with supply and demand, but more to do with captive labour market (e.g. in the UK ability to quit and run own business are limited) and C-suite greed levels and classism.Working class person being exceptional at low latency game development, will unlikely get a chance in finance and earning 10x for very much the same level of competence, because their accent might not be good enough and parents don't frequent members' clubs.
by varispeed
5/29/2026 at 8:14:26 PM
I’ve worked in pretty much every domain of IT in the UK (FinTech, gaming, broadcasting, Hollywood, public sector, etc) and I’ve not experienced any class bias in FinTech.I will say that different industries have different formalities (generally speaking). But that just means you have to interview with smarter attire in FinTech vs interviewing for a job in gambling.
As a hiring manager, I can say that companies will recruit for as little as they think candidates will accept. Fintech gets a bit of a pass on this one but only because they rake in so much money that they can generally afford to attract higher salaries. But it does also mean that gaming can get away with paying people peanuts in comparison and that is literally due to supply and demand.
In places where the C-suite have set unrealistic thresholds on tech salaries, I’ve had to get creative to attract candidates. And that often meant contributing back to open source and basically using that as advertising.
Anyway, this is already a verbose reply but the crux of it is:
1. you shouldn’t underestimate the power of supply and demand in the work space
2. The profitability of a sector also plays heavily into the equation
3. You don’t need to be posh to get a job in FinTech.
by hnlmorg
5/29/2026 at 10:48:17 PM
It didn't affect me, therefore it doesn't exist.Come on.
by varispeed
5/30/2026 at 7:22:06 AM
I obviously cannot speak for every company that has ever existed in the FinTech industry. And you haven’t given any more details beyond vague comments which makes it hard to comment on your specific claims. So I can only talk about my experiences hiring and beyond hired in the industry.But who’s to say your experiences aren’t the anomaly? Or that other factors weren’t to play that lead those hiring managers offering to other candidates?
I also tried researching your point online (just in case I was an anomaly) and the results I got suggested that FinTech scored lower in benchmarks for bias during hiring.
So at this point in time, given what I’ve experienced, read online and the information you’ve shared, there simply isn’t enough data to support your claim. Anecdotal nor otherwise.
by hnlmorg
5/29/2026 at 10:24:04 PM
another thing - games are more like a lottery - you've more misses than hits.so economics takes over.
whereas your typical saas, adtech - once the business is proven u print money unless u r doing stupid shit n being driven by ego such as having the biggest org or pursuing passion projects such as "a.i"
by dzonga
5/29/2026 at 11:15:56 PM
Also for every game dev working on GTA6, there's another working on Barbie's Horse Adventure. When positions are limited, you take what you can get and most of them are making games that are not at all interesting.by vitaflo
5/29/2026 at 4:02:25 PM
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.by ryandrake
5/29/2026 at 5:28:01 PM
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.by javier123454321
5/29/2026 at 5:52:56 PM
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.by JadoJodo
5/29/2026 at 6:20:23 PM
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).
by mikepurvis
5/30/2026 at 7:35:49 AM
> friends watched or a game they played is a perk that has real valuein most cases it don't unless this game become really legendary which often not the case. So young person easily can spent 10y in attempt to do that but as result non of those games will be remembered in 2y after release.
by strobe
5/29/2026 at 9:18:48 PM
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.
by jakeydus
5/29/2026 at 10:26:15 PM
The sneaky thing you don't realize when you’re 20 is that you come to be interested in what you work on. So if you just try and do what you do well, it will become interesting!by qazxcvbnmlp
5/30/2026 at 7:30:16 AM
right and it's also additional hidden kind of exploitation happen with that. That artistic passion coming from desire to do better "art" and grow as "artist" (what ever creative field person is chasing) and also to connect with peoples of similar goals.But in reality that environment helping only to grow in technical aspects of the job ( maybe also learning some market forces) but it leads to severe degradation in artistic practice of which person original desire cultivate even not realizing that just because is no business need for anything like that. Bus sines can be fine by just coping that everyone else doing or implementing some one else vision.
by strobe
5/29/2026 at 11:14:40 PM
Reminds me of this [1] article, quoting Seinfeld, "In the seventies, this is the tragic turn of American culture. And this was explained to me by Mario Joiner who cracked this puzzle that I could not figure out what the hell happened. That money became everything. What happened because it was not like that in the seventies. In the seventies, it’s how cool is your job? How cool is what you’re doing? If your job’s cooler than my job, you beat me."I too wanna work on cooler stuff. Sooner rather than later.
[1]: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2024/05/seinfeld-on-when-mo...
by abhaynayar
5/31/2026 at 11:56:54 AM
Yeah im not saying it's a bad thing necessarily.by javier123454321
5/29/2026 at 6:22:39 PM
To a lesser extent the same has been said about Apple's low pay relative to peer (far less profitable) companies -- the mere honor of working at Apple is an implied part of the compensation package.by xp84
5/29/2026 at 4:19:10 PM
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).
by agentgt
5/29/2026 at 4:24:06 PM
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.by yCombLinks
5/29/2026 at 5:46:49 PM
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.
by deanCommie
5/29/2026 at 6:14:53 PM
It's just a natural progression. When the company is a startup working on a new exciting tech it's chasing the dream and changing the world. When it's a behemoth employing 200k people, it's impossible for all of them to be chasing the dream. Probably like 90% of them would be doing extremely boring "keeping the lights on" tasks and ensuring this gargantuan machine does not go to pieces under it's own weight. It still can pay incredibly well, but it won't be exciting frontier work anymore. It just can't be, 200k people company can't move with the agility of 200 people company.by smsm42
5/29/2026 at 5:53:17 PM
Interesting choice to blame FAANG demise on its workersby wahnfrieden
5/30/2026 at 3:37:16 AM
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.by nixon_why69
6/1/2026 at 9:52:18 AM
Are not the CEOs responsible for cumulative/emergent effects?by keybored
6/1/2026 at 1:02:52 PM
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.
by nixon_why69
5/29/2026 at 7:36:11 PM
I was going to post a more extended rant but really yeah, this says it allby zem
5/29/2026 at 4:28:26 PM
~~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.
by agentgt
5/29/2026 at 4:34:55 PM
Sorry, I didn't make the point I was aiming for initiallyby yCombLinks
5/29/2026 at 4:38:51 PM
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.
by agentgt
5/29/2026 at 7:18:16 PM
sounds very much like open source maintainers tooby tcfhgj
5/29/2026 at 4:57:13 PM
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.
by Negitivefrags
5/29/2026 at 5:14:29 PM
> 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.To really drive this point home, the gaming community recently lost their minds when it became clear that this generation of video games were going to retail for ~$90 per game. Never mind that even in the early 90’s an average game might retail for $40 and what we would call a AAA game could reach as high as $70. In 2025 gamers declared that $90 was highway robbery. But go look at the credits for an early 90s video game. That $40-90 per unit in the early 90s might need to cover the salaries of 23 people (the size of the credits list for Super Mario World on the SNES). Now $90 has to cover 435 people (the credit list for Super Mario Wonder on the switch). Sure we’re selling a lot more copies now, and (some of) the manufacturing costs are lower. But that’s a nearly 20x increase in personnel for a mere 2x increase in (non inflation adjusted) price.
by tpmoney
5/29/2026 at 5:49:05 PM
There's a cool 1990s magazine scan that breaks down the margins for an SNES cartridge: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/11140t0/pricebreakd...by tadfisher
5/29/2026 at 7:26:28 PM
33.1%: Nintendo's charge29.8%: Retailer's margin
15.1%: Publisher's margin
14.8%: VAT
That's... 92.8%.
