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Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

nytimes.com

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Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#311

Post by jackfraser »

lacey wrote: post #272
ghaff wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also photography, writing, art, etc. Some professionals are in fact resentful to greater or lesser degrees of amateurs willing to work for free (either just for fun or because it's useful to them professionally for reputational or other reasons). I asked a journalist I knew whether he minded the fact that people like myself publish articles/blogs for free in publications that also have paid staff/freelancers. His…

I’m a photographer by hobby and you very often see people wanting to hire someone good but who isn’t expecting to make a living at it with offers like “I’ll let you shoot my event to help build your portfolio, and all you have to do is give me a copy of all the photos.” Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots. I don’t know how often they are successful at getting pho…

> Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots.

I personally think that's not a terrible offer. $25/hour to stand around clicking pictures? It's a lot easier than most work people do for minimum wage, first, and secondly it's not like you have massive film costs or need a ton of technical knowledge anymore. 99% of the shots people want can be accomplished with stock or relatively cheap lenses, too; you don't have to be a gear-head who spends all their profits on their kit for no appreciable difference in how much people are willing to pay.

Most of us don't have $500-1000 to pay a photographer so we simply don't bother and rely on friends and family for it. I might consider getting professional pictures of my family if it didn't cost the obscene amount that it does. There's probably a market on the volume, low-cost side that simply isn't being tapped because photographers are often such dilettantes.

For someone who wants to break into photography, finding a steady supply of low-paid jobs to build up the portfolio and their name recognition for word-of-mouth marketing is probably the best way to go. You wouldn't want to be running at these wage levels for more than a year, but to start, well, there's certainly worse paths.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#312

Post by jackfraser »

ghaff wrote: post #283
lacey wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a photographer by hobby and you very often see people wanting to hire someone good but who isn’t expecting to make a living at it with offers like “I’ll let you shoot my event to help build your portfolio, and all you have to do is give me a copy of all the photos.” Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots. I don’t know how often they are successful at getting pho…

"For the exposure/to build your portfolio." Uggh. To be clear, I sometimes shoot events for free as a favor. And I sometimes shoot concerts or sporting events just because I feel like it. And if you find my photos on Flickr I'll probably give you permission to use them for free. (Though if you want to pay me, that's fine too and I do sometimes get annoyed with the presumption that I'm not going to ask for a fee.) But…

Do you _really_ think your photography job deserves the same hourly wage as an engineer or manager?

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#313

Post by bena »

marcelr wrote: post #269
sokoloff wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of 'passion', and to go where their skills are appreciated/where they're treated better/fairly compensated. I worked a couple years in game industry (shipping an auto racing game for Playstation and contributing to a few other titles; I did sleep under my desk a few nights during crunch time so we'd have a demo ready for…

You seem like the exception rather than the rule.. I don't think anyone is suggesting people not follow their passions, its more about people not knowing what they're getting themselves into most of the time.

Consider this though, he's not doing that now.

He did that when he was young, dumb, and full of dreams...

He couldn't sustain that lifestyle. We do sort of glorify the past and lionize struggle as if there were some nobility to it.

There's not. There's no inherent nobility in struggling or being ignorant. Being a dumb kid willing to work awful hours for worse pay to get out a demo in time is not an ideal to strive towards.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#314

Post by bena »

CM30 wrote: post #181
monsieurbanana wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only one half of the solution, the other half is taking into consideration that there's less demand for video games critics than there's people wanting to do it, and possibly choose another less crowded career.

Well, the article mostly focused on game development rather than game journalism, but you're right, both fields have many of the same issues. In fact, video game journalism may be the worst of both the game development and media worlds, since it's got all the downsides of both (low pay, long hours, unstable employment, companies struggling) plus an endless supply of newcomers who (like with game development) think it…

Games journalism is filled with people who want to work "in games" and know they aren't capable of actually making games.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#315

Post by Tiktaalik »

My video game developers need unions story:

I was a core developer on a major feature of Sleeping Dogs/'True Crime: Hong Kong' for 2+ years. At one point, when the game was still being published by ATVI under the title 'True Crime: Hong Kong', ATVI cancelled the game and 100+ developers were laid off including me. Fast forward a few months and miraculously Square Enix decided to pick up the publishing rights for the name, invested a few more months in polish to finish up the title and released it as Sleeping Dogs. I was of course delighted that this canned game saw the light of day and people were able to play it.

In Sleeping Dogs, despite the significant work I put on the project my name appears in 'Special Thanks' instead of being listed as part of the development team. This is very unfair and inappropriate.

Enforcing a clear set of crediting rules would be one of the things that a game developers union could do.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#316

Post by ghaff »

jackfraser wrote: post #311
lacey wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a photographer by hobby and you very often see people wanting to hire someone good but who isn’t expecting to make a living at it with offers like “I’ll let you shoot my event to help build your portfolio, and all you have to do is give me a copy of all the photos.” Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots. I don’t know how often they are successful at getting pho…

> Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots. I personally think that's not a terrible offer. $25/hour to stand around clicking pictures? It's a lot easier than most work people do for minimum wage, first, and secondly it's not like you have massive film costs or need a ton of technical knowledge anymore. 99% of the shots people want can be accomplished with stock or re…

>$25/hour to stand around clicking pictures?

