Can anyone comment on why "big video game" dev pay has lagged "big tech" pay so badly? Ostensibly they are doing remarkably similar engineering problem solving, so why is there such a disparity?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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)
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.
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 ;)
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
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.
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
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).
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 in a video game is way higher than the effort you'd need to put into a productivity tool.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
This is great news, unions not only improve working conditions, but also improve the final product by not having underpaid stressed staff with high turn-over.
It's a good sign for the future product quality of any company to see workers unionise.
There are countless counter examples that are obvious. Teacher's unions (hard to fire teachers, poor quality). Transit unions (mandating 2 drivers per subway car, crazy benefits, etc). Auto industry fighting EVs.
Sorry, it just doesn't make any sense to make such a broad statement regarding this at all.
A union's job is to protect the union. Nothing else.
That is an entirely different argument that's not particularly germane to this topic. One can agree that unions, in the past, have helped workers, and also understand that they are not always in the best interest of the general public. It's complex, but possible!
There are countless counter examples that are obvious. Teacher's unions (hard to fire teachers, poor quality). Transit unions (mandating 2 drivers per subway car, crazy benefits, etc). Auto industry fighting EVs.
Sorry, it just doesn't make any sense to make such a broad statement regarding this at all.
> but also improve the final product by not having underpaid stressed staff with high turn-over.
We'll see. It's not like police unions are making life better for citizens.
Unions are there for one reason, the union members. This will most likely be good for the employees and good on them for acting in their best interest but it seems just as likely that a unionized rockstar is negative for the consumer in either increased pricea, extended timelines or minimum effort to meet exact requirements from employees.
The benefits that workers gain from unionizing come from somewhere.
I would happily pay extra money for GTA 6 if it goes to improving working conditions. It's only negative for the consumer if the consumer views life as a zero sum game.
I agree with you, but I think most people don't. People generally hate paying for software and the $60->$70 standard AAA game pricing got a lot of people (my well paid friends included) complaining. Even if it was very clearly said that it is the cost of a well paid and respected team behind the game, I think most people won't care.
Notably, American police (the country that invented police unions) are a modern invention that largely exist as a output of slave catching and bounty hunting services.
The police union in my city, in a state that borders Canada and fought against slavery, was founded in 1915. I'm guessing they would be surprised to learn that they are a "modern invention" that was from "slave catching" (I guess they do time travel?) and "bounty hunting services". I'm not even sure how you can say something is both a "modern invention" and the "output of slave catching". There's nothing modern about them and being the "output of slave catching" makes them definitionally not "modern".
Police unions act just like every other union does: in the interests of their members.
Unions are illegal in lots of the world. Federal public sector unions weren't legal in the US until the 1960s. Did the fact that they were illegal in 1965 have any bearing on whether or not they should be allowed? Does the fact that something is illegal in the US have any bearing on whether or not Japan should allow it?
I'd really like to know what kind of tangled logic it requires to believe that.
Regardless, police unions aren't the only example of unions who have worked against the benefit of everyone else but themselves. I only used them as an example because I didn't think anyone here would argue disagree that it's had negative outcomes.
What I didn't expect was to find someone arguing that a union wasn't a union. It doesn't matter if it's legal in other places, it's legal in the US. Just because Japan has made police _unions_ illegal doesn't make an US police _union_ not a union.
Anti-unionists are here to tell us that consumers might possibly suffer. Higher prices and delays on a video game. Which has not seen a release in this series in half this century so far.
For all this consumer cares, great. Make it 20% more expensive. Make it 50% more expensive. A hundred. If that helps the greater union cause I can take more walks in the woods to pass the time instead.
Well, given that computer games are not essential goods, most people could survive perfectly well without these so-called luxuries. Or is it only fairly produced luxury goods that are considered a luxury, while exploitatively produced luxury goods are simply treated as the standard way people live?
The unionised Openreach in UK who are really the de facto layer 1 network provider telco build infrastructure to a staggeringly higher quality than most of the move fast startup alternatives.
