[sonzohan]

Game dev here, have worked on AAA and indie.

First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. You need a lot more creativity and ingenuity to solve the unusual problems you run into in gaming.

From there, as others have said, it's a simple supply and demand issue. Nowadays I am a university professor, nearly every student who comes in wants to pursue one of the three fields: cybersecurity, video gaming, or recently ML/AI.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, they want to work on the things that influenced them and shaped their experiences so far. There's an absolute over supply of students who want to make video games.

Gaming, like most of entertainment, is a passion-driven industry. You trade good salary for your name in the credits. You trade nights, hobbies, marriages, and your health for this opportunity. That is unless you reach that lofty 1% of developers who are too valuable to be fired.

Not all areas of gaming are like this. Gambling, like working on slot/pachinko machines, pays very well and has pretty realistic work-life balance. However every student I've talked to about this has universally said "no I don't want to make slot machines. I only want to work on GTA/Stardew Valley/Hollow Knight/Fortnite."

There's seriously no shortage of starry-eyed students who are willing to accept minimum wage to solve SDE3 level problems. I was one of them once.

[Animats]

> First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech.

Yes. Having done everything from mainframe OS internals to proof of correctness to autonomous vehicles, video games are the most difficult.

At the beginning, game dev looks easy, because the tools are good and modern hardware is very capable. But as you approach a big, highly detailed, photorealistic world, the easy approaches hit a performance wall. Then the necessary optimizations become insanely complex. That's the tyranny of the frame rate. That's why I've complained about game engines in Rust. Everybody writes My First Game Engine, then hits the wall about two years in.

The metaverse problem is even worse. All the problems of game dev, plus the problems of user-created content and large scale. With all the effort and money put into metaverses, none emerged that worked as well and looked as good as an AAA game title from the GTA V era. Roblox, Improbable, and Second Life are as good as it got. You'd think there would be some good examples still around, with small user bases, but there are not. There are a whole range of problems only metaverses have, and some of them are unsolved. For commercial games, much of the work takes place during level building and optimization. Unreal Engine Editor does much of the heavy lifting. Metaverses don't have that option.

The total failure of the metaverse industry comes partly from this. It's hard to do, and the problem was underestimated. Mostly by the people who really just wanted to sell their crap NFTs and coins.

The people and wage problem comes from too many people wanting to make games. It's like Hollywood. If you've spend any time around there, you've met the actress/model/waitress types. The male version has stand up comedy levels of ego. That pushes wages down.

[xg15]

> You'd think there would be some good examples still around, with small users bases, but there are not.

Wouldn't VRChat qualify?

[Animats]

VRchat is impressive. It predates the metaverse boom, and it's not a big-world system. The metaverse was supposed to be like Ready Player One, but we didn't get there.

[account42]

> At the beginning, game dev looks easy, because the tools are good and modern hardware is very capable. But as you approach a big, highly detailed, photorealistic world, the easy approaches hit a performance wall. Then the necessary optimizations become insanely complex. That's the tyranny of the frame rate.

This is really a self inflicted problem though because game developers insist on making easily marketed games (=pretty screenshots) over fun ones. You don't need insane optimizations to make the next Minecraft or whatever. And let's be honest, most games run like dogshit because they leave very easy optimization opportunities like unaddressed.

[ziofill]

This is very interesting, what makes video game engineering so difficult?

[abcde666777]

The amount of things you're trying to simulate within the the performance contraints (games push computers to their absolute limits).

An example - a 3d humanoid character. You need code to manage the mesh, the animation (probably skeletal), the animations themselves, all the blending logic, probably specialised code and data for facial animations, and then you need to make sure all of that can mesh with both input driven locomotion and AI driven locomotion - and that's just one problem domain.

And I'm grossly oversimplifying what's involved even in that particular area.

[enraged_camel]

>> games push computers to their absolute limits

The overwhelming majority of games actually don’t. Even 5+ year old rigs can run most modern games just fine.

[overfeed]

> Even 5+ year old rigs can run most modern games just fine

AI-hardware demand is responsible for slowing down the AAA graphics frame-rate treadmill. Back when Nvidia and AMD were releasing improved mid-range consumer GPUs at a steady clip, there was incessant pressure on AAA games to have ever-increasing frame-rates and "photorealistic" graphic-fidelity. Making a game update at 144Hz at 4k resolution/max graphics quality, with no upscaling shortcuts would be a challenging problem, were it a common target.