Developer's royalty: 4.6%
"Yikes" -me, just now
by brianleb
5/29/2026 at 7:53:18 PM
It's also amortized over a much longer period of time too. Those 23 people would scratch build that $40 game in 2 years. These days it's more like 8 years, and you're rarely building from scratch.by ux266478
5/29/2026 at 8:02:40 PM
Now factor in number of copies sold, distribution costs, additional revenue sources...by dns_snek
5/29/2026 at 5:05:28 PM
> 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.
by appreciatorBus
5/29/2026 at 7:34:22 PM
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.by Scaled
5/29/2026 at 5:40:02 PM
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)by andybak
5/29/2026 at 5:06:33 PM
Also games are for leisure. The same thing is true in Hollywood—hundreds of crew members getting paid small wages relative to their long hours and a few stars getting millions.by kellogah
5/29/2026 at 6:59:47 PM
Margins are high. The video game market makes twice the combined revenue of all film/music markets combined.by zipy124
5/29/2026 at 7:11:44 PM
revenue != marginsThere are 20,000 games released per year that split all that revenue, minus the cost of building those games.
by netcoyote
5/29/2026 at 7:14:53 PM
My point was we know those are decent margin industries and video games aren't any more expensive, but anyway you usually look at 20% margin in the industry give or take 10% depending on the scale and particularly advertising costs at large scales.by zipy124
5/29/2026 at 7:17:55 PM
What does revenue have to do with margins. You didn't mention costs anywhere in your statement.by antiframe
5/29/2026 at 7:46:09 PM
See my further reply, margin of 20% give or take 10% depending on scale (on average, some products obviously have incredibly high or low margins as is typical in the creative industry).My point about revenue was that games are pulling in more money than film and TV and we all know they cost less to make, and film and TV has good pay so therefore the games industry can afford similar rates, if not more.
by zipy124
5/29/2026 at 8:06:42 PM
now compare that margin / growth to big tech or hft...by vanuatu
5/29/2026 at 8:10:32 PM
That wasn't the question though was it. Compared to most businesses those are good margins.There isn't any business on earth that compares to the margins of HFT firms. Regardless they aren't asking for big tech or HFT level salaries.
by zipy124
5/29/2026 at 8:38:07 PM
Hmm compared to film/entertainment yes, but from the perspective of an individual developer worker, your alternatives are not just in film/entertainmentby vanuatu
5/29/2026 at 6:58:18 PM
Does that mean the companies that develop games with heavy microtransactions pay their developers more?by duckmysick
5/29/2026 at 5:12:28 PM
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.by fny
5/29/2026 at 5:37:08 PM
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.
by agentgt
5/29/2026 at 6:25:40 PM
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.by cloverich
5/29/2026 at 6:27:44 PM
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.by cloverich
5/29/2026 at 5:10:21 PM
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.by slg
5/29/2026 at 5:22:17 PM
Working for the amount of money one agrees to is not exploitation.by charcircuit
5/29/2026 at 5:40:59 PM
"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.by wat10000
5/29/2026 at 7:19:43 PM
That would be true if there weren't a power and information imbalance.by antiframe
5/30/2026 at 1:04:43 AM
What would be the downside of all salaries in all corporations being pseudonymously public?by simondotau
5/29/2026 at 5:30:31 PM
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.by vouwfietsman
5/29/2026 at 5:00:55 PM
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.by petterroea
5/29/2026 at 6:26:43 PM
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.
by paulddraper
5/30/2026 at 7:25:36 AM
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.
by Agentlien
5/29/2026 at 9:42:26 PM
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.by Sharlin
5/29/2026 at 7:46:41 PM
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.by spike021
5/29/2026 at 4:12:09 PM
I am a unionized software developer in media, not games. I helped the game workers at Blizzard unionize and they all spoke of the "passion tax". One reason the "passion tax" is possible for employers is that there seems to be a degree of labor monopsony for the kind of development done by AAA game studios. In this respect it's quite a bit like Hollywood film production in its heyday.by bwestergard
5/29/2026 at 4:54:17 PM
>One reason the "passion tax" is possible for employers is that there seems to be a degree of labor monopsony for the kind of development done by AAA game studios.How is the existence of a monopsony necessary or even related to a passion tax existing? Suppose the market were a fully free market with tons of software companies on one side and tons of developers on the other. It would fly in the face of reason, and fairness in my eyes, if all developers were paid the same but some got to work on fun stuff like games and others worked on the scheduling software for the scheduling software for the warehouse robot repairs. So a passion tax seems like something that should exist and not really be decried.
by savanaly
5/29/2026 at 5:49:51 PM
> So a passion tax seems like something that should exist and not really be decried.To put it the other way, work that is distasteful in some way, should also pay more, but this is missing the point.
I think the point of the unionization is that the monopsony of a small number of AAA game studios gives them excessive market power to reduce compensation and especially to reduce working conditions.
A union can acquiesce to the passion tax and say that top developers at a AAA should make $150k/year (a bit low), while simultaneously saying that that developer should be able to see their children on nights and weekends. The project management that leads to "perma-crunch" is something that ought to be resolved on the employer's side, not by the employees.
by avidiax
5/29/2026 at 11:02:21 PM
From my perspective the main difference between "crunch time" and sadism is the existence of a retrospective you don't need to pay to view.by gopher_space
5/29/2026 at 4:51:58 PM
Suppose you double their pay, make them more in line with other tech workers. How should you allocate these highly coveted game dev jobs? The supply of jobs won't magically increase (it would likely decrease with higher wages), and the number of people interested in working there would grow as well. Do you just have a lottery?Now rather than being a relatively underpaid worker in an industry you're passionate about, you don't have the opportunity to work there.
by bko
5/29/2026 at 5:07:49 PM
Your hypothetical is interesting, but it doesn't accord with the reasons these workers organized. They did not conceive of the issue as primarily about multiplying all worker compensation by some large factor (e.g. 2x). While they were certainly fighting for higher pay, it was as much about the arbitrariness of career paths as anything. Sexual harassment, crunch time, and layoff cycles were all problems they sought to address.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision_Blizzard_worker_org...
Regarding your hypothetical, two points. First, Hollywood unions did essentially go down the path you imagine. The solution there was to create a less arbitrary system that allowed actors to work their way into the union and get a degree of income stability and protection from (previously horrendous) employer abuse.
"The supply of jobs won't magically increase (it would likely decrease with higher wages)"
You should look into the economics of these game studios a bit more. The unit economics are not like those of producing bricks which an essentially linear (capital, labor) -> bricks production function. The distributive effects between the employers, workers, and consumers would be very difficult to model. You can't really figure out the marginal contribution of the factors of production. To use a Hollywood analogy: Do we know how much less one of George Clooney's films would net if a different actor were cast instead of him? If we can't be sure, can we know what his marginal contribution was?
by bwestergard
5/29/2026 at 6:19:15 PM
Regardless of whether it's pay or conditions, the changes would make it a more desirable place to work, which would increase the amount of people that want to work in that field.> The solution there was to create a less arbitrary system that allowed actors to work their way into the union and get a degree of income stability and protection from (previously horrendous) employer abuse
Less arbitrary sounds good, but you need discretion. A lot of unionized jobs rely or pretty arbitrary rules, like how long the person had worked there. Why should someone doing the same job as me get paid more just because he was there longer? That seems more arbitrary to me than my manager's opinion of my work. You end up having an underclass of younger employees and all the benefits accruing to people that have been there longer. This could sink an entire industry or company as they would be stuck with more expensive labor they can't get rid of while a new company can just hire younger people at the bottom of the scale for the same work
> You should look into the economics of these game studios a bit more. The unit economics are not like those of producing bricks which an essentially linear (capital, labor) -> bricks production function. The distributive effects between the employers, workers, and consumers would be very difficult to model. You can't really figure out the marginal contribution of the factors of production. To use a Hollywood analogy: Do we know how much less one of George Clooney's films would net if a different actor were cast instead of him? If we can't be sure, can we know what his marginal contribution was?