Aviation unions force very high standards and represent a lot of the developments in safety and procedures.
Nuclear power is heavily unionised, resulting in a very stable and highly qualified workforce.
Unions in film and tv have done great work defending artists rights and protecting actors, writers, crew, and others from predatory behaviour by studios.
Fire fighter unions stand against unsafe demands and protect the crews in ways the individuals can’t, resulting in meaningful change. (I’m aware of UK but projecting and assuming this applies internationally)
Correlation != causation. There are a ton of differences between the US car industry and those in other countries, unionization is just one factor.
As a counter anecdote I’d point to Boeing’s non-union facilities, which have produced notably less reliable airplanes than their union locations ever did.
Hello, long-time automotive EE here… The absolute insanity I’ve seen from the UAW would make your fucking head spin right off. It took me a LONG time to accept it.
Ignore my first hand experience with your political ideology, it doesn’t bother me.
But, I’ll tell you I’ve been at on-site RVs and BBQs with dozens of on the clock workers. I know a guy making 80/hr to nap and watch TV in his RV for six of his eight hour shift, and this was not uncommon. I know him, because he is THE GUY that can get a vital operation checked out and no one else.
I’m not debating history or ideology. Just experience of a long time working adjacent to UAW.
When I go to on-site to Mexico it’s like an entirely different industry.
A) Allowed a bug in the code make all GTA5 Load times on every single copy on every platform take exponential times longer to load, for YEARS, unchecked or investigated, until some random kid FIXED IT by reverse engineering compiled code?
B) The bug was a simple and unneeded look up for SHOP items
C) The never rewarded the kid, with say a job or something worthwhile for him like 100k ( when they earn billions ). I mean even this decision ALONE is such terrible optics clearly mgmt were AFK.
D) They then came onto HN to argue with me in the comments about how " its not nice to say mgmt responsible should have been fired over this"
I mean Ive had my share of almost blinding incompetence, but the one that really bothers my crumpet, is when they come on here and start denying things.
Im for the union, Rockstar North made one of the greatest games of all time. It will probably result in an inferior product but crunch is unethical and always due to poor management. Ironically it was probably mgmts' own incompetent hiring policies that resulted in a union being formed.
PS - I got a bit heated and have edited this comment so its readable apologies.
PS - All of this can be verified in previous posts on HN regarding both the bug and replies
PS - And to whoever is downvoting me, feel free to reply and tell me what I am wrong about
This JSON-parsing problem is the least of Rockstars problems I think.
But I bet it happened like this:
- when the game was still in active development, it was maybe anticipated that the shop might have a couple dozen items, no problem even when the JSON parsing is extremely slow
- game is released, a separate maintenance team takes over, online mode is running for several years
- over time more and more items are added to the shop, and now maybe there are a thousands of items in that JSON file
- ...and when there's some 'accidental exponential' code in the JSON loader/parser the loading time gets worse and worse, what once was a few milliseconds is now minutes, but there was never a sudden regression after an update, just every week a little bit slower
- depending on the churn on the maintenance team, the current people on the team probably don't even notice an increase in loading time until they leave again for greener pastures, e.g. for them "it has always been that slow"
- management probably first read about the problem in the news ;) (which of course is a problem on its own - but as long as the money keeps flowing and the curves in Tableau go up and up, why should they even care... players apparently also endured it without bringing out the pitchforks)
Although this is possibly true, at any time the dev team could've gone: "loading is slow man, can we just profile it and see if there's anything obvious?". To someone with access to the source code and a debugger, that's probably less than 30 minutes of time to go from zero to hero.
I've done this kind of stuff many times, and something like a json array taking minutes to parse would likely be very very obvious when looking at a trace.
Thanks for your insight its appreciated. I know I come across mean but Im just reminding everyone of simple facts that atleast contributed to all these problems.
I have nothing to do with Rockstar and wish them well, Im just saying that if I were management during these situations I would have quit or made a public apology. Its just what I feel I would have done. Regardless of the salary. I mean if one is mgmt they should take responsibility.