In an alternate universe where the LLM boom didn't happen, we probably would have 24GB midrange GPUs (and 32GB/48GB Nvidia 5090 Ti), allowing for humongous textures, and likely games rendering at 8k, which 5+ y.o. rigs would struggle with except at low-quality settings.

[lobocinza]

Not on max quality. They can just run the game.

[justinhj]

And many a game developer doesn't have to write any of this because it already is commodity software.

[kaibee]

AHahahahah.

Yeah that's other part. What was PhD level computer graphics becomes table stakes a few years later and not only do you have to do that, but you have to top it a few years later.

Oh and all of these systems have to be aware of each other, because the higher fidelity they become, the harder it is to keep the seams hidden, because the seam between them become more jarring.

Sure, you have skeletal bone animation and all that stuff in 2003, but do your characters adapt their footstep placement to the terrain height? Does the run animation blend smoothly between states? Oh it blends smoothly but now player inputs feel unresponsive because you had the clever idea to make it inertial? Oh now do it all over a network at minimum latency because esports are a hundred million dollar industry.

[socalgal2]

It depends on what you're comparing to. Most game devs have no idea the complexity of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Maps, Search, etc... Sure, compared to a CRUD app, games are generally more complex. Compared to those others they aren't even close.

[mike_hearn]

It's a highly competitive field in which edge is sometimes obtained by better code, so everyone is constantly outdoing each other with new tricks.

[DonHopkins]

The irresistible temptation to add more.

[conceptme]

Roblox does not have a small userbase all kids are on it

[nsagent]

As a former game dev who later got a PhD in CS, I can say I definitely did the equivalent of research as part of my job: I had to solve tough new problems that no one else was and verify they worked better than existing approaches. It's definitely more difficult than anything I worked on in industry and was certainly not paid commensurate with the skill required.

Now I've branched off on my own as I've been disillusioned with academia as well. Can't win'em all.

[cmpxchg8b]

Former gamedev here. This matches my experience. However, working in the games industry from 2000-2011 did wonders for my ability to thrive in big tech. It is easy mode compared to games.

[trueno]

i spent 2 years learning c by fucking with carmacks idtech3 engine. game dev is incredible. i found myself even in such an old engine in awe of the incredibly creative ways problems are solved to get things drawn on screen, the event journals and everything that marry it together, the client server architectures... bruh game dev is next level.

* this doesnt even include graphics programmers who are also awesome. and are just a different breed than i am, for whatever reason my brain just won't process the world of graphics pipelines

[arsenide]

I work in the slot game industry. Plenty of ex-video game devs in this space. Much better work-life balance, but it's very clearly not the same as making video games.

[rf15]

There's also the moral factor, but I've definitely considered switching in the past should money ever be a problem for me.

[cheeze]

I'm the opposite. BigCorp distributed systems guy.

I'd agree with all of this from what I've seen though. The problems that some of my buddies solved straight out of college, while very different than 'hard problems' at bigcorp, are... hard.

One buddy ended up moving to the worst of both worlds... backend infra for a large video game and ended up getting video game salary for bigcorp distributed systems problems.

[al_borland]

Do you tend to see a high drop out rate or general dissatisfaction from graduates when they come to the realization that making a game is a very different experience than playing the games?

[sonzohan]

Dissatisfaction yes, although it doesn't manifest how you'd expect.

It comes in the form not so much in dropouts, but in bad course feedback and bad professor reviews.

"The professor made the class unfun."

"The professor said she's made games but clearly has never done that before with how she taught the class"

I'm a woman so, unsurprisingly, I experience a fair amount of misogyny from students in the class who have never made a game nor have they worked in industry but believe they know how it works.

[mike_hearn]

Calling your students misogynists is a shamefully harsh attack on them without any evidence to back it up. That feedback is exactly what a male teacher would get if he had the same career history as you.