I agree, but that's exactly why you don't want some union to do it that doesn't have the insights. The Hollywood analogy is exactly right, how much would George Clooney films net if they used a different actor. Movie studios have a direct incentive to find out. They can pay someone a lot less and if its comparable, they would. But the idea that a union can have a matrix that can capture George Clooney's worth and pay (how long have you been an actor for?) is unrealistic.
by bko
5/29/2026 at 5:48:37 PM
How should you allocate these highly coveted game dev jobs?Would the company not conduct interviews and pick out whoever seems like the best candidates?
by EliRivers
5/29/2026 at 5:54:16 PM
We have the same problem in the rest of tech, though? Being unable to get into a AAA studio is as unfair as being unable to get into FAANG.This just brings game development in line with other code monkeys. Top studios will pay top dollars, Indie studios will pay what they can, often almost nothing.
And I see nothing wrong with that, do you?
by tredre3
5/29/2026 at 6:22:31 PM
Why are so many engineers unable to get into FAANG? Their hiring seems pretty straight forward. Cram leetcode. Most people can't get into it because they don't want to dedicate 100+ hours cramming these tests. But if you do and you're reasonably smart, you'll get in. Much better chance than something like banking/consulting (hire right out of school) or lawyers (must go through lots of schools). Out of the high paid jobs, it's extremely open and transparent.by bko
5/29/2026 at 8:49:25 PM
Apple doesn’t use Leetcode. It’s often an 8 hour whiteboard interview during with you write pseudo code for the most part. You can’t “cram” for an Apple interview typically.by briandear
5/29/2026 at 10:12:14 PM
>Why are so many engineers unable to get into FAANG? Their hiring seems pretty straight forward. Cram leetcode.First you gotta get passed the resume screening before you get to leetcode. Average resumes with no-name companies don't get past FANG recruiters to get to the leetcode stage.
by joe_mamba
5/29/2026 at 5:59:22 PM
I was under impression there were quite a number of independent game studios, is that no longer a case? What is the cause of a monopsony here - the barrier to entry, at least for making a game, doesn't seem too high. Marketing one successfully is probably harder, but that is a common problem not unique to gaming.by smsm42
5/29/2026 at 6:17:52 PM
There are more indie games than ever before. The issue is AAA games have become billion dollar projects. They are funded and structured far more like AAA movies than other software. Making games is easy. Getting the money together to spend $500 million on development and $500 million on marketing isn't easy.by Sevii
5/29/2026 at 11:09:05 PM
Yes, but I am not sure I understand how all this gives us monopsony. If there are so many indie projects, how doesn't it contradict the claim of monopsony?by smsm42
5/29/2026 at 4:22:46 PM
Thanks, you taught me a new concept, monopsony today, I didn't knew it got a name!by ygouzerh
5/29/2026 at 4:34:31 PM
> monopsonyI had to look it up as well. I assumed it was a play on words about Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony (the three big video game console players).
by darknavi
5/29/2026 at 4:40:19 PM
For future people to look it up.Monopoly is a single seller.
Monopsony is a single buyer.
by lesuorac
5/29/2026 at 9:11:51 PM
Given how popular this has gotten I guess I should point out that it's wrong.There isn't a single seller so the proper ones are
Oligopoly - Market with few sellers
Oligopsony - Market with few buyers
"few" really meaning that they have pricing power as opposed to 3 companies.
by lesuorac
5/29/2026 at 7:09:57 PM
Why do you think passion tax is not applicable in AI research? As that too is a very passion heavy industry at least recently.by kubrickslair
5/29/2026 at 7:23:05 PM
How do we know it's not? Those positions might have paid higher were it not for employees passions.by antiframe
5/29/2026 at 5:10:38 PM
I've done some coaching work with college-age computer science majors. The answer is pretty obvious when you talk to enough of them: Most of them got into computers via video games. Many of them had phases where they worked on video game related code, like modding or trying to make their own games.Not many people get into computers because they dream about staring at a console to figure out why the kubernetes cluster is misbehaving again (though some do).
Like another commenter said, it's the "passion tax": The more interesting a job, the more people seek it. The more people competing for a job, the lower the pay.
by Aurornis
5/29/2026 at 4:11:16 PM
It has not lagged behind depending on how you look at it, video game development can be split into engine programming and gameplay programming. For engine programming, you only need a handful of senior engineers specializing in low level details of a video game engine, and these will get paid high appropriate wages that match industry standard salaries. For the gameplay programmers, they just seek the cheapest labor that can do "quantity over quality" type of work to pump out content and there's a large pool of juniors/interns that will accept these low wages just because they want to be a part of something popular.by diath
5/29/2026 at 4:19:41 PM
But don't bad gameplay programmers implement gameplay badly? If that is truly the state of the industry that explains all the modern games with extremely mushy controls.by rowanG077
5/29/2026 at 4:41:44 PM
I assume by gameplay he means stuff like in game scripting - when you walk here it triggers this. Mushy controls would be down to the engine developers.by IshKebab
5/29/2026 at 5:24:34 PM
Customers don't care about the code. They just care that the gameplay is fun.by charcircuit
5/29/2026 at 5:36:30 PM
Are you implying the only differentiator between good and bad developers is the aesthetic of the code itself? And not the actual computation the code does? Wild take honestly.by rowanG077
5/29/2026 at 6:17:50 PM
As counterintuitive as it sounds, it turns out video game consumers don't care much about the actual computation either. Most games are riddled with bugs, and it has next to no impact on sales. Rather, having weird, even embarrassing bugs can make players look at the game more fondly. Skyrim is one of the best selling games ever. Ostensibly it's about fighting dragons. But "Skyrim moment" does not mean an epic battle with a dragon. It means said dragon flying through a goddamn castle, then getting stuck on a single tree and disappearing into the ground, and still hitting you with fire breath somehow.by Xirdus
5/29/2026 at 6:31:11 PM
Buggy games have destroyed franchises. Gothic 3 being a prime example. Contrary to the memes skyrim is not even close to the worst offenders in terms of bugs. Besides bad code does not only lead to bugs. It can lead to bad gameplay, bad performance, missing features, slipped deadlines. A things users care a lot about.by rowanG077
5/29/2026 at 9:31:21 PM
Gothic has always been a niche franchise, and G3 was poorly received not because of bugs, but because of bad worldbuilding (orcs speaking human language, magic runes disappearing, a powerful kingdom getting wholly conquered in basically no time, pretty small open world) and uninteresting story compared to previous titles. Sure it did have bugs, but so did G1 and G2. And that one AssCreed game where people's heads disappeared leaving just eyeballs behind, which still sold crazy numbers. Or the famously bad Cyberpunk 2077 launch, where bad means millions of copies sold in first 2 weeks, not even counting preorders. Or countless other examples.Most players care about performance even less than they care about bugs. Basically every AAA game nowadays is criticized for piss poor performance and not having the looks to justify it. They're still massive successes.
Usually, it's good code that leads to missed deadlines, not bad code. It literally takes more time and effort to write good code. Gamedev lives on 3-year cycle, that's not enough time for code debt to start causing problems.
Bad gameplay... yes, that can be actual problem. But it's rarely due to a single bad line of code, or even ten thousand bad lines of code. In most games, gameplay is bad because it was designed to be bad. As in, they had a certain way of playing in mind, and they made the game exactly how they wanted, it's just most players don't find that way of playing fun. No amount of code quality can fix that.
by Xirdus
5/30/2026 at 9:41:01 AM
> Gothic has always been a niche franchise, and G3 was poorly received not because of bugs, but because of bad worldbuilding (orcs speaking human language, magic runes disappearing, a powerful kingdom getting wholly conquered in basically no time, pretty small open world) and uninteresting story compared to previous titles.This is just not true. Gothic 3 is still pretty alive in terms of modding and improvement precisely because the base underneath the bugginess was good. You don't have a good community after 20 years if you have bad bodybuilding and uninteresting story.