But maybe in late stage capitalism that is both an abhorrent and illogical idea.
A comment from a new account with Negative inference statements.
This is the kind of weird ass replies I just said appeared last time.
PS - You are editing your comment which is fine, but in turn I have to reply. If it is not reflective of reality feel free to add to the discussion and explain what is false. Also ironically your statement doesnt add to the discussion by elaborating on any part of it. This is exactly the kind of behaviour that doesnt help anyone learn any lessons. its just random insults.
I’m wondering if that’s simply a rational thing available to do as opposed to an actual opinion about collective representation whether thats bargaining or something else
“hey, here’s this regulatory overhead you can completely avoid by merely being present, unless people interested in the regulatory overhead are more persistent. just don't fire them though”
On Thursday, the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) and Rockstar staff members announced the Rockstar Game Workers Union. This union will be part of the IWGB. The reveal came in the form of an informative video which delves into their motives and what we should be looking out for in the future.
What is the career ladder like for game devs? In a union, the only way up is seniority or, in other words, the amount of money you've paid in dues over the years. A great developer isn't going to get rewarded with higher pay or a better role unless they've spent enough time/money as a union member.
This isn't a strict requirement of unions though, right? As a trivial example grad student unions have no real career ladder, though the union negotiates a minimum pay and amount of work for everyone.
That’s not true at all. Look at professional athletes. The starting pitchers in a baseball game are the best pitchers. Or consider WGA screenwriters in Hollywood. Their ability to make money doesn’t depend in seniority.
The typical carreer ladder for most people on a game dev team is basically to get fired when a game project ends and trying to get hired by another game company that's just starting a new project ;)
Maybe exaggerating a bit, but that's the reality in many game dev shops, especially when a game doesn't immediately sell in great numbers.
"...when a game project ends..." ...regardless of whether the game is successful or not. On the upside, you get freedom to create stuff like Concord and Highguard.
Can anyone comment on why "big video game" dev pay has lagged "big tech" pay so badly? Ostensibly they are doing remarkably similar engineering problem solving, so why is there such a disparity?
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.
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.
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.
Interesting choice to blame FAANG demise on its workers
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.
There's a cool 1990s magazine scan that breaks down the margins for an SNES cartridge: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/11140t0/pricebreakd...
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
[delayed]
>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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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
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).
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 ;)
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
Most massive studios have their own which they use across a bunch of titles
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Video game development is largely grunt work outside of the engine
As opposed to making a crud app for a SAAS?
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 in a video game is way higher than the effort you'd need to put into a productivity tool.
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.
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".
Seconday question, for how long do you think you would be happy with that arrangement?
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.
Passion tax.
Individuals making choices.
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”
Major studio pay the same as in tech for the base salary, the big difference is in bonus/stock.
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.
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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
More people dream about building the next game than building another CRM system.
Because they put up with it.
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.
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?
Even in the US, game developer positions tend to pay much lower than the same skills can get you at a "big tech" company.
Who would have thought we'll get programmer unions before GTA 6!
This is great news, unions not only improve working conditions, but also improve the final product by not having underpaid stressed staff with high turn-over. It's a good sign for the future product quality of any company to see workers unionise.
There's no data to prove this assertion, unfortunately.
There are plenty of studies backed by plenty of data to support exactly these assertions.
There are countless counter examples that are obvious. Teacher's unions (hard to fire teachers, poor quality). Transit unions (mandating 2 drivers per subway car, crazy benefits, etc). Auto industry fighting EVs.
Sorry, it just doesn't make any sense to make such a broad statement regarding this at all.
A union's job is to protect the union. Nothing else.
I would be interested to understand more about what you think unions and organisation have done for working rights over the last 100 years.
That is an entirely different argument that's not particularly germane to this topic. One can agree that unions, in the past, have helped workers, and also understand that they are not always in the best interest of the general public. It's complex, but possible!
Then that is an argument to reform and innovate on unions, not do away with them altogether.