You say in a post below that your total games industry experience was a single internship at Blizzard and then a second stint where you "quickly realized" you didn't want to be a games dev at all, and went back into academia where you have been ever since. You say you made a game as part of your PhD, but it's actually a speech therapy program you describe as research. There's nothing wrong with that project for what it is, but your students aren't criticizing you because you're a woman, they're saying they wanted a teacher who spent time in the games industry making the sort of games they themselves would play.

I wouldn't bother pointing this contradiction out normally, but it's just so socially destructive to ask students for feedback and then attack them with the nastiest accusation you have access to, just because they requested a more experienced teacher. Poor kids! It's this kind of thing that results in recommendations to just avoid university entirely. Why sign up for being abused by a teacher like that?

[sonzohan]

> You say in a post below that your total games industry experience was a single internship at Blizzard and then a second stint where you "quickly realized" you didn't want to be a games dev at all

That is not my entire games experience. I have 15 years total, spanning Game Master, lead gameplay engineer, game engineering director, and CTO. I was asked my route to academia, not my entire Gaming Industry CV.

> they're saying they wanted a teacher who spent time in the games industry making the sort of games they themselves would play.

Nearly all of them have played games I've worked on, and can even find my name in the credits.

> Calling your students misogynists is a shamefully harsh attack on them without any evidence to back it up

You're going to make a bunch of assumptions based on a summary of my academic career and then try to insist that misogyny doesn't exist in tech?

[mike_hearn]

Yes, I've never seen any misogyny in tech, if anything it's the other way around where men are told there are too many of them and their employer would prefer more women. But my criticism of your post isn't related to you being a woman, it's to do with you immediately leaping to the worst possible interpretation of your student feedback. Why assume bad faith immediately? Where's the evidence to support that? Do you just assume any negative feedback always has a hidden agenda?

Look - you say you have made games, and that your students have all played games where they could find your name in the credits. You also get feedback that your students don't believe you. This is a weird problem to have and should be trivial to fix if true. Just... boot up the games and show them where you're credited as the lead gameplay engineer? What do they say when you do that?

[Insanity]

I guess because they also learn there’s still plenty of money to be made in other engineering domains.

And to be honest, I think games are a good stepping stone towards a career in software engineering / computer science. Especially back in the day when getting a game to run required you to mess around with the computer haha

[jakeydus]

My first real interaction with a computer in any technical way was trying to get Age of Mythology to work after I lost my activation key. I won't say that I miss those experiences, but they were foundational as h*ck for me.

[Scaled]

My first AAA game industry boss said to me only 10% of people make it 10 years in games. This has been, if anything, optimistic, with there being a sharp drop-off at 2~5 years.

(And in indie it's way worse, it's more like 1% making it one year)

[deaddodo]

I mean, when you're getting paid 40-60% for doing more complex work than app/web development...yeah, the drop-off is almost inevitable. Eventually people (unless they just really love making games) just go "f this, my career is more important".

If you wanna do low-level code, you can go into embedded, sponsored OSI-companies, Microsoft, etc and get paid the same to more than gamedev with 10% of the stress and no crunch. If you wanna get paid much more and do more "vibe"/fun coding, you can go into app/web dev. If you want stability, you go into fintech/medtech/onsite/etc.

Gamedev offers the worst of all worlds and then constantly posits "why is there so much turn over?"...because you made the industry suck to work in.

[avadodin]

Why write a line of code for a car's fuel injection and go back home at 5pm to your wife and kids when you could stay overnight and be hacking on an ill-designed networking protocol for an AAA game while eating 5% discount cheetos?

[ranguna]

> because you made the industry suck to work in.

What do you mean they "made" the industry suck to work in?

[deaddodo]

Just read everything that came before that line.

[maccard]

I taught a “gifted children” university level course that kids between 13 and 17 attenddd. We lost about half of the people on the first few days when they actually had to write code.

[usefulcat]

This description absolutely checks out, even from ~30 years ago when I graduated.

I worked on games for several years early on but quit after going through an EA spouse experience.

In some ways it’s too bad, because the great thing about games is that there is such a great variety of different kinds of problems to solve. Even so, I quit cold turkey and never looked back. It is what it is.

[RobRivera]

What was your route to teaching like? I kinda am considering putting my hat in a similar ring on a part time, evening class type basis if I can get away with it.