> Most players care about performance even less than they care about bugs. Basically every AAA game nowadays is criticized for piss poor performance and not having the looks to justify it. They're still massive successes.
You equal success meaning that players don't get care about bad things in a game. That's just a way to reductive view. You can literally read everywhere how people complain about the bad performance of games. Performance is a standard staple in game reviews.
> Usually, it's good code that leads to missed deadlines, not bad code. It literally takes more time and effort to write good code. Gamedev lives on 3-year cycle, that's not enough time for code debt to start causing problems.
Nice trying to put words in my mouth. This is about good and bad developers. Good developers write better code in the same or less time it would take bad developers. that's literally why they are good developers. Bad developers compound on bad code making progress exponentially slower compared to if you had good developers from the start. The question was never the same developer writing good vs bad code.
> Bad gameplay... yes, that can be actual problem. But it's rarely due to a single bad line of code, or even ten thousand bad lines of code. In most games, gameplay is bad because it was designed to be bad. As in, they had a certain way of playing in mind, and they made the game exactly how they wanted, it's just most players don't find that way of playing fun. No amount of code quality can fix that.
I think you really underestimate how much a gameplay programmer can influence the gameplay. Not every millisecond of latency is specified in game design docs. Most of gameplay is designed by feeling. If your developer is not capable of producing good gameplay your game designers can do nothing.
by rowanG077
5/30/2026 at 12:10:44 PM
> Gothic 3 is still pretty alive in terms of moddingA fraction of G2's modding scene. And the reason is even after all the bugfixes and community patches, people still overwhelmingly prefer G2 over G3.
> You equal success meaning that players don't get care about bad things in a game. That's just a way to reductive view.
I equal success to financial success, because we're talking why game programmers are paid less, and the reason is (partly) because code quality has next to no impact on sales. If people still buy your hame despite the bad things about it, then it's a financial success, and game studios exploit this fact to the extreme.
> Nice trying to put words in my mouth. This is about good and bad developers.
I was replying to this part: "Besides bad code does not only lead to bugs. It can lead to bad gameplay, bad performance, missing features, slipped deadlines." My intention was that no, generally it's not true that bad code leads to missed deadlines. Slow coding, yes. Bad coding, no. Good programmers are valuable to game studios not because they can write good code, but because they write bad code faster. Which is reflected in lower salaries compared to other software products where writing good code actually matters and where salaries are higher.
> Not every millisecond of latency is specified in game design docs. Most of gameplay is designed by feeling.
Not every millisecond matters for the feeling (unless you're making a fighting game but that's why I said rarely, not never). Usually performance issues in gameplay can be masked by increasing timing windows or by the eternal excuse of git gud (usually, not always). In general, the gameplay of the vast majority of games is simple enough that with modern tools, any half decent programmer can implement any feeling the designer aims for, with varying amounts of noticable issues. Sure, there are exceptions, but exceptions don't shape salary trends.
by Xirdus
6/1/2026 at 8:22:28 AM
> This is just not true. Gothic 3 is still pretty alive in terms of modding and improvement precisely because the base underneath the bugginess was good. You don't have a good community after 20 years if you have bad bodybuilding and uninteresting story.You do realize that Bethesda's excuses for worldbuilding are some of the most modded turds out there, right?
by account42
6/1/2026 at 9:59:18 AM
Gothic is not by Bethesda, they are very different games. I'm not sure what exactly you want to say with your commentby rowanG077
5/29/2026 at 8:51:10 PM
People care about stories.by briandear
5/30/2026 at 10:09:30 PM
There are plenty of examples of engine being bad, but gameplay being fun.by 0x457
5/29/2026 at 10:44:41 PM
It’s more nuanced than that. Programmers generally will be paid decently. Gameplay programmers aren’t really the bottom of the pecking order. That dubious honour usually falls to UI engineers. Other folks involved in development who often don’t get paid well and are usually involved in unions are QA, junior programmers, and junior artists. There are a lot more roles than just engine and gameplay programmer.by bananaboy
5/30/2026 at 1:23:39 PM
Artists in my experience earn a lot less than programmers in gamdev; unless you're a technical artist... which is another type of programming.by dijit
6/1/2026 at 2:32:14 AM
Very true!by bananaboy
5/30/2026 at 7:44:45 AM
That’s not really true at studios - maybe at Unreal and Unity they get paid normal wages. I know some people working on the in house engine and rendering of AAA studios and they make like 60% of what I make in general big-ish tech backendby coffeebeqn
5/29/2026 at 8:14:25 PM
Or, just buy Unreal Engine so you can focus on being able to just plug in interchangeable cogs for gameplay programmers. You don’t have to pay them much because you can teach a child how to use Blueprints. Then yes, just crank out slop content for the lowest common denominator and charge $80 for the AAA experience and call it day while laughing all the way to the bank. Churn out battle passes and $30 cosmetic skins for pennies on the dollar and gamers will justify it with “it’s just cosmetic you don’t have to buy it” - while these corporations have behavioural psychologists on staff figuring out the most effective way to exploit FOMO to get you addicted and needing to spend more money on useless shit you don’t need.Suckers.
Is it any wonder the quality bar for modern AAA games is under the floor? How many $400 million dollar flops do we need before these people take a hint?
I would bet money that the story for GTA6 is gonna be horrendous, based on what we’ve seen so far, but this game will make a trillion dollars or whatever because “it’s GTA6”. Bbuut they modelled individual bubbles in the pint of beer with real physics! Does the game even need to be fun anymore? Does it need to innovate or push the medium forward in any way? Or is it just a way to juice up another GTA online putting out mid content with horrible writing just to keep buying up shark cards for another decade, because people will buy it no matter what. Game journalists would never dare give the game a bad review, because they can’t risk losing access to Take Two published games. So what are we left with? A game with completely unjustified amounts of hype and “brand loyalty” that can absolutely get away with phoneing it in and make record breaking amounts of profit. But if you criticize it in any way, you’re just a hater or you’re not “media literate” or something.
by throwatdem12311
5/29/2026 at 4:31:30 PM
Nope. Rendering, tooling, audio, core engine... None of these pay particularly well. More than just gameplay programmer, sure, but because many engines have moved to a visual node style of programming, it's also less and less programming in the gameplay department.>there's a large pool of juniors/interns that will accept these low wages just because they want to be a part of something popular.
That's an unbelievably bad _and_ disrespectful take. They accept these low wages because it's their only way in the industry, and because the industry has made sure to keep a steady supply of fresh meat to burn out. "because they want to be a part of something popular" doesn't work when the vast majority work on unknown games in content factories for the first ten years of their careers.
by well_ackshually
5/29/2026 at 5:24:31 PM
> That's an unbelievably bad _and_ disrespectful take. They accept these low wages because it's their only way in the industry, and because the industry has made sure to keep a steady supply of fresh meat to burn outIs it really “disrespectful” to make an observation of how the world is even if it maybe isn’t how it should be? That fact of the matter is no one “needs” to accept these wages. Software development in general and game development in particular are labor fields of choice. Being a software developer can pay you better in so many different parts of the field, even today long after the dot com boom. People are choosing to accept these bad offers because they value working in this part of the industry more than they value the higher wages they can get elsewhere. Just like plenty of us choose not to make FAANG levels of money because we value our work life balance, or our specific living locations or our principles and beliefs over the money that those companies are throwing at people.
