THE STATE OF GAME DEVELOPERS: Usually, software engineers are some of the
best paid employees in the entire world.
They have great job prospects and some of them are even able to earn 7 figures.
Now, of course, there are people on the other side of the spectrum as well who are freelancing
and barely making ends meet.
But, the people who are really in a sticky situation are the ones that are in the middle.
These guys generally work for extremely well known brands like EA, Activision Blizzard,
and Ubisoft, but they’re often treated like Amazon warehouse workers.
This is quite surprising given that software developers are white collar workers and are
essential in bringing these games to market.
Not to mention, the amount of games that these companies release per year has reduced substantially.
So, you would think that software engineers would have less on their plate, but this is
not the case.
In fact, software engineers routinely work 12 hours per day, six days a week.
And when a game is getting close to its launch day, this ramps up to 13 hours per day, seven
days per week.
This isn’t some sort of new discovery either.
This has been common practice within the gaming industry dating as far back as 2004.
In fact, EA has already settled two class action lawsuits regarding labor abuse, but
20 years later, nothing much has changed at EA, and this is the same case with Activitision
Blizzard, Ubisoft, and even Epic Games.
Given how demanding these companies are, you would think that they atleast pay well.
That must be why people are sticking around right?
Well, that’s not true either.
While these companies do definitely pay a livable wage, it’s nowhere close to what
these software engineers could be earning if they spent their efforts elsewhere.
Take EA for example.
Associate engineers earn $71,000 per year while senior engineers earn $171,000 per year.
This sounds good until you realize that Google pays their entry level engineers $180,000
per year and their senior engineers $326,000 per year.
So, here’s how these game developers trap engineers and get away with working them to
the bone while paying them below market wages.
THE DANGERS OF PASSION: You commonly hear the career advice of follow
your passion and that if you do something you love, you’ll never work a day of your
life.
But, this advice completely falls apart when you factor in companies that abuse their employees’
passion.
The gaming industry is just one example of this, but this issue is present throughout
the entire job market.
The companies with the best working conditions are generally those with products that people
aren’t exactly passionate about.
I mean, I don’t think anybody is particularly passionate about writing algorithms that collect
other people’s data.
So, companies like Facebook and Google have to pay larger salaries and offer better perks
to get people to jump through some moral hoops and do work that doesn’t exactly excite
them.
On the flipside, companies like Tesla and SpaceX are able to pay far lower salaries
and demand much more because the people who work there are extremely passionate about
the final product and company mission.
Game companies very much fall on this side of the spectrum.
The software engineers that apply to these companies are generally avid gamers themselves.
And they’re usually super motivated to bring games that gave them so much joy to other
players.
This sentiment usually gets them trapped in a vicious loop.
As one game developer put it, “it tends to be more fun at the beginning of a project
and a lot of drudgery at the end.”
Just when you think that you might want to switch jobs, you’re given a new project
and your passion for the art is reignited.
And before you know it, you keep going down the same rabbit hole over and over and over.
One EA executive has even admitted that toxic environments are an inevitability within large
publishers.
And the worst part is that the class action lawsuits that we talked about arguably just
made things worse for these developers.
For example, the second lawsuit against EA resulted in many employees being reclassified
as hourly workers instead of salaried workers.
The reasoning behind this was that hourly workers would have to be paid overtime while
salaried workers did not.
This seems like a good thing until you realize that hourly workers are ineligible for stock
based compensation which is where the money is really at.
At Google, for example, well over half of principal engineers’ compensation is in
the form of stock.
And that’s not even accounting for stock growth.
We all know that the FAANG companies have killed it over the past 10 years, but some
of these game developers have actually grown even more than FAANG companies.
EA, for example has grown 10X in the past 10 years while Activision Blizzard has grown
5X.
And much of this growth is attributable to the work being done by game developers, yet
many of them wont even benefit from the company doing so well given that they’re treated
as hourly workers.
So, unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like following their passion has actually worked
out all that well.
TRAPPED: While many developers get stuck in this vicious
loop for their entire careers, some do try to look for other opportunities but it doesn’t
take them long to realize that they’re kind of stuck.
Here’s the thing, while EA and Google both need software engineers, the work that engineers
do at these companies couldn’t be more different.
At EA, software engineers are primarily going to be working to develop things like collision
detection, collision response, physics, animations, and user inputs.
Meanwhile, at Google, software engineers are primarily going to be working on search algorithms,
sorting through data, debugging production issues, and identifying edge cases.
Virtually none of this has to do with programming great physics or fluid game mechanics.
And while most programmers agree that game development is way harder, companies don’t
hire employees based on how hard their previous work was, companies hire based on how relevant
and applicable the previous work was.
