Game dev here, have worked on AAA and indie.
First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. You need a lot more creativity and ingenuity to solve the unusual problems you run into in gaming.
From there, as others have said, it's a simple supply and demand issue. Nowadays I am a university professor, nearly every student who comes in wants to pursue one of the three fields: cybersecurity, video gaming, or recently ML/AI.
This shouldn't come as a surprise, they want to work on the things that influenced them and shaped their experiences so far. There's an absolute over supply of students who want to make video games.
Gaming, like most of entertainment, is a passion-driven industry. You trade good salary for your name in the credits. You trade nights, hobbies, marriages, and your health for this opportunity. That is unless you reach that lofty 1% of developers who are too valuable to be fired.
Not all areas of gaming are like this. Gambling, like working on slot/pachinko machines, pays very well and has pretty realistic work-life balance. However every student I've talked to about this has universally said "no I don't want to make slot machines. I only want to work on GTA/Stardew Valley/Hollow Knight/Fortnite."
There's seriously no shortage of starry-eyed students who are willing to accept minimum wage to solve SDE3 level problems. I was one of them once.
Do you tend to see a high drop out rate or general dissatisfaction from graduates when they come to the realization that making a game is a very different experience than playing the games?
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 never made a game nor have they worked in industry but believe they know how it works.
I guess because they also learn there’s still plenty of money to be made in other engineering domains.
And to be honest, I think games are a good stepping stone towards a career in software engineering / computer science. Especially back in the day when getting a game to run required you to mess around with the computer haha
My first real interaction with a computer in any technical way was trying to get Age of Mythology to work after I lost my activation key. I won't say that I miss those experiences, but they were foundational as h*ck for me.
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 crunch. If you wanna get paid much more and do more "vibe"/fun coding, you can go into app/web dev. If you want stability, you go into fintech/medtech/onsite/etc.
Gamedev offers the worst of all worlds and then constantly posits "why is there so much turn over?"...because you made the industry suck to work in.
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 funds to buy out a course and have me teach it as the instructor.
From there, I wound up at a community college running a bachelor's level degree. They hired me because I was the only candidate with NSF experience. They proceeded to fire their grant manager and have me manage the whole grant without extra pay.
Actually used to hire people for exactly what you want to do: be an adjunct for night classes in tech.
If you want to go that route you need to make friends with the Dean and the head of program. It's rare that we hire someone from the general application process, because most people who work in tech do not make good instructors.
I'll prospect that way, thank you for the insight. I have a unique background AND teaching experience (military leadership for my first career, and then taught as a full time visiting professor for 2 years) but having spent a decade in industry as a software engineer, yes I concur, teaching is not a common skill among the labor force (anecdotal ofc). I hope after I launch my first indie game I could knock on the doors of say Digipen or similar. Will see tho, thats more a 2027 thing.
What kind of PhD research did you do? I considered going back for a PhD program focusing on simulation as it relates to discoverability within AI research, but kept ruling out it was a bad career decision and should be left as a retirement thing
> They proceeded to fire their grant manager and have me manage the whole grant without extra pay.
This is such a bullshit thing to experience. I had a version of this where I took on extra work that I was interested in which became a new revenue stream but was told "let's see how you do and then we'll see about salary bumps". Never saw an extra dime from it. I used the experience learned to land a new job six months later with a salary bump while dumping the other job responsibilities. It's truly the only way to get that bump you deserve.
"You trade good salary for your name in the credits"
When did that become a thing? When Gears of War bonus checks started hitting Epic's parking lot went from a random collection of reasonable vehicles to looking like an exotic car show. I'm fairly certain every dev that worked on Gears or Unreal could have retired off the bonus payouts.
> 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 categorically MORE complex than what Google, Apple, etc develop?
They're not. It's all the same. Same complexity ceiling, same prerequisite levels of creativity.
Most frontends that I develop use the same patterns as games and the backends that I've developed recently look like game servers. Same patterns, same techniques, same level of complexity.
Game development is just development.
It probably depends on the level in the stack your at.
At a high level the engines and frameworks don't feel any different.
Work with graphics and models feels more difficult though then most networked application work I've done.
I'm the opposite. BigCorp distributed systems guy.
I'd agree with all of this from what I've seen though. The problems that some of my buddies solved straight out of college, while very different than 'hard problems' at bigcorp, are... hard.
One buddy ended up moving to the worst of both worlds... backend infra for a large video game and ended up getting video game salary for bigcorp distributed systems problems.
I'd say it has nothing to do with supply and demand, but more to do with captive labour market (e.g. in the UK ability to quit and run own business are limited) and C-suite greed levels and classism.
Working class person being exceptional at low latency game development, will unlikely get a chance in finance and earning 10x for very much the same level of competence, because their accent might not be good enough and parents don't frequent members' clubs.
I’ve worked in pretty much every domain of IT in the UK (FinTech, gaming, broadcasting, Hollywood, public sector, etc) and I’ve not experienced any class bias in FinTech.
I will say that different industries have different formalities (generally speaking). But that just means you have to interview with smarter attire in FinTech vs interviewing for a job in gambling.
As a hiring manager, I can say that companies will recruit for as little as they think candidates will accept. Fintech gets a bit of a pass on this one but only because they rake in so much money that they can generally afford to attract higher salaries. But it does also mean that gaming can get away with paying people peanuts in comparison and that is literally due to supply and demand.
In places where the C-suite have set unrealistic thresholds on tech salaries, I’ve had to get creative to attract candidates. And that often meant contributing back to open source and basically using that as advertising.
Anyway, this is already a verbose reply but the crux of it is:
1. you shouldn’t underestimate the power of supply and demand in the work space
2. The profitability of a sector also plays heavily into the equation
3. You don’t need to be posh to get a job in FinTech.
Is it as simple as supply/demand? People love games and game-loving developers are willing to take lower compensation to be in the industry? As a former obsessed gamer, I remember in my 20s I almost would have been willing to work at iD Software without pay if they let me.
