At this point in human evolution, I can’t understand how anybody would want to be in the gaming industry anymore. I would not blame any developer if they just decided “fuck it” and quit altogether. I’d applaud it, actually.
I wanted to be in the video game industry when I was younger and followed through with it by learning programming and pretty much everything I could with computers.
But then while I was in university, the story about EA’s working culture broke. How they’d say hours were normal but they might need extra hours during “crunch time”, which sounded reasonable until you learned that they just set deadlines such that it was always crunch time. The partners of EA workers did a class action suit against the company and won it IIRC.
That was enough for me to adjust my trajectory. I realized the suddenly obvious bit: people usually go into the video game industry because they have a passion for video games, which sets them up for exploitation like any other job that many people want to get in to.
I might still make a video game but I never intend to be a peon in the video game industry.
At this point in human evolution, I can’t understand how anybody would want to be in the gaming industry anymore. I would not blame any developer if they just decided “fuck it” and quit altogether. I’d applaud it, actually.
I wanted to be in the video game industry when I was younger and followed through with it by learning programming and pretty much everything I could with computers.
But then while I was in university, the story about EA’s working culture broke. How they’d say hours were normal but they might need extra hours during “crunch time”, which sounded reasonable until you learned that they just set deadlines such that it was always crunch time. The partners of EA workers did a class action suit against the company and won it IIRC.
That was enough for me to adjust my trajectory. I realized the suddenly obvious bit: people usually go into the video game industry because they have a passion for video games, which sets them up for exploitation like any other job that many people want to get in to.
I might still make a video game but I never intend to be a peon in the video game industry.
The corpo gaming industry, perhaps. I’ve seen various indie developers have a great time.
The 0.1% who actually hit it big. Let’s not include survivorship bias here :)
You don’t go into indie to hit big though. You do it because it’s your passion, just like any other creative out there.
You can’t pay rent or for food with passion. Indie as in making it your job is brutal.
Indie as a hobby while having a day job can be peachy (I’m doing it myself).