> The real problem however is not that they are immature when they get in, but that too often they get out once they reach maturity,
This is pretty spot-on. One of the main reasons I left the industry was because I got tired of it being perpetual amateur hour. I felt like I didn't know much and yet I often knew more than those around me.
I worked on one game where more than 50% of the engineers had never shipped a game before. Those that had spent all of their time fire-fighting the messes created by the energetic yet clueless brigade of novices.
> Many companies want to own your work even when you’re off the clock. “Here at Nine Dots, we aren't using any non-concurrence agreements, so these personal projects can actually benefit them financially if they make something that is commercially viable,” Boucher-Vidal said.
This was also another major reason I left EA. I couldn't work on games in my free time. Meanwhile, the stuff I did at work didn't actually scratch that itch: it was either huge franchise games I couldn't care less about or technology stack stuff that wasn't an actual game. I spent more time feeling like I was "making games" when I didn't work at EA.
> Until there is evidence that other models will work, and that's going to take a hit game or two, very little with change, and the revolving door of young, white, childless men will continue to make our games.
I honestly don't believe this will significantly change. I compare the game industry to the music industry. In both, you have:
1. A product that people don't need to consume.
2. A product where consumers increasingly expect prices to be tiny or zero.
3. Hordes of young people who want to do it.
4. Work that is intrinsically satisfying for its own sake.
Push aside all of the bullshit and making games is crazy fun. Lots of people want to make them. Lots of people want to play them too, but they don't really want to shell out much cash to do so. I think the end result of this is that it's just a domain where it will be a young person's game and it's very hard to make a lot of money.
Yes, some companies will be able to make real money at it, but for every Rolling Stones, there's a thousand local independent bands playing dive bars that you've never heard of.
And that's OK. I was in one of those bands you've never heard of once. It was awesome. When I had kids, I gave it up, but I certainly don't regret it. Maybe we should think of making games the same way: a fun thing to spend a few years doing when you're young and have the time.
I agree with everything you've said except for one thing: Giving it up. EIther making games or making music.
Both of these pursuits are entirely compatible with having kids and a normal job, so long as you pursue them in a way compatible with your lifestyle. You don't have to go on the road and live out of a van to be in a band; you can pick up some cheap hardware and software and record at home. Record a vocal take, change a diaper, add some reverb, let Dropbox sync the file for your bandmates to add to tomorrow.
Same thing for games. There's no reason you can't make an indie game when you're older and have more responsibilities; you just need to work with the right kind of team, on the right kind of game, with the right kind of scope.
I thought about adding some caveats when I said "gave it up", but didn't for simplicity's sake. I do still have my gear and every now and then I pluck on it.
Yes, you can still record solo, but that's making music. What I gave up was being in a band. Keeping up with bandmates, practicing regularly for several hours a week, and playing shows in bars is possible but much harder when you have kids. I also find it much harder to keep up momentum when it's just me and just in my free time.
Ditto for making games. You certainly can make them in your free time (and I do), but it's a different experience from what you can get jammed in the same room with a few other inspiring people for hours at a time. In today's "everything digital, everything asynchronous" world, I think we seriously undervalue to importance of being there with people.
> There's no reason you can't make an indie game when you're older and have more responsibilities
Something else that people will start to understand more over the next few years as programmers get older: Once you get past a certain age, you tend to have less responsibilities again. Once the kids leave and you start to pay off your car and so on, possibilities begin to open up.
This is pretty spot-on. One of the main reasons I left the industry was because I got tired of it being perpetual amateur hour. I felt like I didn't know much and yet I often knew more than those around me.
I worked on one game where more than 50% of the engineers had never shipped a game before. Those that had spent all of their time fire-fighting the messes created by the energetic yet clueless brigade of novices.
I agree completely. I still remember the HR presentation where they talked about how long most of the developers at our studio had been with the company. I had only been there 6 years and I was somehow one of the 10% most senior people at the studio.
At one point our studio (EA Burnaby) was run by a nice fellow named Jonathan Schappert who later went on to be CEO at Zynga. I'm told that his vision for the studio was for some small percentage (like around 5%) of the programmers to be senior engineers - SE3's or better - and for the rest of the programmers to be kids straight out of school. You can imagine how this 'pyramid of excellence' worked out in practice.
Aren't your four bullet points essentially true of a large number of web applications in tech hubs like Silicon Valley?