It is actually quite a common occurrence in the arts and other creative fields, where there is a level of idealization for the work in itself outside of the remuneration. Musicians, architects, illustrators, cinematographers are all dealing with the same thing the more the work resembles their ideal type of artistic work, the less to pay usually.
I would guess a big part of this is because the art _itself_ is a form of compensation: Artists have a passion for the end result in a way that organizations (e.g., corporations, collectives, movements, etc.) harness and take advantage of in lieu of financial compensation.
This is usually framed in terms of greedy corporations cynically exploiting young workers, but having interviewed for a Sony studio myself a few years ago (and ultimately going back to my native robotics field for almost exactly double the pay), I think there is something tangible about the compensation that is working on something normal people encounter, especially in the leisure spaces of their lives.
It may not pay the rent or put food on the table, but seeing your name in the credits of a movie your friends watched or a game they played is a perk that has real value. Writing a technical book rarely pays the bills either but it's the same story of getting to see your name on the shelf, and maaaybe it leads to getting on a conference panel or something at some point but really you're doing a lot of labour for far below minimum wage just to be able to say you did (as I did for Apress when I was 20 years old... and it landed me an internship at Google, so there you go).
I've always said that being an engineer is a classic choose two out of three options situation. You can:
- be well compensated
- work on something interesting
- work on something ethical
Obviously there's the rare unicorn out there where you get all three, but those are the exception, not the rule.
To a lesser extent the same has been said about Apple's low pay relative to peer (far less profitable) companies -- the mere honor of working at Apple is an implied part of the compensation package.
I think it is mostly just margins. Sure there are lots of people willing to work for no very little money for game dev but I would say there are tons of people willing to work for very little money for FAANG companies because they want that on their resume.
In fact since we are on hackernews that is kind of thing people wanting to be entrepreneurs do. Work at recognizable big tech company for a few years. Leave to be a founder of a startup. Investors ... well that guy came from google they must know what they are doing etc (the irony is they probably have less of the skills to start a company going that path).
They want it on their resume primarily to make more money and have a better career in terms of getting hired, etc. Very different motivation. They'd only work at a FAANG for free long enough to get that bump. Game devs however would work for many years underpaid because they like what they're creating.
~~Perhaps now especially since these companies are predominately hiring oversees contractors but circa 2009-2015 when I was around entrepreneurs and startups this was discussed.~~
~~Ultimately the goal is the same: make more money. So I disagree the motivation is "very different" its just a lot harder now to do a startup.~~
You kept editing your comment so disregard the above. I misread it the first time and then it changed. I left my response thats makes no sense now.
Sorry, I didn't make the point I was aiming for initially
Your new point is excellent btw. I should have considered that.
I also hope it doesn't sound like I don't care for these developers who are being taken advantage of. They should be compensated fairly for their work.
EDIT I should add why I think it is a great point especially since I make recruiting software. The greatest increases in salary for most people is done by switching companies or jobs. If you don't want to leave the company because you really like what you do it would skew it so that salaries are lower.
sounds very much like open source maintainers too
You're not wrong, but it's also so sad.
FAANG used to be the _dream_. Change the world. Work on groundbreaking tech. Solve harder problems than anywhere else. Get Paid incredibly well.
Then I guess a generation focused exclusively on that last part flooded the zone. I still believe that The Great Resignation of 2021 did more harm to our industry than COVID or any interest rate or VC changes.
It polluted the brains of most of the people in our industry from a missionary mindset to a mercenary, and it decimated big company's established cultural memory all to prop up a bunch of unicorns who will probably all slowly die over the next decade.
So now half of the people can't get a job, and the half that can are miserable. This was true BEFORE AI.
It's just a natural progression. When the company is a startup working on a new exciting tech it's chasing the dream and changing the world. When it's a behemoth employing 200k people, it's impossible for all of them to be chasing the dream. Probably like 90% of them would be doing extremely boring "keeping the lights on" tasks and ensuring this gargantuan machine does not go to pieces under it's own weight. It still can pay incredibly well, but it won't be exciting frontier work anymore. It just can't be, 200k people company can't move with the agility of 200 people company.
Interesting choice to blame FAANG demise on its workers
I was going to post a more extended rant but really yeah, this says it all
People haven’t responded to your very first point, and I want to really stress it because I don’t think most people really get it.
Margins.
Game development doesn’t pay more because game development companies can’t afford to pay more.
Sure, an individual game dev company may make a lot due to the hit driven nature of the field, but the totality of the market simply makes less money per developer than big tech does.
In order for that to change, the market has to increase in size by appealing to a more casual audience, or existing gamers have to pay more. Not something I think most gamers would like. And these are the people who the workforce of game developers form from.
> In order for that to change, the market has to increase in size by appealing to a more casual audience, or existing gamers have to pay more. Not something I think most gamers would like.
To really drive this point home, the gaming community recently lost their minds when it became clear that this generation of video games were going to retail for ~$90 per game. Never mind that even in the early 90’s an average game might retail for $40 and what we would call a AAA game could reach as high as $70. In 2025 gamers declared that $90 was highway robbery. But go look at the credits for an early 90s video game. That $40-90 per unit in the early 90s might need to cover the salaries of 23 people (the size of the credits list for Super Mario World on the SNES). Now $90 has to cover 435 people (the credit list for Super Mario Wonder on the switch). Sure we’re selling a lot more copies now, and (some of) the manufacturing costs are lower. But that’s a nearly 20x increase in personnel for a mere 2x increase in (non inflation adjusted) price.
33.1%: Nintendo's charge
29.8%: Retailer's margin
15.1%: Publisher's margin
14.8%: VAT
That's... 92.8%.