[sonzohan]

I graduated in 2011, went straight to work at Blizzard entertainment. At the same time I had gotten accepted into graduate school so I opted for an internship at Blizzard to try both. I went back to Blizzard in 2012, but quickly realized I wanted to do my PhD. So I left Blizzard and went full-time as a student. I didn't have funding so I TAd classes. Eventually my advisor and I scored a big NSF grant, so she used the funds to buy out a course and have me teach it as the instructor.

From there, I wound up at a community college running a bachelor's level degree. They hired me because I was the only candidate with NSF experience. They proceeded to fire their grant manager and have me manage the whole grant without extra pay.

Actually used to hire people for exactly what you want to do: be an adjunct for night classes in tech.

If you want to go that route you need to make friends with the Dean and the head of program. It's rare that we hire someone from the general application process, because most people who work in tech do not make good instructors.

[sonzohan]

Since I'm getting a lot of hate for this post and having "only 2 years"

I have 15 years of experience and counting in games and entertainment. I had 6 years of experience as a game master and software dev (in-game purchasing and balancing) before Blizzard offered me an internship. I also worked in gaming throughout all of grad school, just as a contractor instead of full time.

Those of you who have gone to grad school know stipends don't pay crap and you need a second job to make rent.

Also I continue to contract as a professor. Those of you who have worked as teachers know that teaching also doesn't pay crap.

Finally, I still work in industry. Most recent game released on Steam in 2022.

[RobRivera]

I'll prospect that way, thank you for the insight. I have a unique background AND teaching experience (military leadership for my first career, and then taught as a full time visiting professor for 2 years) but having spent a decade in industry as a software engineer, yes I concur, teaching is not a common skill among the labor force (anecdotal ofc). I hope after I launch my first indie game I could knock on the doors of say Digipen or similar. Will see tho, thats more a 2027 thing.

What kind of PhD research did you do? I considered going back for a PhD program focusing on simulation as it relates to discoverability within AI research, but kept ruling out it was a bad career decision and should be left as a retirement thing

[sonzohan]

> I could knock on the doors of say Digipen or similar.

Seattle based? If so toss me your email or contact and I'll see if I can help you break into teaching if you're interested.

> What kind of PhD research did you do?

Assistive technology. I primarily worked with kids who had cleft lip and palate to improve their at-home speech therapy exercises. Trained some offline ASR models, built a therapy game, and automated metrics. I passed the research onto another student once I got my PhD, but the project lives on as https://spokeitthegame.com/

[RobRivera]

I'd love to! I am currently more east coast based (NYC) and rotate into Seattle monthly, hence looking at it being more a 2027/2028 target. I can drop my email here

Robjrivera23 at gmails

I will have to check out that speech therapy game. Before I entered pilot training, I had received new fake teeth implants that introduced a lisp (new airflow) and as a 20yrold, had to go through speech therapy drills with a military doctor for a whole semester to get my qualification back. Jokes on me, cockpit wasnt for me haha.

[xenophonf]

> most people who work in tech do not make good instructors

Guilty as charged, despite my best attempts to the contrary. I wish I had time to go back to school for some kind of teaching degree. Is there something else I can do or read or watch or something to make me a better teacher? Knowledge transfer is probably the most important aspect of my job.

[dylan604]

> They proceeded to fire their grant manager and have me manage the whole grant without extra pay.

This is such a bullshit thing to experience. I had a version of this where I took on extra work that I was interested in which became a new revenue stream but was told "let's see how you do and then we'll see about salary bumps". Never saw an extra dime from it. I used the experience learned to land a new job six months later with a salary bump while dumping the other job responsibilities. It's truly the only way to get that bump you deserve.

[leovander]

Not to downplay your experience, but from your prior students' comments, they aren't wrong to question your industry credentials? You had maybe less than two years of "gaming" industry experience 14 years ago before going into academics?

Seems like you found an opportunity that you really wanted to pursue, but unfortunately at the same time sort of became a stat of those that can't do, teach.

I had plenty of professors along the way that touted their credentials, but they were so stale in what they were teaching. I know I know, a Computer Science degree doesn't match industry expectations, but so many professors definitely did not keep up with what was going on outside of their bubble.

[sonzohan]

I have 15 years of experience and counting. My most recently released game was 2022 on Steam. Around 80k sales.

Also I still work in industry.