I trust that you are able to translate yourself
https://www.ae.dk/debatindlaeg/2023-05-staerke-fagforeninger...
There are countless counter examples that are obvious. Teacher's unions (hard to fire teachers, poor quality). Transit unions (mandating 2 drivers per subway car, crazy benefits, etc). Auto industry fighting EVs.
Sorry, it just doesn't make any sense to make such a broad statement regarding this at all.
That's something a flat-earther or antivaxxer would say.
> but also improve the final product by not having underpaid stressed staff with high turn-over.
We'll see. It's not like police unions are making life better for citizens.
Unions are there for one reason, the union members. This will most likely be good for the employees and good on them for acting in their best interest but it seems just as likely that a unionized rockstar is negative for the consumer in either increased pricea, extended timelines or minimum effort to meet exact requirements from employees.
The benefits that workers gain from unionizing come from somewhere.
I would happily pay extra money for GTA 6 if it goes to improving working conditions. It's only negative for the consumer if the consumer views life as a zero sum game.
I agree with you, but I think most people don't. People generally hate paying for software and the $60->$70 standard AAA game pricing got a lot of people (my well paid friends included) complaining. Even if it was very clearly said that it is the cost of a well paid and respected team behind the game, I think most people won't care.
Police unions aren’t labor unions and are illegal in many countries including Japan.
https://theconversation.com/why-police-unions-are-not-part-o...
Notably, American police (the country that invented police unions) are a modern invention that largely exist as a output of slave catching and bounty hunting services.
The police union in my city, in a state that borders Canada and fought against slavery, was founded in 1915. I'm guessing they would be surprised to learn that they are a "modern invention" that was from "slave catching" (I guess they do time travel?) and "bounty hunting services". I'm not even sure how you can say something is both a "modern invention" and the "output of slave catching". There's nothing modern about them and being the "output of slave catching" makes them definitionally not "modern".
Police unions act just like every other union does: in the interests of their members.
Unions are illegal in lots of the world. Federal public sector unions weren't legal in the US until the 1960s. Did the fact that they were illegal in 1965 have any bearing on whether or not they should be allowed? Does the fact that something is illegal in the US have any bearing on whether or not Japan should allow it?
> Police unions aren’t labor unions
I'd really like to know what kind of tangled logic it requires to believe that.
Regardless, police unions aren't the only example of unions who have worked against the benefit of everyone else but themselves. I only used them as an example because I didn't think anyone here would argue disagree that it's had negative outcomes.
What I didn't expect was to find someone arguing that a union wasn't a union. It doesn't matter if it's legal in other places, it's legal in the US. Just because Japan has made police _unions_ illegal doesn't make an US police _union_ not a union.
Anti-unionists are here to tell us that consumers might possibly suffer. Higher prices and delays on a video game. Which has not seen a release in this series in half this century so far.
For all this consumer cares, great. Make it 20% more expensive. Make it 50% more expensive. A hundred. If that helps the greater union cause I can take more walks in the woods to pass the time instead.
What a luxury you have to spend so much money on things, then. Hint: most people don't live that way.
Well, given that computer games are not essential goods, most people could survive perfectly well without these so-called luxuries. Or is it only fairly produced luxury goods that are considered a luxury, while exploitatively produced luxury goods are simply treated as the standard way people live?
Hint: maybe they would if they would unionize themselves.
Or :gasp: take less profit. The game will take in Billions especially if they release new versions like GTA5 over time.
That will negatively affect shareholders which is the opposite of the employees' job. Maximizing the value of the stock to shareholders over time.
I hope you tip your earnings back to corporate and organize your peers to suppress your wages
Really? American cars suck compared to japanese and chinese which are not unionized.
What’s an example of a unionized vs non unionized group producing the same thing where unionized is better?
The unionised Openreach in UK who are really the de facto layer 1 network provider telco build infrastructure to a staggeringly higher quality than most of the move fast startup alternatives.
Aviation unions force very high standards and represent a lot of the developments in safety and procedures.