Developer's royalty: 4.6%
"Yikes" -me, just now
It's also amortized over a much longer period of time too. Those 23 people would scratch build that $40 game in 2 years. These days it's more like 8 years, and you're rarely building from scratch.
Now factor in number of copies sold, distribution costs, additional revenue sources...
> In order for that to change, the market has to increase in size by appealing to a more casual audience, or existing gamers have to pay more.
The fun part of all this is that when union demands start forcing the industry in the opposite direction - higher cost, higher prices, smaller market. In a sane world, we would connect this, but in this world, we will just blame management. The union will forever have an invincible PR shield no matter how crazy the demand.
While I fundamentally agree with the concern about unions raising costs in a market where most titles cannot absorb them, GTA/Rockstar definitely can. Especially since the union is fighting for basic quality of life like no crunch instead of (for now at least) increased pay. I am generally not prounion but crunch -- especially at studios that are guaranteed to be profitable (GTA) -- needs to be curbed.
In what world are unions never criticised? I'm in the UK and they are often reviled in the press and among people who don't work in a unionised sector. America has an even stronger tradition of anti-union feeling (maybe partly due to historic links between unions and organised crime but also because the US has often had a stronger collectivisation than most European countries - consider that the political centre in the US would be considered into right wing in most Western countries on most issues)
Margins are high. The video game market makes twice the combined revenue of all film/music markets combined.
revenue != margins
There are 20,000 games released per year that split all that revenue, minus the cost of building those games.
My point was we know those are decent margin industries and video games aren't any more expensive, but anyway you usually look at 20% margin in the industry give or take 10% depending on the scale and particularly advertising costs at large scales.
What does revenue have to do with margins. You didn't mention costs anywhere in your statement.
See my further reply, margin of 20% give or take 10% depending on scale (on average, some products obviously have incredibly high or low margins as is typical in the creative industry).
My point about revenue was that games are pulling in more money than film and TV and we all know they cost less to make, and film and TV has good pay so therefore the games industry can afford similar rates, if not more.
now compare that margin / growth to big tech or hft...
That wasn't the question though was it. Compared to most businesses those are good margins.
There isn't any business on earth that compares to the margins of HFT firms. Regardless they aren't asking for big tech or HFT level salaries.
Hmm compared to film/entertainment yes, but from the perspective of an individual developer worker, your alternatives are not just in film/entertainment
Does that mean the companies that develop games with heavy microtransactions pay their developers more?
Also games are for leisure. The same thing is true in Hollywood—hundreds of crew members getting paid small wages relative to their long hours and a few stars getting millions.
You have the causality inverted. People want big tech on their resume because it makes them look qualified. People with top qualifications work at big tech because of pay. If low quality engineers worked in big tech, it wouldn't be a coveted qualification.
The causality of what? I'm probably missing something obvious here. The cause of people getting paid less in game development I said has to do with margins (although I now think there is more to it than that).
> People want big tech on their resume because it makes them look qualified.
I think I said that?
> People with top qualifications work at big tech because of pay.
Actually I am not sure if that is true. I think top qualification people work at these places because of other reasons than just money. I'm talking Carmack working at Facebook for example is because of more possibilities and less the pay. Like FB is we have this really smart team for you and this tech for you and you can make your own products etc.
After all there is academia and that mostly pays shit and plenty of qualified people there.
> If low quality engineers worked in big tech, it wouldn't be a coveted qualification.
And I think that is probably happening more now. The 10x developer was kind of a myth. More people for less money these days particularly with AI is becoming more of the norm.
Carmack level folks are the exception. the vast majority of faang interest is money. In fact if youve been in dev long enough, youd see even the makeup of the tyipical eng has changed, there are quite a few normies in the field these days, many of whom im not sure even like coding at all. Its seen as a reliably high paying field worth steering towards regardless of interest. It has lately reminded me of the kinds of people id see in medicine. smart, capable, not particularly interested in the field as such.
begs the question why there is a good supply of eng on low margin business though, given the skills transfer cleanly to higher margin businesses.
All else being equal, the cooler a job is, the less it will pay. It's why unions have been so successful in other "cool jobs" like professional athlete and working on movies and TV. There are some people who would do those jobs for free which completely destroys the market power of most individuals requiring collective action to prevent exploitation.
Working for the amount of money one agrees to is not exploitation.
That would be true if there weren't a power and information imbalance.
It would be prudent if you would dig a bit deeper into how unions came to be. Long story short, capitalism can easily create situations where you agree to be exploited to some degree, to avoid being exploited to another, worse, degree.
"Agrees" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Agreeing to $100/hour because you think it's fair and agreeing to $1/hour because you're starving may both qualify, but they're quite different.
I think this is part of it. I have heard some people turn to prostitution to afford working for the mickey mouse company in Tokyo. Second hand accounts. People go to insane lengths just to work at their dream place.
as a student back in 2012, the CS program i was in was mostly people who wanted to make games. that's just one person's POV but most people i knew at the time weren't really into anything else in software.
This is the answer to all price questions, including this one.
There are a large number of people that are passionate about games. Moreso than say, ERP software.
And this holds true relative to demand (gaming is ~$300B/year globally).
---
Additionally, most software engineering is not FAANG. That is the upper end of it.
I am a unionized software developer in media, not games. I helped the game workers at Blizzard unionize and they all spoke of the "passion tax". One reason the "passion tax" is possible for employers is that there seems to be a degree of labor monopsony for the kind of development done by AAA game studios. In this respect it's quite a bit like Hollywood film production in its heyday.
>One reason the "passion tax" is possible for employers is that there seems to be a degree of labor monopsony for the kind of development done by AAA game studios.