The only point I might contest for that analogy would be (2), but I think we are still seeing a trend towards disrupting traditional payment systems (e.g., people expect Facebook to be free and funded by ads).
And it's worth mentioning that Silicon Valley startups do have their fair share of underpaid, overworked positions. But I think that is slowly changing, and we are seeing startups--especially ones that have been around for a few years--paying market or even above market wages for reasonable 40-50 hour work weeks.
Hell, I was just reading an old thread on reddit--about 3 years old--where people were posting their salaries. I was shocked to see a lot of people working at Google, Facebook, or a Silicon Valley startup, with a few years of experience, posting that they made $80-85k in salary. That's what I'd expect in South or Midwest, but not the Bay Area. Now fresh grads there are getting $100k with signing bonuses (at least from Google/Facebook).
Yes, I think the startup market may be similar. Two differences are that right now there are so many startups, there is still strong demand for programmers. The game industry is actually not that big, so the demand for game programmers hasn't been as high.
Also, I think the startup scene is newer. While there are some younger developers now whose childhood dream is to build a website, there aren't as many of those as there are people who grew up playing videogames and who want nothing more than to make them.
As the web gets older and you have more adults whose software experiences during their formative years revolved around websites (or, I guess, soon, mobile apps), that may change.
It better change, I really hate programming the web, I'm more interested in robots, electronics and computer hardware. But startups for those are difficult, risky and expensive.
>> The real problem however is not that they are immature when they get in, but that too often they get out once they reach maturity,
> This is pretty spot-on.
I've studiously avoided working for EA (they almost had me once, but I said no when they pulled a bait-and-switch on the project that convinced me to interview to begin with), but I've been in the industry for 20+ years, mostly working for smaller companies or doing consulting.
I think that while most people (historically) have worked for big companies, that there's a new trend (Kickstarter/crowdfunding) that is making it possible for indie developers to compete, and more importantly, to make a reasonable income while they develop the game.
Granted, a lot of game Kickstarters fail, but then a lot of the people who put them on are not as qualified as they need to be to impress the public.
>I honestly don't believe this will significantly change. I compare the game industry to the music industry.
EXACTLY! And Kickstarter is democratizing the music industry as well! Heck, throw in the movie industry -- there were 17 Kickstarter-backed films at Sundance this year [1], and musicians are using Kickstarter (and digital distribution in general) to get away from the awful music labels that almost universally eat up their profits.
The biggest problem in games/music/movies is typically that you have to make them before you can sell them. All three industries are really hit-driven. If they don't strike the right chord when the product is released, then any money invested in production is lost. So the investors get very conservative about what they'll make, and the general quality goes down as they try to reduce costs in stupid ways (80+ hours a week etc.).
Crowdfunding turns this idea around completely, in that you can invest a small amount of time and money in trying to prove that your idea has legs, and if it does, then the product can be made with the money put in by your fans. If it doesn't, then you either fix your idea or start from scratch with the next idea.
And if none of your ideas work, then it's off to a different industry. The public has spoken.
I'm a game developer with a family and a social life. It can be done. [2]
[2] I have yet myself to "hit the jackpot" with anything I've made; some of my time is spent doing consulting (I'm a programmer), where I make enough money to pay for the time I spend trying to make games. My burn rate is low (even with a family) in part because I left the Bay Area because this is what I want to do, and in order to do it I can't have a huge mortgage that forces me to have a day job that I can't quit. It's all about deciding what your priorities are and then acting on them.
For what it's worth, I found work-life balance increased steadily during my tenure at EA. The whole ea_spouse thing brought a lot of attention to problems. It still wasn't great, but it was better than when I started.
When I left EA, I was working 40 hours a week reliably. This was in large part, though, because that was a high priority for me and I moved off game teams and onto shared tech stuff because it was less high-pressure, even though that wasn't ideal for my career.
> And Kickstarter is democratizing the music industry as well!
I'm really excited about Kickstarter too. However, even when it works well, I don't think you get much more than a living wage. I think that's OK, but it's worth keeping in mind that it isn't a golden ticket.
I also worry that the social structures around Kickstarter have not settled down yet. Right now, I think a lot of money coming in is based on novelty or optimism. As Kickstarter matures (and more projects fail) I think both of those will wear off. It can still work, and I hope it does, but it won't be as easy as it is right now.
> The biggest problem in games/music/movies is typically that you have to make them before you can sell them.
