[Dedime]

Admittedly I didn't dive much into this to get the full context, but it's saddening to me that a legendary game designer had a GoFundMe. I was hoping achieving that level of status in a traditionally well-paid industry would leave one well off, financially.

[ido]

The games industry is not traditionally well paid, unfortunately.

[johnnyanmac]

It's such an erractic industry in terms of compensation. You can found a studio, make some acclaimed darlings, and still end up shuttering and being no better off than your average joe. Then there's being a "software engineer in games" where you're a cog in a wheel fixing bugs in the yearly Sportball game that gets compensated 200k and you live very well despite never truly "impacting" the industry the same way. 200k isn't mindblowing for a software engineer, but it's well beyond "average joe" range at that point.

I'm that cog. Or at least, was. Situations like this make me thing a lot about the state of the industry and where I lie in life.

[wileydragonfly]

You contributed to a popular game that lots of people enjoyed? Rest easy with this, friend.

[swiftcoder]

This. It's consistently lower-paying than the rest of the software industry.

[connicpu]

Yep, unfortunately that's a big part of the reason I left for a more traditional tech role. The same skills are extremely valuable at any company writing performance critical software.

[walthamstow]

Video games are an art form, the downside is they pay like one too.

[reactordev]

Cancer and US Medical Care has a tendency to drain any savings you have. Also, it was sudden so it’s not like she was ready to retire at all.

[nemomarx]

I'm wondering if she actually got the fundraiser money, considering how quickly this moved - the last update implied it would have to go to her funeral, and I hope it pays for the bills or helps her family.

[textfiles]

Some funds were used to cover treatments. She has arrangements with her family, and this fundraiser helps.

[aidenn0]

Not just legendary game designer, but co-founder of a game studio and publisher (Interplay).

[stavros]

I was hoping one wouldn't need to be well off to get treatment for an illness, but that's the US for you.

[chaostheory]

The video game industry is not a well paying one, even for programmers

[superultra]

The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.

It’s a tragedy that our own citizens are not the direct be beneficiaries of that wealth.

I think a lot about the scene in Star Trek IV when McCoy is in a hospital and says “what is this the dark ages?”

Gofundme is like a kafkaesque tragic absurdity that - hopefully - will be looked at as an indictment of the inequitable K shaped economy we’ve built, and hopefully fixed in the future.

[tomaskafka]

As a lucky European, I have US labeled as “richest third world country”.

[Tade0]

> The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.

This framing by Forbes (any many others really) is insidious because it doesn't take into account the population number and how unevenly wealth is spread.

For instance, Switzerland is not a huge economy - around the 20th in the world, but its citizens enjoy an extremely high quality of life because both income inequality and incomes overall are significantly better that in the US.

[apothegm]

Population size is usually included in those calculations. It’s typically GDP per capita.

But I couldn’t agree more that the inequality and social safety net (or lack thereof) make the numbers deeply disconnected from QoL. Which I believe is the whole point.

[Tade0]

> It’s typically GDP per capita.

If so, then the US is ~7th, or 5th among nations numbering in the millions. Still very high, just not at the top.

[thelibrarian]

Considering the James Van Der Beek of Dawson's Creek fame is having to hold a fundraising auction of his memorabilia to fund his cancer treatment, cancer is expensive in the US.

[latentsea]

How'd the theme song to that show go again?

[fastball]

Cancer is expensive everywhere, the difference is who pays for it.

[anonyfox]

actually a difference is also how many players along the supply chain siphon money out of the process. the more greed is allowed and acted on for the treatment, the more expensive it gets. introduce layers of insurances, hedgefonds, pension funds, lobbyism, ... it adds up to riddiculous amounts far beyond the original R&D/infrastructure/treatment costs.

[simondotau]

And those are just the downsides of a market-based system. There are also upsides of single-payer systems, like monopsony buying power.

[philipallstar]

And also downsides, e.g. many treatments just aren't available, and many others would never have had their discovery funded without the market-based system existing.

[ben_w]

Governments can (and do) directly fund medical research including drug discovery. This is in part because governments of even just middling competence have an incentive to keep their workforce (which also includes their military) healthy.

[simondotau]

Nobody is advocating for eliminating a market-based system. My country (Australia) has both single-payer and a market-based private healthcare system.

[kragen]

It's a lot more expensive in the US. Three years of ribociclib is US$100k here in Argentina, which dwarfs the usual costs of things like chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgical resection. (All of which is normally paid for either by a health plan or by the public hospital system.) In the US, if you have to go through all of that, I think the cost is going to be at least an order of magnitude higher.

[jrflowers]

This is either intentional bad faith trolling or you are not aware of the per capita spending on healthcare in the US.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

[fastball]

You don't think cancer is an expensive disease to treat? You don't think it involves a lot of inputs?