How is the existence of a monopsony necessary or even related to a passion tax existing? Suppose the market were a fully free market with tons of software companies on one side and tons of developers on the other. It would fly in the face of reason, and fairness in my eyes, if all developers were paid the same but some got to work on fun stuff like games and others worked on the scheduling software for the scheduling software for the warehouse robot repairs. So a passion tax seems like something that should exist and not really be decried.
> So a passion tax seems like something that should exist and not really be decried.
To put it the other way, work that is distasteful in some way, should also pay more, but this is missing the point.
I think the point of the unionization is that the monopsony of a small number of AAA game studios gives them excessive market power to reduce compensation and especially to reduce working conditions.
A union can acquiesce to the passion tax and say that top developers at a AAA should make $150k/year (a bit low), while simultaneously saying that that developer should be able to see their children on nights and weekends. The project management that leads to "perma-crunch" is something that ought to be resolved on the employer's side, not by the employees.
Suppose you double their pay, make them more in line with other tech workers. How should you allocate these highly coveted game dev jobs? The supply of jobs won't magically increase (it would likely decrease with higher wages), and the number of people interested in working there would grow as well. Do you just have a lottery?
Now rather than being a relatively underpaid worker in an industry you're passionate about, you don't have the opportunity to work there.
Your hypothetical is interesting, but it doesn't accord with the reasons these workers organized. They did not conceive of the issue as primarily about multiplying all worker compensation by some large factor (e.g. 2x). While they were certainly fighting for higher pay, it was as much about the arbitrariness of career paths as anything. Sexual harassment, crunch time, and layoff cycles were all problems they sought to address.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision_Blizzard_worker_org...
Regarding your hypothetical, two points. First, Hollywood unions did essentially go down the path you imagine. The solution there was to create a less arbitrary system that allowed actors to work their way into the union and get a degree of income stability and protection from (previously horrendous) employer abuse.
"The supply of jobs won't magically increase (it would likely decrease with higher wages)"
You should look into the economics of these game studios a bit more. The unit economics are not like those of producing bricks which an essentially linear (capital, labor) -> bricks production function. The distributive effects between the employers, workers, and consumers would be very difficult to model. You can't really figure out the marginal contribution of the factors of production. To use a Hollywood analogy: Do we know how much less one of George Clooney's films would net if a different actor were cast instead of him? If we can't be sure, can we know what his marginal contribution was?
Regardless of whether it's pay or conditions, the changes would make it a more desirable place to work, which would increase the amount of people that want to work in that field.
> The solution there was to create a less arbitrary system that allowed actors to work their way into the union and get a degree of income stability and protection from (previously horrendous) employer abuse
Less arbitrary sounds good, but you need discretion. A lot of unionized jobs rely or pretty arbitrary rules, like how long the person had worked there. Why should someone doing the same job as me get paid more just because he was there longer? That seems more arbitrary to me than my manager's opinion of my work. You end up having an underclass of younger employees and all the benefits accruing to people that have been there longer. This could sink an entire industry or company as they would be stuck with more expensive labor they can't get rid of while a new company can just hire younger people at the bottom of the scale for the same work
> You should look into the economics of these game studios a bit more. The unit economics are not like those of producing bricks which an essentially linear (capital, labor) -> bricks production function. The distributive effects between the employers, workers, and consumers would be very difficult to model. You can't really figure out the marginal contribution of the factors of production. To use a Hollywood analogy: Do we know how much less one of George Clooney's films would net if a different actor were cast instead of him? If we can't be sure, can we know what his marginal contribution was?
I agree, but that's exactly why you don't want some union to do it that doesn't have the insights. The Hollywood analogy is exactly right, how much would George Clooney films net if they used a different actor. Movie studios have a direct incentive to find out. They can pay someone a lot less and if its comparable, they would. But the idea that a union can have a matrix that can capture George Clooney's worth and pay (how long have you been an actor for?) is unrealistic.
How should you allocate these highly coveted game dev jobs?
Would the company not conduct interviews and pick out whoever seems like the best candidates?
We have the same problem in the rest of tech, though? Being unable to get into a AAA studio is as unfair as being unable to get into FAANG.
This just brings game development in line with other code monkeys. Top studios will pay top dollars, Indie studios will pay what they can, often almost nothing.
And I see nothing wrong with that, do you?
Why are so many engineers unable to get into FAANG? Their hiring seems pretty straight forward. Cram leetcode. Most people can't get into it because they don't want to dedicate 100+ hours cramming these tests. But if you do and you're reasonably smart, you'll get in. Much better chance than something like banking/consulting (hire right out of school) or lawyers (must go through lots of schools). Out of the high paid jobs, it's extremely open and transparent.
Apple doesn’t use Leetcode. It’s often an 8 hour whiteboard interview during with you write pseudo code for the most part. You can’t “cram” for an Apple interview typically.
I was under impression there were quite a number of independent game studios, is that no longer a case? What is the cause of a monopsony here - the barrier to entry, at least for making a game, doesn't seem too high. Marketing one successfully is probably harder, but that is a common problem not unique to gaming.
There are more indie games than ever before. The issue is AAA games have become billion dollar projects. They are funded and structured far more like AAA movies than other software. Making games is easy. Getting the money together to spend $500 million on development and $500 million on marketing isn't easy.
Why do you think passion tax is not applicable in AI research? As that too is a very passion heavy industry at least recently.
How do we know it's not? Those positions might have paid higher were it not for employees passions.
Thanks, you taught me a new concept, monopsony today, I didn't knew it got a name!
> monopsony
I had to look it up as well. I assumed it was a play on words about Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony (the three big video game console players).
For future people to look it up.
Monopoly is a single seller.
Monopsony is a single buyer.
Given how popular this has gotten I guess I should point out that it's wrong.
There isn't a single seller so the proper ones are
Oligopoly - Market with few sellers
Oligopsony - Market with few buyers
"few" really meaning that they have pricing power as opposed to 3 companies.
