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this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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As someone who always thought about getting into gaming as a career, i'm so glad i didn't... it's a shame that game developers are having to suffer through such a toxic industry, and that there aren't more protections in place for these people that create the amazing experiences that we all love so much.
I hope that they are able to find new and better places of employment.
Unions. If we want to stop the suffering of exploited game developers while the gaming industry rakes in more money than the movie- and music industry combined, we should push hard for unions to protect the well being on creative potential of these workers. Idgaf if EA loses 10-25 million a year to additional wages. That money belongs to the workers in the first place.
It's probably significantly more than 10-25 million a year in additional wages given the quality of employees, but it's still likely pocket change next to things like the marketing budget. I work in a more capital intensive industry (tooling, hard parts, etc), but we still spend a few billion on engineering. Know what else we spend a few billion on? Marketing, amoung many other things. Job cuts always make me chuckle because they're a, "we're doing something" but we spend orders of magnitude more on material, facilities, etc.
According to a quick search engine query, EA had 13500 employees as of 2023. He's proposing a $50-150 monthly pay rise, which is... not much of an upgrade.
Making games is expensive, you guys.
And what was the board's compensation in comparison? No, making games costs what it costs. What is expensive is the marketing stupidity and the corruption and self serving in upper management.
Both of those things can be true at once. I don't know how much the marketing is "stupidity", ideally marketing makes you money. Execs being overpaid is absoutely a thing.
But even if you took those out games would be very expensive to make. When you have hundreds of people working on something for years numbers start to get very high. Scale is a bitch.
Found the MBA guys!
You absolutely did not, but keep guessing.
I don't think that unions will help the game industry to the same degree that they help others.
There's an endless supply of young people who are excited to make games. Oversupply means that the demand-side (employers) have the power advantage.
I left the game industry in 2010 (after 18 years) and it was the best career decision I've ever made.
I still get to work with amazing people on interesting problems AND I work sustainable hours and am compensated better.
Wanted to be a game dev my whole life, got a bs in cs applied to a few jobs, and realized it was brutal work and went sde instead.