[chaostheory]

It's gotten slightly better for developers, but the video game industry is horrible for most of the people in it. It's tends to be toxic with lower pay & benefits with much longer hours. I guess that's the price for doing something that you love.

imo The only time it works "well" is with successful indie companies.

[munk-a]

Developers sit in a place of privilege at video game companies (I say as a former developer at a video game company) but the experience still sucks - there are far too many star-eyed fresh college graduates willing to work for peanuts for anyone to make a decent living working sane hours.

Indie companies are the absolute worst - there are occasional success stories (like, say, No Man's Sky) but they always involve insane overtime and fiscal risk - Sean Murray sold his house to keep the company afloat. And No Man's Sky - even with all the controversy - is one of the biggest recent successes (with the last one to go as mainstream being Minecraft IMO). If you make those fiscal and health gambles and lose then you're SOL - there are thousands of games made by passionate people that could have been good that just never hit the right PR vein or happened to have a buggy v1.0 and got written off by the community.

[blintz]

This is why I think the parallel to the movie industry is so useful: there, you also have actors/production staff/etc willing to work for essentially nothing, and an industry that, without the unions, would be more than happy to exploit them. It's not perfect, but the unions in Hollywood definitely prevent the studios from completely abusing the "doing something that you love" impulse.

[Reichhardt]

The market is fundamentally unfair: Indie developers are forced to pay 30% commissions, whilst mega-studios get sweetheart deals of 10%.

These sweetheart deals are practically impossible for Indies (including ex-AAA workers) to compete against and replicate, and its leading to industry stagnation.

As long as the standard rate at Apple, Google, Valve, Microsoft, Sony remains 30%, I would not advise anyone to work in the games industry. At least Nintendo gives customers 5% cashback on Switch, leaving an effective commission rate of 25% (a major reason why that platform has been so successful and an oasis of success for Indie devs).

The first thing a GameDev Union should fight for is fair commission on these platforms, independent of entity size.

[Sebguer]

In many cases, successful indie companies aren't much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDPzZkx0cPs