Nuclear power is heavily unionised, resulting in a very stable and highly qualified workforce.
Unions in film and tv have done great work defending artists rights and protecting actors, writers, crew, and others from predatory behaviour by studios.
Fire fighter unions stand against unsafe demands and protect the crews in ways the individuals can’t, resulting in meaningful change. (I’m aware of UK but projecting and assuming this applies internationally)
I could go on…
I see the benefit of a union for the workers, but your examples seem strange. They do not illustrate that a union somehow results in a better product.
If that were self evident how come there has never been a company that started with employees unionized? To get this supposed benefit
They’re called cooperatives
Mondragon is a extremely large well structured cooperative that did exactly this and is a hallmark of success for anarchist cooperatives worldwide
It's a bit reversed, labor unions are cooperatives, not the other way around, as cooperatives are more flexible in arrangement than unions.
Don't disagree with the rest of the comment though.
Japanese auto workers have been unionized since the 60s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation_of_Japan_Automob...
In fact part of the SCAP mandates after World War II two during the MacArthur occupation was specifically to form powerful unions in Japan
Interesting - but seems like Toyota in particular had their cars produced by non unionized group producing workers at least for some period:
https://uaw.org/we-keep-toyota-running-workers-at-critical-t...
Seems hard to compare since there is no comparison in Japan that is not unionized
But given that China is now winning my original point stands
Hey as long as you can find a reason you are right, that’s really what all life is about right?
Huh? Are you projecting something here?
Correlation != causation. There are a ton of differences between the US car industry and those in other countries, unionization is just one factor.
As a counter anecdote I’d point to Boeing’s non-union facilities, which have produced notably less reliable airplanes than their union locations ever did.
Aren’t most boeing made by unionized workers? If by both that seems like a good comparison to make
Is there any reason to believe North American cars wouldn't be even worse if there weren't unions?
Hello, long-time automotive EE here… The absolute insanity I’ve seen from the UAW would make your fucking head spin right off. It took me a LONG time to accept it.
Ignore my first hand experience with your political ideology, it doesn’t bother me.
But, I’ll tell you I’ve been at on-site RVs and BBQs with dozens of on the clock workers. I know a guy making 80/hr to nap and watch TV in his RV for six of his eight hour shift, and this was not uncommon. I know him, because he is THE GUY that can get a vital operation checked out and no one else.
I’m not debating history or ideology. Just experience of a long time working adjacent to UAW.
When I go to on-site to Mexico it’s like an entirely different industry.
Solidarity forever! Game devs eat a a lot of crap, so I'm glad they are banding together to bargain collectively.
Isnt management at Rockstar the same poeple who:
A) Allowed a bug in the code make all GTA5 Load times on every single copy on every platform take exponential times longer to load, for YEARS, unchecked or investigated, until some random kid FIXED IT by reverse engineering compiled code?
B) The bug was a simple and unneeded look up for SHOP items
C) The never rewarded the kid, with say a job or something worthwhile for him like 100k ( when they earn billions ). I mean even this decision ALONE is such terrible optics clearly mgmt were AFK.
D) They then came onto HN to argue with me in the comments about how " its not nice to say mgmt responsible should have been fired over this"
I mean Ive had my share of almost blinding incompetence, but the one that really bothers my crumpet, is when they come on here and start denying things.
Im for the union, Rockstar North made one of the greatest games of all time. It will probably result in an inferior product but crunch is unethical and always due to poor management. Ironically it was probably mgmts' own incompetent hiring policies that resulted in a union being formed.
PS - I got a bit heated and have edited this comment so its readable apologies.
PS - All of this can be verified in previous posts on HN regarding both the bug and replies
PS - And to whoever is downvoting me, feel free to reply and tell me what I am wrong about
This JSON-parsing problem is the least of Rockstars problems I think.