I'm going to assume good intent but that's an incredibly condescending remark. Just so you know.

How about if I offer a trained developer $25/hour to write me some software? It's just sitting and typing.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#317

Post by [deleted] »

murph-almighty wrote: post #228
derefr wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of 'passion' So the “practical” solution is to change human nature? That doesn’t sound right. It’d be like saying that the practical solution to human trafficking is for people to stop visiting prostitutes; or that the solution to gangs’ drug income is for people to stop buying drugs. In all these cases, you can quash su…

>IT'd be like saying that the practical solution to human trafficking is for people to stop visiting prostitutes I don't want to nitpick but a lot of the strategy surrounding ending human trafficking involves cutting off demand, which means trying to stop johns from buying prostitutes. This sort of `cut off the demand` strategy isn't entirely unheard of.

[deleted]

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#318

Post by luiscleto »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #309
luiscleto wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t think it’s about supply and demand for game developer pay either If there was a shortage of game developers, employers would be forced to give much better benefits and compensation to retain and hire staff (and probably there would be a lot less games and studios). There may be more to the analysis, but I don't agree that you can ignore supply and demand and turn this into just oppressor greedy guy vs oppre…

I don't want to make it reductionist at all, you're right. A more enlightened view of compensation, if you need a more general economic way of looking at it, is: "In a world where most of economic value exists in human relationships or in computation, compensation is more about (1) how accounting reflects that economic reality, and (2) how well the compensated individual extracts accounting value from whatever big pi…

> It's all accounting! I can't emphasize this enough--you can pay the employees 2x as much, or 10x as much, or 1/2x as much, and Fortnite will be EXACTLY as fun as it is now. That's what people are outraged about.

Yes, but there is a difference if it takes 20 devs to make it and there are only 10 available vs there being 200. Competition among the devs as to who gets to make it means each of them will tolerate worse conditions to get the offer over the other. Effectively driving down the costs of producing the game. With a union in play, the cost of production would be stopped from going down.

I'm not necessarily arguing that it is worse with a union than without. But an expected side effect of forcing high costs (high wages in this case) would be that it would make it much harder for aspiring game devs to enter the field.

> you unionize because it will get these people paid better and feel happier at basically no economic cost

This is not true. Again, unions might produce a better outcome, I don't know otherwise for sure. But to think that you can tweak the economic system to behave exactly as you want it to, producing all the positive outcomes with no negatives, is absurd. We can often fail to achieve anything similar with simple software systems, much less with something as intricate and complex as humanity.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#319

Post by legohead »

maxehmookau wrote: post #67
lovetocode wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably jumped the gun on the unionization part. I don’t know a lot about it but my impression of unions is not so bright. Maybe my ignorance is showing with that regard

My knowledge of unions is based entirely on the UK. They allow groups of employees who are subject to poor conditions to group together and participate in collective bargaining. Most programmers in the UK are not a member of a union as pay is fairly high and conditions relatively good, but the majority of public-sector and a lot of private-sector workers are. Unionising would be an excellent first step for employees…

I was part of a union and was even on the union board that did the bargaining. Bargaining was incredibly stressful and a really terrible experience. Each time it made me want to quit my job. You learn just how little the company actually cares about you. Then you can't help but let the other members of the union know, and morale plummets overall. This happens every year...

I'm lucky at my current job that my employer does care for the employees. We are paid well, have amazing benefits, they are open about earnings and such. I much prefer this scenario rather than a union, but I can totally get why some companies need a union -- companies that treat their employees terribly. I just feel bad that it has to be a thing at all :(

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#320

Post by bena »

EliRivers wrote: post #50
lovetocode wrote: post #6

Game developers let themselves be exploited with low pay and unpaid overtime. They should grow a spine and say no to ridiculous work conditions. I am tired of hearing about it. They don’t need to unionize, they need to realize that they have a unique and valuable skill set. If we are talking specifically about programmers, we have the fortunate leverage to tell our employers to go piss up a rope with the weekly job o…

they need to realize that they have a unique and valuable skill set The competition to be a low-paid drone in game development is huge; significantly more than in non game dev. The games industry is powered by huge numbers of low-experience software engineers. They get paid in glamour and the thrill of being able to tell their friends they work in games. They could leave and go somewhere else for more money, but they…

Yes. I see this a lot. There's a testing facility for one of the major studios nearby. Lots of people try to get jobs there and say they work at "X".

But it's all QA. So I'm like "Cool, so you make minimum wage running tests".

I mean, you may never see my name in lights, but I ain't hurting to pay the bills if you know what I mean.

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