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GTA 6 Developers Unionize

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Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#521

Post by miiiiiike »

kelnos wrote: post #472
miiiiiike wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

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.

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.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#522

Post by sonzohan »

mike_hearn wrote: post #512
sonzohan wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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

That 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?

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#523

Post by miiiiiike »

nsagent wrote: post #400
miiiiiike wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cat…

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 g…

> 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?

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#524

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

miiiiiike wrote: post #460
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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”.

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.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#525

Post by sonzohan »

leovander wrote: post #412
sonzohan wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 professo…

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.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#526

Post by 0x457 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #125
charcircuit wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers don't care about the code. They just care that the gameplay is fun.

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.

There are plenty of examples of engine being bad, but gameplay being fun.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#527

Post by sonzohan »

sonzohan wrote: post #258
RobRivera wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#529

Post by oreally »

miiiiiike wrote: post #518
oreally wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#530

Post by ranguna »

deaddodo wrote: post #287
Scaled wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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 crun…

> because you made the industry suck to work in.

What do you mean they "made" the industry suck to work in?

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