Yes, it's inevitable in any product where the initial cost is very high and the marginal cost is effectively zero. Digital content like games and movies one example. Drugs are another, I think. I wonder if oil drilling is similar?
It seems like in all of these cases, a consequence is conservatism in investment leading to missed opportunities.
> I moved off game teams and onto shared tech stuff because it was less high-pressure, even though that wasn't ideal for my career.
By shared tech I assume you mean tools and engines? And that's worse for your career? That sad.
It's a common trend I notice that companies don't often spot and reward tool makers (policy drivers, etc), which often boost productivity for large portions of employees, instead of just themselves.
> By shared tech I assume you mean tools and engines?
I was doing tools, but not engines. UI toolkit stuff, asset pipelines, a bunch of metrics gathering. At the EA studio I was at, being on a game team was a better career path if you want to get more clout.
The industry launched her album, 25K bought it and it was a failure, on Kickstartet she raised 1.5millon dollars with almost exactly 25k backers. The irony, there are a lot of people and a lot of people like music, and even if its not the everyone, it's big enough that they can make a good wage.
>When I left EA, I was working 40 hours a week reliably.
My last gig had me working 30-35 hours a week reliably. And I made way more than EA was offering.
>This was in large part, though, because that was a high priority for me and I moved off game teams and onto shared tech stuff because it was less high-pressure, even though that wasn't ideal for my career.
The one time I worked for a big company (well, a studio owned by Activision -- the studio itself wasn't that big) I did tools as well, similarly to avoid working in the critical path of a game Gold Master release.
That was the worst fit for me of any job I've ever had. Not because it was tools, but for more complex reasons...mostly, I guess, because the tasks they assigned me didn't play to my strengths.
Do you have a blog or link to your work? I'd be very interested in reading about the experiences of someone who has a successful "career" making games while providing for a family.
Not anything that's updated with any regularity. As I ramp up to a Kickstarter I'm certainly going to be updating more, but that hasn't started yet, so everything is pretty stale.
The sad truth is that I feel like a lot of things that go on are either not worthy of writing about, or they involve some kind of sensitive negotiation or relationship that I shouldn't post about. At the end of the day I end up paralyzed by these fears and fail to post anything.
But you can find the rather rusty company blog here [1], or my personal blog here [2]. The latter has a bit more activity because it has my Pinboard stream on the side, and I try to post a comment with most links.
In general, though, no, I don't really blog as well as I should. Yet, anyway. Kickstarter may change things for me.
> The real problem however is not that they are immature when they get in, but that too often they get out once they reach maturity,
This is pretty spot-on. One of the main reasons I left the industry was because I got tired of it being perpetual amateur hour. I felt like I didn't know much and yet I often knew more than those around me.
I worked on one game where more than 50% of the engineers had never shipped a game before. Those that had spent all of their time fire-fighting the messes created by the energetic yet clueless brigade of novices.
> Many companies want to own your work even when you’re off the clock. “Here at Nine Dots, we aren't using any non-concurrence agreements, so these personal projects can actually benefit them financially if they make something that is commercially viable,” Boucher-Vidal said.
This was also another major reason I left EA. I couldn't work on games in my free time. Meanwhile, the stuff I did at work didn't actually scratch that itch: it was either huge franchise games I couldn't care less about or technology stack stuff that wasn't an actual game. I spent more time feeling like I was "making games" when I didn't work at EA.
> Until there is evidence that other models will work, and that's going to take a hit game or two, very little with change, and the revolving door of young, white, childless men will continue to make our games.
I honestly don't believe this will significantly change. I compare the game industry to the music industry. In both, you have:
1. A product that people don't need to consume.
2. A product where consumers increasingly expect prices to be tiny or zero.
3. Hordes of young people who want to do it.
4. Work that is intrinsically satisfying for its own sake.
Push aside all of the bullshit and making games is crazy fun. Lots of people want to make them. Lots of people want to play them too, but they don't really want to shell out much cash to do so. I think the end result of this is that it's just a domain where it will be a young person's game and it's very hard to make a lot of money.
Yes, some companies will be able to make real money at it, but for every Rolling Stones, there's a thousand local independent bands playing dive bars that you've never heard of.
And that's OK. I was in one of those bands you've never heard of once. It was awesome. When I had kids, I gave it up, but I certainly don't regret it. Maybe we should think of making games the same way: a fun thing to spend a few years doing when you're young and have the time.