I wish I could have stayed in it. I loved it, and I loved my coworkers, and I loved making something that people I knew and cared about enjoyed… but I also can’t work in an industry where after 2 years of working on weekends until 3am making a project that then makes SOMEONE literally millions a day, all the while getting paid barely enough to pay back minimums on student loans, I and all my coworkers STILL lose our jobs out of the blue.
It’s not so much that Nintendo is massive… it’s that they don’t FIRE their devs after every project. Miyamoto, Sakurai, Aonuma, etc. have all been working at that company for DECADES.
They are MASTER artisans, in the same way a carpenter becomes one over a lifetime.
The games industry outside of a very select few companies like Valve, Nintendo, Insomniac, etc. DEVOUR people and churn through them at a completely horrific pace.
Constant crunch, burnout, underpaid, firing as soon as a game’s profit chart shows even a slight slowdown… all that results in a broken pipeline where you always have 20-something-year-old interns being paid dogshit who are desperate to keep their job working 60 hour weeks and hoping they can jump ship to a better studio before they get shit-canned… and then bailing on the industry completely.
Even hit game making celebrities like Cliff Blezinski, John Carmack, and other relatively well-known game devs either no longer work at their hit studios, or have left the industry all-together.
The reason it’s shit now, is because those who own the studios think making games is more like the textile industry or people working as cogs in a burger factory than any sort of artisan work… so they have reshaped it to be one where people are expendable and replaced constantly by bright-eyed young folks excited to work on their dream IP for them.
It’s just finally catching up as the owners’ boundless greed has only continued and conditions have worsened for the actual game makers.
It’s not going to improve until the current way of making games is completely overturned and regulated in such a way where those who work on games can have their careers grow in the same way other artisan fields can - where they apprentice under masters who teach them the ropes, and who slowly gain knowledge and skill over many game projects they ship under the banner of one company - and they get royalties and other real tangible benefits for their hard work.
This presumes that the closing of studios / layoffs will result in the same sort of funds used to pay for those sorts of investments are going to be recycled and available to new startup studios…
Also assumes that it doesn’t result in people leaving the game industry as a consequence of career game devs deciding the video game industry is largely an untenable career path if any sort of job security and stability is a goal in your life…
…because that’s why I left…
Started working in more general software industry work around 2012. The last game studio I worked for generated something like $8 million / day at its peak revenue point, but they still closed us down and let us all go within 2 years of hitting that milestone in the middle of a new project we were working on.
Haven’t worked more than a handful of days crunch since, and doubled my pay as well.
Not saying I wouldn’t have rather stayed because I didn’t love the work, but I wanted to own a home someday and start a family, so I had to pivot in order to be a relatively more reliable bread-winner for my family.
It is sadly far more common than I think many might realize.
I went to school with a bunch of folks who worked all over the industry, and now only a little under half of them remain in the game industry.
They’ve worked at Bungie, BioWare, on Ken Levine projects, DOOM 2016, games for Netflix, etc. and so many like myself dropped out mostly because of the depressingly high rate of studio closure and mass layoffs that so much of the industry engages in.
I know of at least one that has gone off on their own à la indie dev whom originally worked on the Saints Row games while at Volition, but he’s yet to reach the success I imagine he deserves - given that he was probably one of the most talented folks in our cohort at our game dev school.
The “safe” way probably is one involving mass unionization, but I don’t see that happening - same with software. It just popped up post-Reagan - which seems to have been the point where new career fields didn’t adopt a pro-union stance…
As far as “for fun” goes, I sometimes do little visual projects, but no - the last time I worked on game stuff directly outside of just some casual consultation was at my last game job in 2012.
Also, that’s super crazy you saw that and crossed paths here, too. 😅
Glad at least a couple folks liked it.
I’m hopeful for a more federated circle of platforms to revive something more akin to the internet pre-Facebook, but I don’t know if it will ever get there.
Lemmy and Mastodon are great, but they still are nowhere at critical mass… and the platforms have largely remained somewhat stagnant feature-improvement-wise.
Who knows what will happen, but I am hopeful things overall in the Fediverse will continue to improve - even if it is mostly as a side-effect occuring from nefarious leadership among big business continuing to consolidate the major wings of the internet…