[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?