So, it’s typically quite difficult for engineers that spent their entire careers in game development
to switch to traditional software engineering.
This issue is only made worse with time.
As software engineers progress through the ranks, their jobs have less to do with coding
and more to do with systems design and leveraging enterprise solutions.
This includes things like Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Oracle
apps, SAP, Salesforce, and so on.
With that being said, when a game developer with 10 years experience interviews for a
software engineer position, the questions are going to be less about reversing linked
lists and creating binary trees and more about how familiar they are with SAP S4/Hana or
AWS.
The developers that are competing against the game developer are likely to have a traditional
background and will thus be able to answer these questions much better.
Now, you might be asking, why not just apply for a lower level position.
Well, the problem is that it’s even harder to get these jobs because you come off as
being overqualified.
In an ideal world, recruiters would take a closer look at the game developers background
and let them interview for the more junior role so that they can learn the ropes on the
tech side of things.
But, more times than not, recruiters dismiss such applicants as engineers with a lack of
trajectory.
If a given developer has 10 years of experience but they still aren’t familiar with systems
design or enterprise solutions, the applicant comes off as someone who isn’t growing and
learning, and no one wants to hire someone that isn’t growing and learning.
So, while some game developers try venturing out, they’re often hit with a bunch of rejection
and they end up staying at their current role or switching to yet another game company,
and the cycle just continues.
DISCRIMINATION: It’s not all terrible news though as there
are a few game companies prioritize employee’s mental health.
One of these companies is Riot Games who is the developer behind League of Legends and
Valorant.
Not only does Riot Games rank favorably when it comes to workplace culture, they actually
rank at the top.
In fact, 95% of Riot employees say that it’s a great place to work while the average for
a US company is only 57%.
But, even Riot falls victim to one of the biggest isues within the game development
industry which is gender based discrimnation.
Just a few years ago, Riot’s entire leadership was men and they actually got sued for discrimiation.
They ended up settling for $100 million.
Since then, Riot has diversified their leadership to include 20% women, but it doesn’t seem
like the sentiment has changed all the much.
Yes, Riot has expanded their diversity, but it appears that this is more of a show to
appease courts than a true shift in culture.
A similar situation can be found at Ubisoft as well.
In fact, an internal survey at Ubisoft revealed that 25% of employees had seen or experienced
workplace misconduct.
In addition to this, 1 in 5 said that they didn’t feel fully respected or safe in the
work environment.
Since then, Ubisoft has gone ahead and fired a bucnho their executive team.
But to be honest, there’s not much that these companies can do because that’s not
where the issue really stems from.
The issue really stems from the gaming community itself which can oftentimes be quite toxic.
This isn’t just limited to gaming per se.
Basically any online community where you can mask your identity is pretty toxic.
And given that the gaming community is likely the largest community in which this is possible,
it’s no wonder that they’re also arguably the most toxic.
Of course, this isn’t to say that all gamers are toxic.
The vast majority of perfectly normal people, but it just takes a few bad actors here and
there to gain a bad reputation.
And if you want an example of just how toxic online communities can get, I recommend checking
out the YouTube channel: MaskedArab.
The YouTuber basically goes onto Omegle dressed as an Arab and basically everyone is racist
to him.
It’s actually pretty funny because the YouTuber generally roasts these people pretty hard,
but it’s also sad that people can be so toxic.
Anyway, when you combine this online toxicity with the fact that hardcore gaming communities
are dominated by men, it’s not surprising that women working at these game companies
often have to deal with a bunch of discrimination and toxicity.
THE VERDICT: In the end, most game companies are nostalgic
to many of us as we grew up seeing their loading animations over and over again, and many of
us have sunk more hours into these games than we’d like to admit.
Considering this, it’s not surprising that many of these people would like to enter game
development themselves and bring joy to a new generation of people, but unfortunately,
the industry is not all that great.
First of all, given that you're driven by passion, it’s easy for these mega companies
to take advantage of that and demand more work while paying relatively less.
And if you get far into a game development career, it’s often hard to switch to a traditional
software engineering role as you often don’t possess the knowledge and expertise that would
be expected of someone at your level.
And if you’re a woman, all of these issues are just going to be amplified even more.
So, what’s the solution to all of this?
Well, theoretically speaking, it’s actually really simple.
Instead of only following passion, the key would be to follow a combination of passion
and opportunity.
If you’re a programmer interested in game development, the answer might be to join Twitch
or Discord.
These companies deal with much more traditional engineering skills like integration with AWS.
So, you’d be able to participate in and grow the gaming community while not being
subject to its various pitfalls.
And if enough people start thinking like this and move away from traditional development
companies, then maybe the situation may just get better, but that’s just what I think.
Would you want to be a game developer?
Comment that down below.
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