I've done some coaching work with college-age computer science majors. The answer is pretty obvious when you talk to enough of them: Most of them got into computers via video games. Many of them had phases where they worked on video game related code, like modding or trying to make their own games.
Not many people get into computers because they dream about staring at a console to figure out why the kubernetes cluster is misbehaving again (though some do).
Like another commenter said, it's the "passion tax": The more interesting a job, the more people seek it. The more people competing for a job, the lower the pay.
It has not lagged behind depending on how you look at it, video game development can be split into engine programming and gameplay programming. For engine programming, you only need a handful of senior engineers specializing in low level details of a video game engine, and these will get paid high appropriate wages that match industry standard salaries. For the gameplay programmers, they just seek the cheapest labor that can do "quantity over quality" type of work to pump out content and there's a large pool of juniors/interns that will accept these low wages just because they want to be a part of something popular.
Or, just buy Unreal Engine so you can focus on being able to just plug in interchangeable cogs for gameplay programmers. You don’t have to pay them much because you can teach a child how to use Blueprints. Then yes, just crank out slop content for the lowest common denominator and charge $80 for the AAA experience and call it day while laughing all the way to the bank. Churn out battle passes and $30 cosmetic skins for pennies on the dollar and gamers will justify it with “it’s just cosmetic you don’t have to buy it” - while these corporations have behavioural psychologists on staff figuring out the most effective way to exploit FOMO to get you addicted and needing to spend more money on useless shit you don’t need.
Suckers.
Is it any wonder the quality bar for modern AAA games is under the floor? How many $400 million dollar flops do we need before these people take a hint?
I would bet money that the story for GTA6 is gonna be horrendous, based on what we’ve seen so far, but this game will make a trillion dollars or whatever because “it’s GTA6”. Bbuut they modelled individual bubbles in the pint of beer with real physics! Does the game even need to be fun anymore? Does it need to innovate or push the medium forward in any way? Or is it just a way to juice up another GTA online putting out mid content with horrible writing just to keep buying up shark cards for another decade, because people will buy it no matter what. Game journalists would never dare give the game a bad review, because they can’t risk losing access to Take Two published games. So what are we left with? A game with completely unjustified amounts of hype and “brand loyalty” that can absolutely get away with phoneing it in and make record breaking amounts of profit. But if you criticize it in any way, you’re just a hater or you’re not “media literate” or something.
But don't bad gameplay programmers implement gameplay badly? If that is truly the state of the industry that explains all the modern games with extremely mushy controls.
I assume by gameplay he means stuff like in game scripting - when you walk here it triggers this. Mushy controls would be down to the engine developers.
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.
Nope. Rendering, tooling, audio, core engine... None of these pay particularly well. More than just gameplay programmer, sure, but because many engines have moved to a visual node style of programming, it's also less and less programming in the gameplay department.
>there's a large pool of juniors/interns that will accept these low wages just because they want to be a part of something popular.
That's an unbelievably bad _and_ disrespectful take. They accept these low wages because it's their only way in the industry, and because the industry has made sure to keep a steady supply of fresh meat to burn out. "because they want to be a part of something popular" doesn't work when the vast majority work on unknown games in content factories for the first ten years of their careers.
> That's an unbelievably bad _and_ disrespectful take. They accept these low wages because it's their only way in the industry, and because the industry has made sure to keep a steady supply of fresh meat to burn out
Is it really “disrespectful” to make an observation of how the world is even if it maybe isn’t how it should be? That fact of the matter is no one “needs” to accept these wages. Software development in general and game development in particular are labor fields of choice. Being a software developer can pay you better in so many different parts of the field, even today long after the dot com boom. People are choosing to accept these bad offers because they value working in this part of the industry more than they value the higher wages they can get elsewhere. Just like plenty of us choose not to make FAANG levels of money because we value our work life balance, or our specific living locations or our principles and beliefs over the money that those companies are throwing at people.
We can talk about how these bad offers are knowingly abusive or artificially suppressed and still acknowledge that people are making informed choices to accept those offers.
I think by “something popular” gp meant an industry that people are excited to be in — which dovetails with your implication about accepting low pay for a way in the industry
> but because many engines have moved to a visual node style of programming, it's also less and less programming in the gameplay department.
He's talking about the people who make those tools, and he's right. Engine developers are paid pretty well, especially at Epic and Unity. You don't think Tim Sweeney snagged SPJ because he's really into Fortnite, do you?
Modern AAA video game development has much more in common with a traditional factory assembly line than a typical tech startup (for better or worse) - or maybe movie production is an even better comparison (especially now where most of the production seems to happen 'in post').
Also VC doesn't seem to be all that interested in investing into game dev companies, I guess because it's such an extreme hit-and-miss business (e.g. even when a game-dev company lands a massive hit, the next attempt may be a massive flop and sink the whole company).
> Ostensibly they are doing remarkable similar engineering problem solving
The engineering problems have been mostly outsourced to Unity and Epic Games (e.g. Unreal Engine)
That’s only true in some instances. Do most AAA titles like Call of Duty, GTA, etc use Unity or Unreal?
In the last few years the pendulum has been swinging back from inhouse engine to Unreal Engine. There are a couple of holdouts, but my guess is that the majority of AAA games currently released are back on UE - at least it feels that way ;)
And Unity always ruled supreme for AA and mobile games.
A couple of holdouts? Hardly. Capcom uses the RE Engine. Released ~4 games with it in the past three years. In fact, SF6 went from UE to RE Engine. Death Stranding 2 is Decima. Id still uses IdTech, and that's never changing. Ubisoft still uses Anvil, and Outlaws was Snowdrop. EA still uses Frostbite. Bethesda continues to use their crappy engine, which I forget the name of. FromSoftware will likely never give up their engine, which has been used for Elden Ring and its successors. There's more that I can't be bothered to look up.