We can talk about how these bad offers are knowingly abusive or artificially suppressed and still acknowledge that people are making informed choices to accept those offers.
by tpmoney
5/29/2026 at 4:41:12 PM
I think by “something popular” gp meant an industry that people are excited to be in — which dovetails with your implication about accepting low pay for a way in the industryby elefanten
5/29/2026 at 8:02:03 PM
> but because many engines have moved to a visual node style of programming, it's also less and less programming in the gameplay department.He's talking about the people who make those tools, and he's right. Engine developers are paid pretty well, especially at Epic and Unity. You don't think Tim Sweeney snagged SPJ because he's really into Fortnite, do you?
by ux266478
5/30/2026 at 9:45:33 AM
Epic has over 4000 employees. For 1 SPJ (that might be really well paid, but you don't even know that), there's a hundred good engineers that are underpaid (compared to what they could make selling AI slop and advertisement).If your goal is to get rich, you make more money as an L3 at Google doing absolutely fuck all than an L5 at Epic does bearing the entire responsibility of an entire subsystem on your shoulders.
by well_ackshually
5/29/2026 at 4:22:29 PM
It's really the same in any creative industry. Employers exploit you through this combination of factors:1. You love the area and are willing to take a cut to work in that area, particularly when the alternative is working on CRMs for a PBM;
2. Demand for these jobs still exceeds supply; and
3. The very top of this pyramid makes a shitload of money. If you get to like a Lead Engineer type position, you might be making points on unit sales. And for a big hit that can be big money; and
4. Historically, indie development wasn't a viable route to making a living but it suffers from the same distortions too. For every Notch or ConcernedApe, there are thousands of pepole who below the poverty line. Look at something as widely regarded (but niche) like Dwarf Fortress. They made bank (and deserved it) from the Steam release but they spent 10+ years making a couple of thousand of dollars a month between the two of them.
Just look at the music industry. There are artists and bands who are trying to make it, training for years and making $50 to play some local venue and they're just hoping to get noticed. In years gone by that was a record contract. Nowadays, there are alternate routes. Justin Bieber was a Youtube breakout.
Fun fact: the first artist to have a #1 single without a record contract was Lisa Loeb for Stay in the early 1990s because it was picked up for the sound track (those used to be a big deal) for Reality Bites.
by jmyeet
5/29/2026 at 4:06:02 PM
Modern AAA video game development has much more in common with a traditional factory assembly line than a typical tech startup (for better or worse) - or maybe movie production is an even better comparison (especially now where most of the production seems to happen 'in post').Also VC doesn't seem to be all that interested in investing into game dev companies, I guess because it's such an extreme hit-and-miss business (e.g. even when a game-dev company lands a massive hit, the next attempt may be a massive flop and sink the whole company).
> Ostensibly they are doing remarkable similar engineering problem solving
The engineering problems have been mostly outsourced to Unity and Epic Games (e.g. Unreal Engine)
by flohofwoe
5/29/2026 at 4:17:17 PM
That’s only true in some instances. Do most AAA titles like Call of Duty, GTA, etc use Unity or Unreal?by LPisGood
5/29/2026 at 4:41:54 PM
There are many studios with their own engines that rival or exceed UE5 - which seems overhyped, because at this point they caught up with graphics fidelity without terrible performance that dread a lot of UE5 titles.Recent notable example is Crimson Desert, they spent years building their own engine for this game and IMO they raised the bar when it comes to creating a huge realistic world.
Others that come to my mind are Decima and RE Engine.
by pawelduda
5/29/2026 at 4:53:29 PM
As a Korean freelancer, I’ve spoken with former developers from Pearl Abyss. They officially work 10 to 7, but the relentless crunch culture drives most people out.While the company is extremely proud of its proprietary engine, I was told it causes severe internal politics. The studio is heavily biased toward the engineers who built the engine. Another huge downside is the lack of documentation—you can't just Google your bugs. (Granted, this was the situation two years ago).
The CEO is famously known in Korea for prioritizing developers while devaluing writers and planners. However, even within that developer-first environment, the proprietary engine has birthed a clear internal hierarchy among the programmers
by jdw64
5/29/2026 at 5:01:19 PM
The main point of using a 3rd-party engine like Unity or UE is not to buy technical excellence, but to get a 'good enough' asset pipeline, authoring tools and engine runtime cheaper than building and nurturing your own inhouse engine and tools team ... especially when the best programmers on those teams are then poached by Epic or Unity anyway ;)by flohofwoe
5/30/2026 at 10:22:36 AM
I agree and that's why I'm happy not all studios not going this route. It usually means they game will be unique above average because one of the reasons would be needing the engine to work for something else than a "typical game template".by pawelduda
5/29/2026 at 5:07:48 PM
Companies I remember: CD Project RED, but they are now switching their newest game to Unreal Engine.id Software, the new Doom series uses highly performant engine (as if there was some legacy there for that).
by krzyk
5/29/2026 at 5:10:41 PM
Crimson Desert's engine is heavily derived from Black Desert's engine (called BlackSpace Engine) so it wasn't really from the ground up, but your point still stands.by nazgulsenpai
5/29/2026 at 5:43:50 PM
I've read somewhere they had several attempts until they could comfortably support the scale of the game, so maybe it was just rebuilding some major partsby pawelduda
5/29/2026 at 4:21:52 PM
In the last few years the pendulum has been swinging back from inhouse engine to Unreal Engine. There are a couple of holdouts, but my guess is that the majority of AAA games currently released are back on UE - at least it feels that way ;)And Unity always ruled supreme for AA and mobile games.
by flohofwoe
5/29/2026 at 9:04:47 PM
A couple of holdouts? Hardly. Capcom uses the RE Engine. Released ~4 games with it in the past three years. In fact, SF6 went from UE to RE Engine. Death Stranding 2 is Decima. Id still uses IdTech, and that's never changing. Ubisoft still uses Anvil, and Outlaws was Snowdrop. EA still uses Frostbite. Bethesda continues to use their crappy engine, which I forget the name of. FromSoftware will likely never give up their engine, which has been used for Elden Ring and its successors. There's more that I can't be bothered to look up.by LugosFergus
5/29/2026 at 8:27:29 PM
Swinging back? Was UE used more widely in the past than it is now?by garaetjjte
5/30/2026 at 9:48:50 AM
When the Xbox360 was released, a lot of game companies moved from inhouse to UE3. In the next generation the pendulum has swung back to inhouse, and now its swinging back to UE5. Seems to be a 10 year cycle or so...by flohofwoe
5/29/2026 at 4:46:39 PM
I heard a great perspective on this from a Chinese developer. The reliance on outsourced engines like Unity or Unreal isn't just driven by the high costs of in-house development and yearly upgrades. The real issue is career mobility.Knowledge of a proprietary engine is completely locked to that specific company. They pointed out that Unity and Unreal became industry standards simply because of the dynamics of changing jobs. I fully agree with that assessment.
