Hi guys,
In this post I want to share my current thoughts and ask for your advice. This post is about gamedev in general, and role and perspectives of a programmer inside gamedev.
I'll start with saying that I'm currently 28 and have been doing gamedev projects (or non-gamedev, but using game engines) basically for my entire professional life. During student years I was preparing myself for this industry reading and learning numerous game development tools and knowledge. It was f***in hard, I had nobody to ask and the Internet and books were my only tutors. But I had a dream of making games someday..
Skipping some ranting and whining about how hard it was to find the job, I want to jump to nowadays and say that my dream has partially came true, however am I happy now? Hell, no...
First, most of the jobs I was working were either unprofessional or dull, management was always awful, only some percent of the products actually seen the release light, even lesser percent of the projects can be put on the resume without being ashamed... That's the first fact, the industry is chaotic and unstable, lack of professional education leads to self-prepared workers who often simply bad specialists but it's very hard to find good ones!
Next, I was researching life conditions and salaries of game developers in the Google. One thing I'm sure now is that majority of the programmers are working like a dogs 60-100 hours per week (I found this information from completely different unrelated sources). They can't see their families and have bad health due to this overwhelming schedule. Constant crunching also don't make it better.
Moving to the salaries, seems like average game programmer (non programmers earn even less) is $90k a year (ranging $60k to $100k depenging on the experience). My research has shown to me that other areas although being not that funny can be more profitable in terms of pure money. And moving to indie development is not an option at all as it's complete money fail (just search the Google to find out that most of the indies don't earn even $10k on their games, averaging only couple of thousand bucks... that's simply ridiculous given how much time you should spend even on a small game).
Another things that bothers me is carrier growth. As I understand game programmer can be:
- usual programmer
- senior programmer
- maybe technical director
And that's it. First you work 5-6 years to become senior, then another 5-10 to become head of the team if you're lucky and smart. This will give you probably another $10k-$30k depending on the company/project/luck/your brains.
So what do we have here? You must work days and nights without seeing your relatives for the moderate salary and hot having really good carrier growth... Is that what I was dreaming and spend whole my life to get into? I feel so wasted right now to be honest. What's the point of developing games if you can't even really have time to PLAY them?
p.s. Lately I wanted to learn Unreal Engine 4 as it came out couple of weeks ago, but stumbled upon these thoughts which only led me to the conclusion that I should run from the gamedev as fast as I can while it's not very late instead of learning more of the gamedev tech...
In this post I want to share my current thoughts and ask for your advice. This post is about gamedev in general, and role and perspectives of a programmer inside gamedev.
I'll start with saying that I'm currently 28 and have been doing gamedev projects (or non-gamedev, but using game engines) basically for my entire professional life. During student years I was preparing myself for this industry reading and learning numerous game development tools and knowledge. It was f***in hard, I had nobody to ask and the Internet and books were my only tutors. But I had a dream of making games someday..
Skipping some ranting and whining about how hard it was to find the job, I want to jump to nowadays and say that my dream has partially came true, however am I happy now? Hell, no...
First, most of the jobs I was working were either unprofessional or dull, management was always awful, only some percent of the products actually seen the release light, even lesser percent of the projects can be put on the resume without being ashamed... That's the first fact, the industry is chaotic and unstable, lack of professional education leads to self-prepared workers who often simply bad specialists but it's very hard to find good ones!
Next, I was researching life conditions and salaries of game developers in the Google. One thing I'm sure now is that majority of the programmers are working like a dogs 60-100 hours per week (I found this information from completely different unrelated sources). They can't see their families and have bad health due to this overwhelming schedule. Constant crunching also don't make it better.
Moving to the salaries, seems like average game programmer (non programmers earn even less) is $90k a year (ranging $60k to $100k depenging on the experience). My research has shown to me that other areas although being not that funny can be more profitable in terms of pure money. And moving to indie development is not an option at all as it's complete money fail (just search the Google to find out that most of the indies don't earn even $10k on their games, averaging only couple of thousand bucks... that's simply ridiculous given how much time you should spend even on a small game).
Another things that bothers me is carrier growth. As I understand game programmer can be:
- usual programmer
- senior programmer
- maybe technical director
And that's it. First you work 5-6 years to become senior, then another 5-10 to become head of the team if you're lucky and smart. This will give you probably another $10k-$30k depending on the company/project/luck/your brains.
So what do we have here? You must work days and nights without seeing your relatives for the moderate salary and hot having really good carrier growth... Is that what I was dreaming and spend whole my life to get into? I feel so wasted right now to be honest. What's the point of developing games if you can't even really have time to PLAY them?
p.s. Lately I wanted to learn Unreal Engine 4 as it came out couple of weeks ago, but stumbled upon these thoughts which only led me to the conclusion that I should run from the gamedev as fast as I can while it's not very late instead of learning more of the gamedev tech...
Looking for a job!
My LinkedIn Profile
My LinkedIn Profile