I work in architecture, a field that is also notorious for long hours, excessive crunch time, and mediocre pay. Real-time 3D graphics have started to become important to the design process over the last several years, and at a previous firm I met a 3D vis guy who’d transitioned into my industry from a job at a game developer, “because the hours and pay are so much better.” It boggled my mind that conditions could be so much worse in game dev that my own field would be an improvement.
It’s also, imo, because it’s a relatively newer career. Nurses, teachers, mechanics all existed as industries before he decline of labor. I work in biotech, and people have these oblivious conversations on reddit that are like, “I have a masters but can’t find a job with any stability or a living wage in my city. What am I doing wrong?”
And each time I explain that what they’re doing wrong is trying to get paid under late stage capitalism in a high risk-high reward casino industry filled with foreign visa-holding indentured servants and no one who has ever heard of collective bargaining.
Not to diminish your point because all fields should be unionized, but nurses and teachers are drastically underpaid and overworked, despite many of them having unions.
But those unions are negotiating against employers who have immense market power. State governments essentially have the last word on teachers’ salaries, and a lot of the country has consolidated to the point where there are only 1-3 major hospital networks in any area.
Without the ability to switch employers for better pay, the unions are the only way that those professions have to improve their pay and working conditions. (This may explain why travel nurses get much better pay than most nurses.)
Yeah, lab work has the cultural cachet of STEM and knowledge work, but looks a lot more like manual labor in practice. One of the lab planners at my current employer switched careers after getting her master’s because pipetting thousands upon thousands of well plates for her research gave her severe repetitive stress injuries that made it unbearable to continue working in the lab.
Biotech has another problem, in that the VC money --and therefore the job market – is concentrated in a small number of HCOL metros. A friend of mine founded a startup out here in the Midwest, and he struggles to attract enough funding to retain staff who are constantly being lured away to the coasts by better-funded firms offering better pay, even though that money wouldn’t go nearly as far in a place like SF or Boston compared to Kansas City.
On the one hand, Annapurna seems to know what they’re doing - Nimona was fantastic. On the other hand, I think it’s going to be hard to make this into a movie. I’m assuming they’ll focus on the journey of the cat and the environment around it, but they’ll have to fill all of the other space, hopefully with the robots and their personalities.
Took me cost me closer to 10, and you can wait for sales.
I thought it was just a “walk around” game. Boy was I wrong. Best game I’ve played in a long time, constantly engaged in the entire story. Yes it’s worth it.
I hope the cat in the movie will look more natural than the one in the game.
In the game, the animation looks great. I’m sure they took a lot of effort with the motion capture.
But there is something weird about the cat’s face. It just doesn’t look like a cat, no realistically, not cartoonish either. Perhaps some adjustment in the facial modelling will help.
Astartes. I’m not a warhammer person at all but I’ve seen this short film about 5 times now. Just from an artistic standpoint it is super impressive. Highly recommended.
A 100%, some of the things that you hear from the industry are crazy. If you offered me twice my current salary to be a developer in the AAA videogame industry, I wouldn't take it.
Not a game developer, but one aspect is that developers outside of the gaming industry function VERY differently to the point where there is little in the way of transferable knowledge.
For example, most games are made in C/C++ because performance is a serious concern, but management will absolutely shit themselves if you try to make a web service in that language due to security concerns. The only language with any serious overlap is C#, as that is the scripting language used in Unreal Engine and Unity.
Some app developers use game engines for non-game apps (eg: Duolingo uses Unity) but that's about it.
I understand that video games dev and Web dev does not overlap but the developer field is more vast than just Web. For example embedded development uses a lot of C/C++ so knowledge would be transferable there.
I would also say that even though the engines or framework is not the same, surely there are human skills that can be transferred like managing a project, solving problems, algorithms, performance analytics and debugging.
But that’s only my theory and I have no experience on switching field like that
You've got a very valid point with embedded devices. Although there are some big differences in that software for embedded devices typically also act as the operating system, something games stopped doing years ago.
For everything else you mentioned, you're mostly correct but there are complications. The problem is, it can be hard to sell those skills at an interview.
Yeah, embedded is exactly where I’m trying to transfer to, but good luck getting embedded jobs in Los Angeles that aren’t military or otherwise require a background check.
Not shocking. I just hope people learn from this and react by not getting into the gaming industry until the shortage of workers forces it to change. Same thing with the entertainment industry outside of gaming at large.
The way the movie / tv industry treats most of its employees who aren't at the very top is just horrible, and if people didn't have such stars in their eyes for Hollywood and such, working conditions would be so much better all around, along with pay and mandatory breaks.
I've been in the entertainment industry, and so has my sister. It's amazingly how terrible people are treated, including crew and lower end actors, and all for a product that's not really necessary or all that important for the survival of the world. People don't think about it, but we've been around for MILLIONS of years without TV and Movies. Sure there were plays and such, but it doesn't take much for humanity to amuse itself. Simple conversations, board games, some sticks and balls... if the writer / actor strikes kept going on, and new content stopped coming out, it'd suck at first, but we'd get used to it.
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Aktywne