But I bet it happened like this:
- when the game was still in active development, it was maybe anticipated that the shop might have a couple dozen items, no problem even when the JSON parsing is extremely slow
- game is released, a separate maintenance team takes over, online mode is running for several years
- over time more and more items are added to the shop, and now maybe there are a thousands of items in that JSON file
- ...and when there's some 'accidental exponential' code in the JSON loader/parser the loading time gets worse and worse, what once was a few milliseconds is now minutes, but there was never a sudden regression after an update, just every week a little bit slower
- depending on the churn on the maintenance team, the current people on the team probably don't even notice an increase in loading time until they leave again for greener pastures, e.g. for them "it has always been that slow"
- management probably first read about the problem in the news ;) (which of course is a problem on its own - but as long as the money keeps flowing and the curves in Tableau go up and up, why should they even care... players apparently also endured it without bringing out the pitchforks)
Although this is possibly true, at any time the dev team could've gone: "loading is slow man, can we just profile it and see if there's anything obvious?". To someone with access to the source code and a debugger, that's probably less than 30 minutes of time to go from zero to hero.
I've done this kind of stuff many times, and something like a json array taking minutes to parse would likely be very very obvious when looking at a trace.
Thanks for your insight its appreciated. I know I come across mean but Im just reminding everyone of simple facts that atleast contributed to all these problems.
I have nothing to do with Rockstar and wish them well, Im just saying that if I were management during these situations I would have quit or made a public apology. Its just what I feel I would have done. Regardless of the salary. I mean if one is mgmt they should take responsibility.
But maybe in late stage capitalism that is both an abhorrent and illogical idea.
If this "management" is so incompetent and ineffective, the workers shouldn't need them, right? They should just start their own company.
Didn't think so.
This simplistic view of "management" is detrimental to a productive conversation and doesn't reflect reality.
A comment from a new account with Negative inference statements.
This is the kind of weird ass replies I just said appeared last time.
PS - You are editing your comment which is fine, but in turn I have to reply. If it is not reflective of reality feel free to add to the discussion and explain what is false. Also ironically your statement doesnt add to the discussion by elaborating on any part of it. This is exactly the kind of behaviour that doesnt help anyone learn any lessons. its just random insults.
Hell yeah
I always see the same thing:
“employer seen as blocking union effort”
I’m wondering if that’s simply a rational thing available to do as opposed to an actual opinion about collective representation whether thats bargaining or something else
“hey, here’s this regulatory overhead you can completely avoid by merely being present, unless people interested in the regulatory overhead are more persistent. just don't fire them though”
happy for them but uh.. 2028 release confirmed lol
Good. I want them to take their time, pour their craft and passion into it, and release something amazing.
On Thursday, the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) and Rockstar staff members announced the Rockstar Game Workers Union. This union will be part of the IWGB. The reveal came in the form of an informative video which delves into their motives and what we should be looking out for in the future.
If companies do not like this, paying a percent of profit instead of salaries is always an option.
(ah s** here we go again by the way).
> paying a percent of profit instead of salaries is always an option
lol no.
They should call it a cartel
One of these days I'm going to see an article here about how the sex worker characters in GTA 6 have unionized.
What is the career ladder like for game devs? In a union, the only way up is seniority or, in other words, the amount of money you've paid in dues over the years. A great developer isn't going to get rewarded with higher pay or a better role unless they've spent enough time/money as a union member.
> In a union, the only way up is seniority
This isn't a strict requirement of unions though, right? As a trivial example grad student unions have no real career ladder, though the union negotiates a minimum pay and amount of work for everyone.
> the only way up is seniority
That’s not true at all. Look at professional athletes. The starting pitchers in a baseball game are the best pitchers. Or consider WGA screenwriters in Hollywood. Their ability to make money doesn’t depend in seniority.
The typical carreer ladder for most people on a game dev team is basically to get fired when a game project ends and trying to get hired by another game company that's just starting a new project ;)
Maybe exaggerating a bit, but that's the reality in many game dev shops, especially when a game doesn't immediately sell in great numbers.
"...when a game project ends..." ...regardless of whether the game is successful or not. On the upside, you get freedom to create stuff like Concord and Highguard.
Unions have nothing to do with career progression…