[adinisom]

Great seeing where Speech with Sam and, more generally, you ended up.

[socalgal2]

That's one frame. Another frame is video games is like movies, music. You start a band and think you're going to be the next hit band and be famous but the reality is only a few bands a year are successful. Movies are closer because most movies require a crew and a budget. How many movies are hits? The issue is not that game companies are evil, the issue is that it's a hit driven industry.

I worked on AAA and indie as well. I crunched for years. That crunch was on me because I was being paid to make MY games and like any creator, I wanted my game to be great.

GTA6 is an exception in games being the game with the biggest team (AFAIK). The bigger the team the more you're a cog.

[forgetfreeman]

"You trade good salary for your name in the credits"

When did that become a thing? When Gears of War bonus checks started hitting Epic's parking lot went from a random collection of reasonable vehicles to looking like an exotic car show. I'm fairly certain every dev that worked on Gears or Unreal could have retired off the bonus payouts.

[Sharlin]

That’s a tiny and decidedly nonrepresentative sample of gamedevs.

[forgetfreeman]

Fair enough. That community is a hell of a lot larger now than it used to be.

[bananaboy]

If you’re working for one of the big studios making blockbusters the bonuses can still be pretty good.

[steve_adams_86]

> engineering in video gaming is generally more complex

This tracks with my experience. Games present so many unexpected challenges. Or, known and expected challenges that are challenging nonetheless.

The other place I've had my ass handed to me was in robotics. Translating digital models to the physical space is how physics tells you it's actually in control and your ideas are cute and all, but other things are going to happen instead.

The simulator starts out simple and gradually becomes grotesque as it contacts reality.

[miiiiiike]

> engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech.

I always roll my eyes when I hear this from game developers. And my eyes hurt from rolling I've heard it so many times.

I've done game dev, systems, backend, frontend, all of it. It's all the same. Maybe you developed low complexity "big tech" projects but, c'mon, you're really going to argue that games are categorically MORE complex than what Google, Apple, etc develop?

They're not. It's all the same. Same complexity ceiling, same prerequisite levels of creativity.

Most frontends that I develop use the same patterns as games and the backends that I've developed recently look like game servers. Same patterns, same techniques, same level of complexity.

Game development is just development.

[nsagent]

It certainly depends on what you're working on in games. Not every game pushes the envelope, but the ones that do are seriously complex. They are essentially realtime embedded systems, which push the hardware to the max.

Sometimes you get similar demands at the big companies like Google and Meta, but often you have the opportunity to throw more compute at the problem. That is rarely possible in games.

Having been a game dev before getting my PhD focused on NLP, I can definitely say some of the challenges I ran into developing a first of its kind MMORTS, was seriously challenging. When I took the mandatory grad classes in distributed systems and low level architecture design, I already had first hand experience and aced those classes without any effort. I was familiar with many of the problems and their solutions because I needed to for my work. In addition to working at the lowest level debugging the memory allocators, full networking stack, database layer, you name it all in C++. Being a lead developer on a project of that scope was much more complicated than any work I did later.

My first semester of my PhD I wrote a Transformer from scratch referencing only the original paper (it was soon after the paper came out, there were few resources then). I was the only person who got an implementation that matched the results from the original Transformer (most got much worse performance). I credit the skills and abilities I gained in the game dev industry.

That isn't me throwing shade at others; as I said there are hard problems in industries other than game dev, but the skills required are not compensated at the level you'd expect given the difficulty of the work.

[mickeyp]

No the insight here is that you went _back_ and got your PhD with years of experience building professional software.

Expecting a 20-year old undergrad or a 23-year old postgrad to do as well as someone who left and came back to uni to finish their degree(s) is... uncharitable.

[nsagent]

I became lead of that MMORTS within 4yrs of starting my career. I've worked with lots of PhD students who came back after more than 5 years working in big tech; not one had the experience and abilities I did. I've also worked with fresh grads in games who were miles ahead of 99% of the software engineers and PhDs I've encountered in my time.

Again, I've also run into equally talented fresh grads in big tech, but they were much more rare.

Take my anecdotes as you will.

[miiiiiike]

> the skills required are not compensated at the level you'd expect given the difficulty of the work.