Swinging back? Was UE used more widely in the past than it is now?
I heard a great perspective on this from a Chinese developer. The reliance on outsourced engines like Unity or Unreal isn't just driven by the high costs of in-house development and yearly upgrades. The real issue is career mobility.
Knowledge of a proprietary engine is completely locked to that specific company. They pointed out that Unity and Unreal became industry standards simply because of the dynamics of changing jobs. I fully agree with that assessment.
There are many studios with their own engines that rival or exceed UE5 - which seems overhyped, because at this point they caught up with graphics fidelity without terrible performance that dread a lot of UE5 titles.
Recent notable example is Crimson Desert, they spent years building their own engine for this game and IMO they raised the bar when it comes to creating a huge realistic world.
Others that come to my mind are Decima and RE Engine.
As a Korean freelancer, I’ve spoken with former developers from Pearl Abyss. They officially work 10 to 7, but the relentless crunch culture drives most people out.
While the company is extremely proud of its proprietary engine, I was told it causes severe internal politics. The studio is heavily biased toward the engineers who built the engine. Another huge downside is the lack of documentation—you can't just Google your bugs. (Granted, this was the situation two years ago).
The CEO is famously known in Korea for prioritizing developers while devaluing writers and planners. However, even within that developer-first environment, the proprietary engine has birthed a clear internal hierarchy among the programmers
The main point of using a 3rd-party engine like Unity or UE is not to buy technical excellence, but to get a 'good enough' asset pipeline, authoring tools and engine runtime cheaper than building and nurturing your own inhouse engine and tools team ... especially when the best programmers on those teams are then poached by Epic or Unity anyway ;)
Companies I remember: CD Project RED, but they are now switching their newest game to Unreal Engine.
id Software, the new Doom series uses highly performant engine (as if there was some legacy there for that).
Crimson Desert's engine is heavily derived from Black Desert's engine (called BlackSpace Engine) so it wasn't really from the ground up, but your point still stands.
I've read somewhere they had several attempts until they could comfortably support the scale of the game, so maybe it was just rebuilding some major parts
Microsoft moved Halo to Unreal Engine. Call of duty engine is based off ID tech 3.
Most massive studios have their own which they use across a bunch of titles
Game VC is called being a publisher.
I think a never-ending pool of young, fresh, and naïve graduates happy to sell their soul to make video games has been a strong contributor for low wages for a while.
Any time someone gets too senior, just replace them with another graduate.
Naturally, the product quality and timescale suffers too.
Yep, 0-day contracts. Don't like it? Move on and we'll hire another set of university grads.
That's how most studios work.
It's so bad man. I'm pretty specialized in Windows antivirus/malware dev. Big AAA company leading their anticheats? ~200 and that's PUSHING the band. Generic midsize company doing half the work, 300+, at the big names? 700 TC. Remote, game companies want in person 5 days a week, half the pay, and don't have proper interview timelines. And this is for a really niche skillset, my friend with 7 years experience at 2k is making 120k as a C dev. Now part of it, is they don't believe they can literally just double their salary AND do a fourth of the work by getting out of that horrible industry.
Seems like game studios are distributed too where you just don't benefit in any way shape or form of economies of scale and agglomeration for the worker. Activition in Santa monica lays you off, where do you go now? Raytheon probably doesn't want you given how many actual aerospace people they can pick from and they all know the secret fire of software engineering too. Google in Playa vista would probably want more pure CS experience not someone pigeonholed into gamedev. Got to pack up your life and go somewhere else in all likelihood.
I'm actually in the industry. I don't think it's as much about supply and demand as it is about expected value of the product.
Most games are expensive to make and most of them fail. Way more than normal software which doesn't have ultra-high marketing costs or diverse staffing needs (Art, QA, game design, etc).
In my time I heard some people called this the "Tower Records effect". If the workplace is cool enough (record store, video game company, rock band), enough kids will want to work there that the employer can pay peanuts and won't run out of applicants.
Supply and demand. There's a high supply of people who want to work in video game development, which drives down the price of labor. It's the same reason why nearly all actors work for a pittance.
Because pay is not directly correlated to technical finesse. It is primarily dictated by how much money a company can expect to make.
And Advertising (FAANG) is insanely profitable, while doing software in other difficult fields (firmware in automotive or embedded, etc) may be technically challenging, but the margin is is only like 6-10% max
Only 2 of the letters in FAANG are primarily advertising companies.
They're all pretty high margin though.
I think flipping the question like this gets at the heart of the true answer.
The question is not why video game pay has lagged, but why tech pay has jumped ahead.
Everyone says supply and demand and then explains labour supply. Which is an important piece.
But the labour demand half is important too. Bigtech makes so much money (or is so well financed) that competing on top talent is more feasible when compared to the boom/bust nature of the games industry.
You could invert this question and it would be equally valid.
The question is why the gulf, rather than why the lag. Why is big tech pay so high?
When you compare it to other trades and industries video game dev pay is much more “normal”
Flipping the question like this was my instinct as well. I think the passion tax and supply and demand are definitely factors, but the real reason for the gap is that big tech has gotten increasingly exploitative and monopolistic, leading to larger margins and higher competition for talent.
Way outdated info, but back in mid '00s when I was interviewing with EA, the recruiter guy who happened to like me said - "be careful when entering gamedev domain, because it's very hard to exit it once in."
Not in a sense that it's so good so you don't want to leave, but that other companies are leery of hiring people with the gamedev experience.
Make what you will out of that remark.
Not true. Regularly had FAANG want to double/triple my salary to leave games.
> Can anyone comment on why "big video game" dev pay has lagged "big tech" pay so badly?
I believe its game developers are more easily exploited is because typically they really want to work in the game industry.
