Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
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Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
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Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#2I don't see the gaming industry changing anytime soon.
Just like actors and actresses go to Hollywood to be in show business. Many programmers enter the gaming industry so they can work on games.
While I love video games, I can't see myself in the gaming industry.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#3As a 30-year old childless white man who left the games industry after a short 8 months in order to get married and spend time with my spouse, I can tell you that the assessment is fairly spot on. If you weren't putting in 12 hours daily, something was wrong with you and it was 'bad for team morale'. I was also pretty horribly underpaid, as evidenced by raising my salary over 200% by leaving.
Seems to me the 'white' part is being called out unfairly considering the rest of tech isn't a whole lot different, demographically speaking.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#4This comes down to supply and demand - people want to work on games, and don't see a way to get a experience and/or a paycheck out of it outside the large companies.
This isn't weird, because people aren't rational - I know plenty of people who took degrees in fields where the supply of labor outnumbers the jobs available, and thus work less than ideal hours, for less pay and more abuse than they should.
I'd love for everyone to be able to do what they love, but frankly this is frequently the result.
Also, there's an unfortunate truncation on that URL...
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#5As someone with 5 years experience in the industry, this article is spot on the money for everything I experienced.
It's a huge problem, both by discriminating against people unwilling or unable to put in ridiculous hours, and by driving away those talented women and men who are finally becoming experienced experts when they become so burned out they have to leave the industry.
I worked in games for 5 years. I no longer do. I had a lot of good times but I'll never work for a mainstream games company again.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#6I really, truly, honestly believe that above 9 hours a day for an extended period of time actually ends up hurting your development efforts.
You want developers who come into work and WORK. Not work a little, check a little HN, work a little, eat, check a little Reddit. Living at work forces coping mechanisms like this on you because you really only have a finite amount of creative attention.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#7This is a major reason why I gave up on my childhood dream of being a game developer. The industry is screwed, and it'll continue to be as long as it's profitable to create games like that.
In fact, it's only going to get worse as people keep expecting more and more out of next-gen games. AAA game budgets can't keep skyrocketing like they did over the past decade, and that means squeezing the workforce to produce more with less.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#8It's all the things that are wrong with software development in silicon valley with the extra seasoning of a huge backlog of people who will do anything to break into the industry. There's no shortage of 20 somethings with coding chops willing to work 60, 80, or 100 hours a week at 2/3 or 1/2 the pay they'd make outside the game industry. And the same goes for artists too. So game companies hoover up that talent and crank out games, although it comes at a cost because it's not exactly the best model for quality or sustainability.
Edit: And the major downside of working this way is that you don't have the slack needed to truly innovate (technically or artistically).
Some companies do a better job (Valve comes to mind), and those companies tend to focus on quality and unique IP over schedule pressure. Also, indie game development is becoming a bigger part of the industry. The bad-old-ways are still hugely profitable for many game studios though so I imagine it will take a good long while for things to change.
Edit2: Also, the working conditions part is just one way that game dev is maybe 20-ish years behind software dev (on average) in terms of best practices. You can see this in lots of other aspects as well such as development patterns, QA, tooling, release management, etc.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#9Most trendy, fashionable and 'glamorous' jobs are like this. A lot of suckers want to get into the field, and the employers know this.
I know people who work in haute-couture shops. They typically clock in 14+ hours per day, and regularly work insane hours on the weekend. The weeks leading up to a fashion show / collection are brutal. These people have years of experience and managerial responsibilities, yet their salaries are absolutely laughable (I'd say a waiter often earns more than them).
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#10Counter example here. 42 and still happy and thriving in the games industry and married with children. I'm happy to say I have read my kids stories every night of their lives (out of town trips excluded), and make it home for a family meal 95% of the time. You can't do this at every game company, but there are enough out there that you can find them.