by jdw64
5/29/2026 at 7:37:28 PM
Microsoft moved Halo to Unreal Engine. Call of duty engine is based off ID tech 3.by asdff
5/29/2026 at 10:49:51 PM
It barely resembles id tech 3 at this point (I am an engine and pipeline programmer at Sledgehammer Games). There are very very few remnants of it in the codebase. I occasionally do some spelunking to see what’s left and these days it’s just the occasional comment and function names (although the content of the functions will have changed significantly).by bananaboy
5/30/2026 at 9:04:41 PM
I'm guessing its cheaper to iterate the old engine like this than to try and rebuild a new one from scratch one day, then move everyone onto that new engine and have them be as familiar as they were with the old one made of a couple decades of mostly duct tape it sounds like now.by asdff
6/1/2026 at 2:37:43 AM
Exactly! Armchair enthusiasts and gamers and such will talk about some game release and its "new engine" but throwing away the entire codebase is rarely a sensible choice financially speaking.by bananaboy
5/29/2026 at 4:19:56 PM
Most massive studios have their own which they use across a bunch of titlesby DrBenCarson
5/29/2026 at 6:34:15 PM
Game VC is called being a publisher.by UK-Al05
5/31/2026 at 10:48:05 AM
Hardly comparable IMHO, entirely different goals and scale.by flohofwoe
5/29/2026 at 7:25:10 PM
It's so bad man. I'm pretty specialized in Windows antivirus/malware dev. Big AAA company leading their anticheats? ~200 and that's PUSHING the band. Generic midsize company doing half the work, 300+, at the big names? 700 TC. Remote, game companies want in person 5 days a week, half the pay, and don't have proper interview timelines. And this is for a really niche skillset, my friend with 7 years experience at 2k is making 120k as a C dev. Now part of it, is they don't believe they can literally just double their salary AND do a fourth of the work by getting out of that horrible industry.by maldev
5/29/2026 at 7:30:54 PM
Seems like game studios are distributed too where you just don't benefit in any way shape or form of economies of scale and agglomeration for the worker. Activition in Santa monica lays you off, where do you go now? Raytheon probably doesn't want you given how many actual aerospace people they can pick from and they all know the secret fire of software engineering too. Google in Playa vista would probably want more pure CS experience not someone pigeonholed into gamedev. Got to pack up your life and go somewhere else in all likelihood.by asdff
5/29/2026 at 4:02:53 PM
I think a never-ending pool of young, fresh, and naïve graduates happy to sell their soul to make video games has been a strong contributor for low wages for a while. Any time someone gets too senior, just replace them with another graduate. Naturally, the product quality and timescale suffers too.by HugoTea
5/29/2026 at 5:00:44 PM
Yep, 0-day contracts. Don't like it? Move on and we'll hire another set of university grads.That's how most studios work.
by doublerabbit
5/30/2026 at 2:44:36 AM
Can AI replace game developers now?by ZivenChang
5/29/2026 at 5:04:56 PM
I'm actually in the industry. I don't think it's as much about supply and demand as it is about expected value of the product.Most games are expensive to make and most of them fail. Way more than normal software which doesn't have ultra-high marketing costs or diverse staffing needs (Art, QA, game design, etc).
by tyleo
5/29/2026 at 4:12:03 PM
Because pay is not directly correlated to technical finesse. It is primarily dictated by how much money a company can expect to make.And Advertising (FAANG) is insanely profitable, while doing software in other difficult fields (firmware in automotive or embedded, etc) may be technically challenging, but the margin is is only like 6-10% max
by moooo99
5/29/2026 at 4:18:35 PM
Only 2 of the letters in FAANG are primarily advertising companies.by LPisGood
5/29/2026 at 6:01:22 PM
They're all pretty high margin though.I think flipping the question like this gets at the heart of the true answer.
The question is not why video game pay has lagged, but why tech pay has jumped ahead.
by psvv
5/29/2026 at 6:07:00 PM
In my time I heard some people called this the "Tower Records effect". If the workplace is cool enough (record store, video game company, rock band), enough kids will want to work there that the employer can pay peanuts and won't run out of applicants.by ihaveajob
5/29/2026 at 7:29:45 PM
Way outdated info, but back in mid '00s when I was interviewing with EA, the recruiter guy who happened to like me said - "be careful when entering gamedev domain, because it's very hard to exit it once in."Not in a sense that it's so good so you don't want to leave, but that other companies are leery of hiring people with the gamedev experience.
Make what you will out of that remark.
by abcd_f
5/29/2026 at 7:42:12 PM
Not true. Regularly had FAANG want to double/triple my salary to leave games.by Scaled
5/29/2026 at 4:16:33 PM
Supply and demand. There's a high supply of people who want to work in video game development, which drives down the price of labor. It's the same reason why nearly all actors work for a pittance.by rayiner
5/29/2026 at 4:49:22 PM
You could invert this question and it would be equally valid.The question is why the gulf, rather than why the lag. Why is big tech pay so high?
When you compare it to other trades and industries video game dev pay is much more “normal”
by simonjgreen
5/29/2026 at 6:05:14 PM
Flipping the question like this was my instinct as well. I think the passion tax and supply and demand are definitely factors, but the real reason for the gap is that big tech has gotten increasingly exploitative and monopolistic, leading to larger margins and higher competition for talent.by psvv
5/29/2026 at 4:18:54 PM
Video game development is largely grunt work outside of the engineby DrBenCarson
5/29/2026 at 4:56:15 PM
This, and also, if you just take a step back and think of the bigger picture, the work isn't valuable. There's a lot more value in pushing ads, a CRM, an email app, etc than keeping a 14 year old kid entertained.I don't really buy the supply/demand argument everyone else is saying here. The end product just doesn't provide value to people's lives. The amount of effort you'd need to put in to provide value to someone's life through a video game is way higher than the effort you'd need to put into a productivity tool.
In fact, more often than not, video games provide negative value to people's lives. They're usually a waste of time at best. And at worst, addictive and carpal tunnel inducing.
by jhatemyjob
5/29/2026 at 6:38:14 PM
This is a crazy worldview to hold when looking at the annual revenue of just a single IP like Pokemon? Video games surpassed Hollywood years ago! If we want to measure value differently, I already treat certain games with the same reverence as literary classics, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.by abnercoimbre
5/29/2026 at 6:40:15 PM
Funny you mention Pokemon. Have you been to a Pokemon regional championships recently? Take a good look at the average Pokemon player. You really think that hobby is adding value to their life?by jhatemyjob
5/29/2026 at 6:46:17 PM
I've met people whose lives were almost destroyed due to games. This is true. I've also met those whose lives were transformed positively by it (no, not Pokemon.) They run the whole gamut.I'll concede an email app doesn't produce that kind of wide-ranging effect on humans.
by abnercoimbre
5/29/2026 at 6:55:42 PM
That is precisely my point, thank you. Yeah there's a few good ones like Undertale or (early 2010s era) Minecraft or Roblox or Garry's Mod but those are rare. Most of the games out there are the types like Pokemon which are more like a drug addiction.So bringing this back to the "why don't game devs make boatloads of money like FAANG" it's because the vast majority of roles are being a scripter at Game Freak or Rockstar or whatever. I'm sure the engineers at Valve or Roblox or Epic Games are being treated very well because those companies actually provide value to people's lives.
Roblox to a lesser extent, but you get my point. I'd rather have my kid play Roblox where he might learn Lua scripting, than Pokemon which is just a complete dead end. Just look at what happened to Byuu and Hax. Or hell, even endrift with that weird unnecessary drama with Analogue. Many such cases. Not sure if you get those references. But the stories surrounding those people are why I stay far away from Nintendo stuff. And gaming in general.
by jhatemyjob
5/30/2026 at 5:59:11 AM
> The end product just doesn't provide value to people's lives.You're waaay too tuned in to the corporate ideology to be saying something like this. I suggest you zoom out. The top heavy games do make a ton of money, so evidently there's value in entertaining people and giving them some good playtime compared to the drudge that is corporate life (PS. in case you didn't know not all people love to work for some other guy's mission/vision).
by oreally
6/1/2026 at 3:17:53 AM
Entertainment isn't inherently valuable.by jhatemyjob
5/29/2026 at 5:40:56 PM
As opposed to making a crud app for a SAAS?by maccard
5/29/2026 at 6:35:07 PM
[flagged]by jhatemyjob
5/29/2026 at 7:20:57 PM
The ignorance in this comment is offensive.by maccard
5/29/2026 at 11:03:06 PM
Exactly. There is a lot of ignorance in this thread. As if the only two roles are engine programmer and gameplay programmer where gameplay is just scripting. Nope. We have engineering teams dedicated to: UI, physics, rendering, streaming, automation, gameplay (people who write gameplay features that the game designers will access via script), build infra, pipeline (and pipeline is split up into people doing lighting/geometry tools vs tools that package up data for efficient runtime use), level editing tools, asset editing tools. I’m sure I’ve forgotten plenty. Then there are the QA teams, automation (not engineers but write test scripts etc), production, level designers, vfx artists, tech artists (almost programmers), character artists, 2d artists, prop artists, gameplay scripters. This is Activision but I know EA are similar and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that most AAA companies are also similar.There’s a wide range of pay levels there.
by bananaboy
5/29/2026 at 11:04:04 PM
And none of those people are “low skill”.by maccard
5/30/2026 at 12:17:13 AM
I never said they are low skill. They just don't have their priorities straight.Those QA teams, automation people, production, level designers, vfx artists, tech artists, character artists, 2d artists, prop artists, gameplay scripters, etc are doing all that work just to put some pretty pixels on a 14 year old's screen. There's very little value there.
by jhatemyjob
5/30/2026 at 12:47:56 AM
Jesus Christ dude.First off, adults play video games too. I think they’re actually the leading consumers, though I don’t care to look that up. Second, people like entertainment. Videogames are certainly no less important than movies, TV, or most novels. Entertainment can be important. Personally I find really hard videogames to be meditative and it’s bad for my mental health when I can’t get some time now and again to play some. I also made most of my adult friend group as a teen playing Halo together in a cabin multiple times per week.