I work in tech. I would be happy to work on gta 6 for 30% of my current income.
In addition to low salary, and crunchtime, the other big downside in the gaming industry is frequently layoffs, and studioes going bust.
You can't ride on a single game for long, and if the next one goes badly half the company will get fired. Not true of the bigger studios, but of course not everybody works in those.
I have friends who work in gaming, and it's a regular thing for studios to form with a great game, go bust a year or three later, and then a new studio get formed with largely similar staff.
Developers move between the same companies around and around again. The lack of stability is a real problem, especially with increasing use of "AI".
Shit can hit the fan with bigger studios when Microsoft or Sony acquire them.
Seconday question, for how long do you think you would be happy with that arrangement?
“Working on GTA 6” is a dream job for many millions of young people and there is only one rockstar north, if you quit the line of people willing to replace you for minimum wage would be thousands long, the number willing to do it for free would be hundreds long.
“Writing react components” “deploying a database” “debugging the Android build” are not dream jobs and you can do it at hundreds of companies
I think the usual theory is: So many of us got into computers because we loved playing video games, and wanted to make them, and then loved making games. So the game companies that will pay you money to make games (even if there's a lot of non-fun to it) don't have to pay as much as, say, a surveillance capitalism company of sharp-elbowed careerists.
IIUC, the majority of FAANG is people who are there, first and foremost, for the paycheck. (And then maybe they get interested in the work, especially if it seems like progress towards a promotion for more money, or because it gave them skills or resume keywords that they can then use to get more money elsewhere. It's the money/career that's interesting first -- craft and product are only a consequence of wanting the money.)
Maybe the skill set in game dev is less portable to other domains? I'm on backend side, and I interviewed a lot of people over my career, with all variety of backgrounds, and I can hardly recall anybody coming from the gaming industry for some reason. It seems to be somehow separate from other tech fields, not sure why. If that's true, then the cause is that the market is smaller, so the gaming studios have more power.
Historically it has always been a bottom tier paying industry. Same like animation and VFX. On top of this, now you have AI and almost anyone can create some impressive games using stuff like Claude code. So, I foresee it will only get worse from here.
Supply and demand would suggest that there's more supply of those willing to be paid less to work in entertainment 'on games' to meet the demand. Would be cool to see actual economics on it though.
Video game development is largely grunt work outside of the engine
As opposed to making a crud app for a SAAS?
At least for a crud app you have a real customer, need to coordinate between the server/client, etc. A game scripter is just making pretty pixels that will show up on a 14 year old's computer monitor for a split second.
The ignorance in this comment is offensive.
This, and also, if you just take a step back and think of the bigger picture, the work isn't valuable. There's a lot more value in pushing ads, a CRM, an email app, etc than keeping a 14 year old kid entertained.
I don't really buy the supply/demand argument everyone else is saying here. The end product just doesn't provide value to people's lives. The amount of effort you'd need to put in to provide value to someone's life through a video game is way higher than the effort you'd need to put into a productivity tool.
In fact, more often than not, video games provide negative value to people's lives. They're usually a waste of time at best. And at worst, addictive and carpal tunnel inducing.
This is a crazy worldview to hold when looking at the annual revenue of just a single IP like Pokemon? Video games surpassed Hollywood years ago! If we want to measure value differently, I already treat certain games with the same reverence as literary classics, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.
Funny you mention Pokemon. Have you been to a Pokemon regional championships recently? Take a good look at the average Pokemon player. You really think that hobby is adding value to their life?
I've met people whose lives were almost destroyed due to games. This is true. I've also met those whose lives were transformed positively by it (no, not Pokemon.) They run the whole gamut.
I'll concede an email app doesn't produce that kind of wide-ranging effect on humans.
That is precisely my point, thank you. Yeah there's a few good ones like Undertale or (early 2010s era) Minecraft or Roblox or Garry's Mod but those are rare. Most of the games out there are the types like Pokemon which are more like a drug addiction.
So bringing this back to the "why don't game devs make boatloads of money like FAANG" it's because the vast majority of roles are being a scripter at Game Freak or Rockstar or whatever. I'm sure the engineers at Valve or Roblox or Epic Games are being treated very well because those companies actually provide value to people's lives.
Roblox to a lesser extent, but you get my point. I'd rather have my kid play Roblox where he might learn Lua scripting, than Pokemon which is just a complete dead end. Just look at what happened to Byuu and Hax. Or hell, even endrift with that weird unnecessary drama with Analogue. Many such cases. Not sure if you get those references. But the stories surrounding those people are why I stay far away from Nintendo stuff. And gaming in general.
Employee pay depends on the margins of the industry. High margin industries can afford to pay high wages. Game publishers have nowhere near the margins of Google.
Big video game industry never had to compete with META for top talent.
Tangible example: Walmart labs had to quadruple the salaries once it realized they could not attract any scientists or top tier engineers.
Major studio pay the same as in tech for the base salary, the big difference is in bonus/stock.
How can pay ostensibly be lagging behind big tech at Rockstar, yet GTA 6 allegedly has a budget of $3B? Granted not all of it will be allocated to development cost, but still.
People are willing to work for less because they enjoy the work more. Also wouldn't be surprised if the gaming industry trends younger, so less experience negotiating.
Supply/demand.
For example, GPU shader programming is something people will practically fight over doing because it's so non obviously utterly addictive.
I would say dev roles in tech in general that lack an operational component also lag in pay, and much of gamedev is pure dev in a sense the wider tech industry has since largely forgotten exists.
On the art side it's even more extreme.
GPU programming has to be one of the highest paying jobs in the game industry, and it can transition quite easily into other industries as well. Mostly because it’s not an entry-level position. On top of being a solid C++ developer, you need to understand the entire hardware stack and be able to optimize shaders at the instruction level while juggling things like occupancy, memory coalescing, and other low level performance concerns.