There it is! This is the core argument that I feel like most people here are actually making. Well said, I completely agree.

I agree that game devs are/feel undervalued and underappreciated by game studios. But I don't think that game dev is inherently more complex than other forms of development or that it requires more creativity.

Two different issues.

Instead of arguing that game devs are special I'd argue that game devs should be told that there are jobs outside of the games industry with work that's just as interesting, complex, creative, and fulfilling as game development. Jobs where you'll use the same kinds of skills but may get paid much more.

You find a lot of miserable game devs who refuse to work in any other industry because non-game dev work is akin to mindlessly producing producing grey, soot covered, widgets in some dystopian factory.

If you need to be a game dev, go for it. I hope you get paid what you're worth. But, if you're and if you're miserable doing game dev, you have options outside of game dev.

In summary: If you can do game dev you can do other types of dev work. Similarly, if you can do other types of dev work you can do game dev.

The question is, whichever side you start on, can cross that divide and still be happy?

[michaelsalim]

Not a game dev but I used to dabble in it. Quite surprised by this take honestly. Sure, each domain has its own complex things to solve. But on average, I think it's quite safe to say that game development consistently demands more creative solutions to problems compared to many other fields.

[miiiiiike]

All development requires creativity. Different types of creativity for different types of problems.

Creativity isn’t narrowly defined to exclude everything but art, game mechanisms, and narrative.

You think the creation of GMail didn’t take creativity?

I’m suspicious of anyone who tries to lay a special claim to creativity for their class or type of work. Creates a false creative vs cog narrative that always seems to benefit the speaker.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

I work in big tech but dabbled in games. Games are much harder. Lots of math and you have to process 8 million pixels in 16 milliseconds, in addition to running your physics and NPC AIs. Big tech is 90% CRUD and 90% squabbling over variable names and we somehow think pushing a bit of HTML in 500ms is both hard and acceptable performance.

[miiiiiike]

Is it harder because you’re less experienced with games. Your big tech job really requires no creativity?

Modern sites are extremely complex. BASH, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Varnish, NGINX, Postgres, Cassandra, Elastic, Redis, Celery, CSS/Sass, Typescript. Observability, logging, build systems, testing, backups, CI, and a consistent design system. That’s all just to get to HTTP 200 “hello world”.

[oreally]

Sure they're complex but tbh they don't need to be. Sorry to bruise your professional ego but you should understand that there's a lot of decisions in bigtech/corporate that equates to 'buy it don't build it, it'll be cheaper, and (secretly) I can show it off on my resume'. And then when you use it, usually it isn't catered for the business' purposes because the tech is meant to cover a large amount of use cases. At that point they move on and the inefficiencies become the norm.

And these require none of the deep math that the lower levels of gamedev stack require. It's tedious, not hard to string all of these web components.

[tester756]

>Modern sites are extremely complex. BASH, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Varnish, NGINX, Postgres, Cassandra, Elastic, Redis, Celery, CSS/Sass, Typescript. Observability, logging, build systems, testing, backups, CI, and a consistent design system. That’s all just to get to HTTP 200 “hello world”.

A lot of fancy keywords, but

1) It's the stack that you decided to put your services on, your HTTP 200 could be also served by nginx + 1 html file

2) You can make empty video multiplayer game which will sound as fancy as that HTTP 200 hello world

[baobabKoodaa]

Games often have inherent technical complexity. Big tech has mountains of unnecessary complexity just to get to "hello world", as you said. These are different things in nature.

[kelnos]

Complex in the way you're using it (a sea of technologies that looks daunting) doesn't automatically mean "hard". I've worked in big tech on distributed systems, with most of the things in your list, and worked on some difficult problems, but I could absolutely believe that cutting-edge game dev is harder, even significantly so.

[chrystalkey]

Well yes sure, but those infrastructure questions come with games as well on top of the whole inherent complexity described in this comment family

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

Could be. I've been using most of the technologies you listed for over 20 years so none of that is really hard for me anymore.

[selfhoster1312]

> You think the creation of GMail didn’t take creativity?

Disclaimer: i've barely ever programmed video games

Not the same kind of creativity, for sure. Gmail has no performance constraints (and its performance is horrible), has no UX constraint (and its UX is horrible). It pushed the free tier some time ago and was arguably a decent webmail at the time, but nothing about it was revolutionary.