I’m guessing you at least consume some sort of entertainment, so to say something like that is incredibly hypocritical.
by Auracle
5/30/2026 at 2:47:56 AM
I touched a nerve huh? You wanna know another leading consumer? Recreational drug users. Lot of money in that industry.by jhatemyjob
5/30/2026 at 1:01:49 AM
Sorry - you said it’s “grunt work”, not low skill.> There's very little value there.
As opposed to the 373rd X-as-a-service crud app with AI features?
by maccard
5/30/2026 at 2:43:27 AM
Ok so now you're lying. I never said that.by jhatemyjob
6/1/2026 at 3:40:44 AM
Okay, sorry. I retract that. I responded to the original comment saying "this", which implies that I would have said that myself. So... you got me there.As for the second part of your comment, well... yeah, I don't disagree with you there. That doesn't have any value either. Those people are probably not making that much money.
by jhatemyjob
5/29/2026 at 4:10:53 PM
I work in tech. I would be happy to work on gta 6 for 30% of my current income.by para_parolu
5/29/2026 at 4:34:53 PM
In addition to low salary, and crunchtime, the other big downside in the gaming industry is frequently layoffs, and studioes going bust.You can't ride on a single game for long, and if the next one goes badly half the company will get fired. Not true of the bigger studios, but of course not everybody works in those.
I have friends who work in gaming, and it's a regular thing for studios to form with a great game, go bust a year or three later, and then a new studio get formed with largely similar staff.
Developers move between the same companies around and around again. The lack of stability is a real problem, especially with increasing use of "AI".
by stevekemp
5/29/2026 at 7:38:45 PM
Shit can hit the fan with bigger studios when Microsoft or Sony acquire them.by asdff
5/29/2026 at 4:19:04 PM
Seconday question, for how long do you think you would be happy with that arrangement?by SuddsMcDuff
5/30/2026 at 5:52:12 AM
Most industries or companies that have a brand or make something people are passionate about, get away with paying lower salaries since they'll attract workers who want to work specifically at that company or in that industry. Companies that do boring things have to compete harder for workers.by somedude895
5/29/2026 at 4:09:44 PM
I think the usual theory is: So many of us got into computers because we loved playing video games, and wanted to make them, and then loved making games. So the game companies that will pay you money to make games (even if there's a lot of non-fun to it) don't have to pay as much as, say, a surveillance capitalism company of sharp-elbowed careerists.IIUC, the majority of FAANG is people who are there, first and foremost, for the paycheck. (And then maybe they get interested in the work, especially if it seems like progress towards a promotion for more money, or because it gave them skills or resume keywords that they can then use to get more money elsewhere. It's the money/career that's interesting first -- craft and product are only a consequence of wanting the money.)
by neilv
5/29/2026 at 4:01:45 PM
Has it? A lot of 'big tech pay' is based on US salaries which are astronomical compared with all of Western Europe. And big game companies are lot more spread out globally. For example, in this case they're in the UK so how do their salaries compare with UK dev salaries?by basisword
5/29/2026 at 4:18:34 PM
Even in the US, game developer positions tend to pay much lower than the same skills can get you at a "big tech" company.by connicpu
5/29/2026 at 7:04:24 PM
They pay slightly above market rate compared to standard software in the UK, but below London/FAANG wages.by zipy124
5/29/2026 at 6:39:47 PM
I mean it’s not just tech ALL salaries in the US make Europe look a joke.by whywhywhywhy
5/29/2026 at 11:54:18 PM
Basically - building video games is (or seems from the outside) fun and cool, and so there are lots of people who want to do it. In effect, people are willing to be paid in fun, rather than in money. Also, games just generate a lot less revenue overall than boring, run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen SaaS apps. By a wide mile. When you look at these SaaS companies they're generating maybe $1M/yr in revenue per employee (not just developer). Some blockbuster games can achieve that, but not many.So basically, high supply of labor and relatively lower demand for it in games than in boring business/SaaS software.
by Nifty3929
5/30/2026 at 12:00:29 AM
99.99% of SaaS could only dream of the revenue of GTA5, and this post is about GTA6. It generates more revenue than famous SaaS unicorns like Notion and Figma.by deaux
5/29/2026 at 4:01:54 PM
Supply and demand would suggest that there's more supply of those willing to be paid less to work in entertainment 'on games' to meet the demand. Would be cool to see actual economics on it though.by jrmeyer2
5/29/2026 at 4:00:57 PM
Passion tax.by bananabiscuit
5/29/2026 at 4:20:05 PM
Individuals making choices.by SuddsMcDuff
5/29/2026 at 11:06:00 PM
And companies using the many individuals to magnify their leverage.by throwawaysoxjje
5/29/2026 at 5:43:45 PM
Big video game industry never had to compete with META for top talent.Tangible example: Walmart labs had to quadruple the salaries once it realized they could not attract any scientists or top tier engineers.
by whatever1
5/30/2026 at 2:32:06 AM
A lot of game development is not technically sophisticated, especially when the engine is bought or developed already. The other factors are the hit driven nature of the business, meaning you can spend years building a game that flops, and the fact that many people want to make games which drives down salaries. In my opinion game developers should work like movie staff; mid level wages but the ability to earn residuals from all their games. It means a secure life if you have enough hits.by justinhj
5/29/2026 at 5:55:45 PM
Maybe the skill set in game dev is less portable to other domains? I'm on backend side, and I interviewed a lot of people over my career, with all variety of backgrounds, and I can hardly recall anybody coming from the gaming industry for some reason. It seems to be somehow separate from other tech fields, not sure why. If that's true, then the cause is that the market is smaller, so the gaming studios have more power.by smsm42
5/29/2026 at 4:13:47 PM
Supply/demand.For example, GPU shader programming is something people will practically fight over doing because it's so non obviously utterly addictive.
I would say dev roles in tech in general that lack an operational component also lag in pay, and much of gamedev is pure dev in a sense the wider tech industry has since largely forgotten exists.