My experience of it, which is quite substantial both as dev and overseeing whole teams at it, is people do not pay for GPU programming, they do pay for integrating it into their framework, optimizing what the artists did already, and developing profiling tools, but the only part of that remotely competitive with ops related roles is "We didn't think we needed developers so our art team made an inefficient mess in Unreal and we're desperate to release the game on time and are throwing money around to make sure it actually runs on remotely normal hardware", after which they will sit around complaining about how expensive it was and the amount of damage that was done to their artistic vision in the process.
I agree, low-level highly specialized technology roles within game companies do pay well.
It's really the same in any creative industry. Employers exploit you through this combination of factors:
1. You love the area and are willing to take a cut to work in that area, particularly when the alternative is working on CRMs for a PBM;
2. Demand for these jobs still exceeds supply; and
3. The very top of this pyramid makes a shitload of money. If you get to like a Lead Engineer type position, you might be making points on unit sales. And for a big hit that can be big money; and
4. Historically, indie development wasn't a viable route to making a living but it suffers from the same distortions too. For every Notch or ConcernedApe, there are thousands of pepole who below the poverty line. Look at something as widely regarded (but niche) like Dwarf Fortress. They made bank (and deserved it) from the Steam release but they spent 10+ years making a couple of thousand of dollars a month between the two of them.
Just look at the music industry. There are artists and bands who are trying to make it, training for years and making $50 to play some local venue and they're just hoping to get noticed. In years gone by that was a record contract. Nowadays, there are alternate routes. Justin Bieber was a Youtube breakout.
Fun fact: the first artist to have a #1 single without a record contract was Lisa Loeb for Stay in the early 1990s because it was picked up for the sound track (those used to be a big deal) for Reality Bites.
My guess would be that game prices haven't dramatically changed in 20-30 years and development costs have skyrocketed. Easiest way to save money is on payroll.
This forgets about microtransactions.
There are more silos in the software engineering industry than you might expect as a "Big Tech" kind of engineer (assuming that's where you're speaking from). Gaming, embedded, audio, aviation, defense, automotive, medtech and pharmacy, deep enterprise, finance, etc.
Those silos maintain different processes and workflows, different company cultures, different skill specializations, etc and jumping around between them in mid-career or senior can be very challenging. So they tend to have their own org chart shapes and salary/benefit norms.
When a Big Tech company moves into or absorbs one of those silos, or emerges from one of those silos, it can shake up what the people within them get paid (and thereby have big knock-on effects for legacy employers), but otherwise it's just it's own little bubble in a lot of ways. People can share stories and ideas across the siloes in venues like HN, but many of the "what are you even talking about" reactions that happen on here often occur when people from these different silos stumble into what are sometimes deep differences in what they do and what their work experience is like.
my guess is: the ENGINEERING problems they solve are harder, but they're still just video games at the end of the day, compared to something that solves an actual business need.
The business need of the games industry is making money selling games and content and ads, just like the business need of Netflix or Spotify is making money via ads and subscriptions for music or movies or etc.
It's a consumer business much like any other. Just like most startups and major companies, they are not necessary for the world in the way utilities for example are.
The problem of videogames compared to startups and SV tech is that the long-term money potential is very limited at best, and rapidly becomes very brittle. Most startups pay bigger salaries for much easier work, because they burn the money investors are betting hoping the company will crack a new long-term market, not because they make money themselves. There's very little games market to crack, very little chance to turn your product into a long-lived platform to built on top of, meanwhile the upfront investment is huge.
Because building video games isn’t really work, it’s just fun. I’d do it for half of whatever these guys are being paid.
Because they put up with it.
Has it? A lot of 'big tech pay' is based on US salaries which are astronomical compared with all of Western Europe. And big game companies are lot more spread out globally. For example, in this case they're in the UK so how do their salaries compare with UK dev salaries?
They pay slightly above market rate compared to standard software in the UK, but below London/FAANG wages.
Even in the US, game developer positions tend to pay much lower than the same skills can get you at a "big tech" company.
I mean it’s not just tech ALL salaries in the US make Europe look a joke.
More people dream about building the next game than building another CRM system.
Too many people are willing to do it for low pay and long hours because of their passion for it. Also most games are not guaranteed clients and thus profits like with large corporate software.
supply and demand as always
So I can comment on this as someone who has worked in video games for 15 years now, for 3 of the biggest publishers.
To start with, I've been at Ubisoft for 10 years - and the pay was famously abysmal. Like you could go and work at a supermarket and earn more, without joking. And every time I tried to argue about it the counter argument was
1) we pay low but you get to work on cool stuff
2) there is an infinite number of people interested in working here
3) if you don't like it, then leave
And you know what....as much as I absolutely hate to admit it, there was a nugget of truth to that. I was paid like shit, but I got to work on games which sold 30-40 million copies and were enjoyed by a lot of people. Nothing makes me happier than meeting people saying they played one of the games I worked on and they loved or they have fond memories of it. I don't think that justifies the poor pay, but all of my friends in IT were paid a lot more but worked on some software they hated and no one remembers it. I mean there are exceptions to this, but in general, I really enjoyed my time at Ubisoft, the problems were interesting and everyone who worked there really wanted to be there. Incredibly skilled and passionate people.
BUT I've since moved to one of the other largest publishers in video games and basically had the same position but doubled my salary. Then couple years later I moved to another big publisher and I got a crazy pay bump, basically in line with what people I know at "big tech" are being paid. And I took a step down from a tech lead to senior engineer to be here.
So I think some parts of the industry are definitely paying top money for people to work for them. When I was looking for jobs I had several offers from big companies in video games at similar pay too, so they weren't alone in this.
I think the industry has just changed from what it used to be. At least afaik programmers are being paid much better than they used to be. But that's just my personal experience.