The hacks required to get a game to react and push pixels in real time on specific hardware are very interesting. That's closer to proper software engineering than many things we find in startups. That said, more and more games use Unity and other all-in-one engines and are not engineering anymore… and as a player, i can certainly feel the difference in the constant stuttering which mostly was not there when playing console games >10 years ago.

[Thaxll]

In web dev there is little creativity because everything has been done and there is a library / service to solve every problems, none of that exists in major games. Try Claude in your frontend/backend service, then try that in a game client.

[miiiiiike]

Games have engines that provide so much. Unreal, Gadot, Unity.

Have you tried doing modern frontend work? Creativity is required.

I played with Claude recently. It wasn’t able to refactor a CSS one liner into simple sass mixin.

[oreally]

I think the differentiator is the amount of deep Math that goes into it.

A simple card game is on par with standard app development.

But if you're working at lower levels of a world simulation engine that require linear algebra, computer graphics knowledge? Camera and joint manipulation? Animation? Navmeshes? Physics? That's a notch harder than a REST app and microservices infrastructure. Some robotics, ML areas touch on this too.

The only tough topics at these adtechs that might match would be graph manipulation, or currently ML knowledge. I suspect leetcode isn't very applicable in everyday usage.

[tayo42]

It probably depends on the level in the stack your at.

At a high level the engines and frameworks don't feel any different.

Work with graphics and models feels more difficult though then most networked application work I've done.

[neonstatic]

> There's an absolute over supply of students who want to make video games.

To be fair, you don't have to be a teacher / lecturer to notice this. One trip to an AI reddit thread asking what people are working on will reveal that it's either porn, role-play, or game development.

[varispeed]

I'd say it has nothing to do with supply and demand, but more to do with captive labour market (e.g. in the UK ability to quit and run own business are limited) and C-suite greed levels and classism.

Working class person being exceptional at low latency game development, will unlikely get a chance in finance and earning 10x for very much the same level of competence, because their accent might not be good enough and parents don't frequent members' clubs.

[hnlmorg]

I’ve worked in pretty much every domain of IT in the UK (FinTech, gaming, broadcasting, Hollywood, public sector, etc) and I’ve not experienced any class bias in FinTech.

I will say that different industries have different formalities (generally speaking). But that just means you have to interview with smarter attire in FinTech vs interviewing for a job in gambling.

As a hiring manager, I can say that companies will recruit for as little as they think candidates will accept. Fintech gets a bit of a pass on this one but only because they rake in so much money that they can generally afford to attract higher salaries. But it does also mean that gaming can get away with paying people peanuts in comparison and that is literally due to supply and demand.

In places where the C-suite have set unrealistic thresholds on tech salaries, I’ve had to get creative to attract candidates. And that often meant contributing back to open source and basically using that as advertising.

Anyway, this is already a verbose reply but the crux of it is:

1. you shouldn’t underestimate the power of supply and demand in the work space

2. The profitability of a sector also plays heavily into the equation

3. You don’t need to be posh to get a job in FinTech.

[varispeed]

It didn't affect me, therefore it doesn't exist.

Come on.

[hnlmorg]

I obviously cannot speak for every company that has ever existed in the FinTech industry. And you haven’t given any more details beyond vague comments which makes it hard to comment on your specific claims. So I can only talk about my experiences hiring and beyond hired in the industry.

But who’s to say your experiences aren’t the anomaly? Or that other factors weren’t to play that lead those hiring managers offering to other candidates?

I also tried researching your point online (just in case I was an anomaly) and the results I got suggested that FinTech scored lower in benchmarks for bias during hiring.

So at this point in time, given what I’ve experienced, read online and the information you’ve shared, there simply isn’t enough data to support your claim. Anecdotal nor otherwise.

[dzonga]

another thing - games are more like a lottery - you've more misses than hits.

so economics takes over.

whereas your typical saas, adtech - once the business is proven u print money unless u r doing stupid shit n being driven by ego such as having the biggest org or pursuing passion projects such as "a.i"

[vitaflo]

Also for every game dev working on GTA6, there's another working on Barbie's Horse Adventure. When positions are limited, you take what you can get and most of them are making games that are not at all interesting.