On the art side it's even more extreme.
by fidotron
5/29/2026 at 5:32:09 PM
GPU programming has to be one of the highest paying jobs in the game industry, and it can transition quite easily into other industries as well. Mostly because it’s not an entry-level position. On top of being a solid C++ developer, you need to understand the entire hardware stack and be able to optimize shaders at the instruction level while juggling things like occupancy, memory coalescing, and other low level performance concerns.by smartties
5/29/2026 at 5:56:59 PM
My experience of it, which is quite substantial both as dev and overseeing whole teams at it, is people do not pay for GPU programming, they do pay for integrating it into their framework, optimizing what the artists did already, and developing profiling tools, but the only part of that remotely competitive with ops related roles is "We didn't think we needed developers so our art team made an inefficient mess in Unreal and we're desperate to release the game on time and are throwing money around to make sure it actually runs on remotely normal hardware", after which they will sit around complaining about how expensive it was and the amount of damage that was done to their artistic vision in the process.by fidotron
5/29/2026 at 7:00:07 PM
I agree, low-level highly specialized technology roles within game companies do pay well.by manas96
5/29/2026 at 6:32:42 PM
“Working on GTA 6” is a dream job for many millions of young people and there is only one rockstar north, if you quit the line of people willing to replace you for minimum wage would be thousands long, the number willing to do it for free would be hundreds long.“Writing react components” “deploying a database” “debugging the Android build” are not dream jobs and you can do it at hundreds of companies
by whywhywhywhy
5/29/2026 at 8:12:01 PM
Everyone says supply and demand and then explains labour supply. Which is an important piece.But the labour demand half is important too. Bigtech makes so much money (or is so well financed) that competing on top talent is more feasible when compared to the boom/bust nature of the games industry.
by ninth_ant
5/29/2026 at 4:22:59 PM
Major studio pay the same as in tech for the base salary, the big difference is in bonus/stock.by Thaxll
5/29/2026 at 10:42:10 PM
Supply of folks who want to work on a game is higher so wages suffer. Pay is not influenced by talent or merit alone.That and they used to be able to waive a mythical shipping bonus but if it was ever true, I don't think its really something to count on these days.
by jayd16
5/29/2026 at 6:31:03 PM
Historically it has always been a bottom tier paying industry. Same like animation and VFX. On top of this, now you have AI and almost anyone can create some impressive games using stuff like Claude code. So, I foresee it will only get worse from here.by neya
5/29/2026 at 8:00:28 PM
> Can anyone comment on why "big video game" dev pay has lagged "big tech" pay so badly?I believe its game developers are more easily exploited is because typically they really want to work in the game industry.
by wnevets
5/29/2026 at 4:27:05 PM
Too many people are willing to do it for low pay and long hours because of their passion for it. Also most games are not guaranteed clients and thus profits like with large corporate software.by dyauspitr
5/29/2026 at 5:16:00 PM
How can pay ostensibly be lagging behind big tech at Rockstar, yet GTA 6 allegedly has a budget of $3B? Granted not all of it will be allocated to development cost, but still.by sjtgraham
5/29/2026 at 4:16:47 PM
People are willing to work for less because they enjoy the work more. Also wouldn't be surprised if the gaming industry trends younger, so less experience negotiating.by tripleee
5/29/2026 at 6:07:38 PM
My guess would be that game prices haven't dramatically changed in 20-30 years and development costs have skyrocketed. Easiest way to save money is on payroll.by geriatricguy
5/29/2026 at 6:54:01 PM
Game sales have skyrocketed though. Inflation corrected revenue has increased something like 5x in the past 30 years.https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenue...
by jampekka
5/30/2026 at 2:34:56 PM
Where are you seeing a 5x there? I see a 2x over the last 30 years for PC & Console - which are the expensive platforms to develop for. (If you're AA(A).)by lrae
5/29/2026 at 7:39:39 PM
This forgets about microtransactions.by asdff
5/29/2026 at 6:13:40 PM
Employee pay depends on the margins of the industry. High margin industries can afford to pay high wages. Game publishers have nowhere near the margins of Google.by Sevii
5/30/2026 at 12:30:14 AM
I imagine it is because people who aspire to work in gaming will also aspire to lower pay for the prestige, even if in reality the work is equally boring.by claysmithr
5/29/2026 at 10:07:05 PM
Because “big video game” revenue did continue to grow exponentially.Big Tech has infinite money from ads to spend on whatever. Video games do not.
by forrestthewoods
5/29/2026 at 7:11:21 PM
So I can comment on this as someone who has worked in video games for 15 years now, for 3 of the biggest publishers.To start with, I've been at Ubisoft for 10 years - and the pay was famously abysmal. Like you could go and work at a supermarket and earn more, without joking. And every time I tried to argue about it the counter argument was
1) we pay low but you get to work on cool stuff
2) there is an infinite number of people interested in working here
3) if you don't like it, then leave
And you know what....as much as I absolutely hate to admit it, there was a nugget of truth to that. I was paid like shit, but I got to work on games which sold 30-40 million copies and were enjoyed by a lot of people. Nothing makes me happier than meeting people saying they played one of the games I worked on and they loved or they have fond memories of it. I don't think that justifies the poor pay, but all of my friends in IT were paid a lot more but worked on some software they hated and no one remembers it. I mean there are exceptions to this, but in general, I really enjoyed my time at Ubisoft, the problems were interesting and everyone who worked there really wanted to be there. Incredibly skilled and passionate people.
BUT I've since moved to one of the other largest publishers in video games and basically had the same position but doubled my salary. Then couple years later I moved to another big publisher and I got a crazy pay bump, basically in line with what people I know at "big tech" are being paid. And I took a step down from a tech lead to senior engineer to be here.
So I think some parts of the industry are definitely paying top money for people to work for them. When I was looking for jobs I had several offers from big companies in video games at similar pay too, so they weren't alone in this.
I think the industry has just changed from what it used to be. At least afaik programmers are being paid much better than they used to be. But that's just my personal experience.
by gambiting
5/29/2026 at 5:09:59 PM
There are more silos in the software engineering industry than you might expect as a "Big Tech" kind of engineer (assuming that's where you're speaking from). Gaming, embedded, audio, aviation, defense, automotive, medtech and pharmacy, deep enterprise, finance, etc.Those silos maintain different processes and workflows, different company cultures, different skill specializations, etc and jumping around between them in mid-career or senior can be very challenging. So they tend to have their own org chart shapes and salary/benefit norms.
When a Big Tech company moves into or absorbs one of those silos, or emerges from one of those silos, it can shake up what the people within them get paid (and thereby have big knock-on effects for legacy employers), but otherwise it's just it's own little bubble in a lot of ways. People can share stories and ideas across the siloes in venues like HN, but many of the "what are you even talking about" reactions that happen on here often occur when people from these different silos stumble into what are sometimes deep differences in what they do and what their work experience is like.
by swatcoder
5/29/2026 at 5:09:55 PM
my guess is: the ENGINEERING problems they solve are harder, but they're still just video games at the end of the day, compared to something that solves an actual business need.by saadn92
5/29/2026 at 6:50:09 PM
The business need of the games industry is making money selling games and content and ads, just like the business need of Netflix or Spotify is making money via ads and subscriptions for music or movies or etc.It's a consumer business much like any other. Just like most startups and major companies, they are not necessary for the world in the way utilities for example are.
The problem of videogames compared to startups and SV tech is that the long-term money potential is very limited at best, and rapidly becomes very brittle. Most startups pay bigger salaries for much easier work, because they burn the money investors are betting hoping the company will crack a new long-term market, not because they make money themselves. There's very little games market to crack, very little chance to turn your product into a long-lived platform to built on top of, meanwhile the upfront investment is huge.
by Jare
5/30/2026 at 6:04:25 AM
This is correct. Market economics doesn't care how hard/deep you worked on something, just how much value it can get for cheap.by oreally
5/29/2026 at 6:58:50 PM
It is a tax on dreams.by RicoElectrico
5/29/2026 at 4:00:50 PM
Because they put up with it.by majorchord
5/29/2026 at 6:06:42 PM
Sexy rarely pays.by bdcravens
5/29/2026 at 4:53:27 PM
More people dream about building the next game than building another CRM system.by victorbjorklund
5/29/2026 at 6:48:11 PM
supply and demand as alwaysby jackmott42
5/29/2026 at 5:40:03 PM
Because building video games isn’t really work, it’s just fun. I’d do it for half of whatever these guys are being paid.by MagicMoonlight