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.
There are lots of options for roleplayers who want to bring the Witcher to the table in the meantime, of various levels of complexity. There’s On the Path for something fun and streamlined, or Vaesen and Ironsworn for a bit more meat. You could use Monster of the Week or Bump in the Dark if you’re willing to move the setting into a more Witchery direction.
And if you’d rather stick with a system you’re more familiar with, there are supplements like Into the Wyrd and Wild or The Perilous Wilds that allow you to put your players through dangerous evirons on the trail of unique monsters.
I was considering making the jump from film and television to the video game industry until a year or two ago. I am really passionate about video games, and I really think there’s a lane for me. Unfortunately, after reading so many horrible stories about crunch culture and learning just how demanding the industry can be (even as somebody who worked on some pretty grueling Hollywood sets) I decided not to go that route. It still makes me upset to think about. I just feel like the industry is so terrible it’d be irresponsible and unfair to my family to go down that route. Reading Significant Zero really put the last nail in the coffin for me on that dream, even though it wasn’t the intention of the book. 
I know it’s not much, but I hope that if you don’t already, you find some time for yourself to just make games for the fun of it.
Not if you’re already dealing with overwork stress, but if you have free time that you’d like to spend on something. No one has to play them or you could do game jams (even though that’s inherently crunch, it’s the choice of the dev rather than their boss and more of a self-imposed limitation) or do otherwise random stuff and just let people muck about with whatever you’ve created. No pressure, no deadlines, no expectations.
And since you know already know how production in general works, you’re well aware of the iterative process and won’t fall into the trap of “why is this taking so long and why can’t my graphics be as good as GTA V” or whatever, which a lot of new developers (and programmers and pretty much everyone) encounter.
I work at a company which doesn’t make games, but interacts with a lot of game devs, and employs a lot of ex-game devs; and everyone I work with is either glad they got out of game dev or glad they skipped it altogether.
I used to work for a very reasonable (smaller) game studio, and while it was fun, I still got a massive pay and quality-of-life improvement by changing careers away from making games.
I get it Roleplaying games are the Hot shit, and im more them happy to welcome everyone into a great and fullfilling Hobby, but at the same time it feels like the market is saturated. In last 2 years alone ive seen the annoucement of whole RPG Systems by:
*The witcher
*dark souls
*gloomhaven
*assasins creed
*Stormlight Archive
*Candela Obscura by Critical role
And those where just the ones that reached my ear.
On the other Hand im All for more diversity in the TTRPG community, currently D&D takes way to much space for how Bad the quality of offical books is.
I’m 10 years into my games career and one of the main reasons I’m still in it is that I’ve worked for indie studios for most of my career.
I’ve worked rarely for AAA studios and they are soulless and long hours. It’s not fun, it’s not creative, it’s not about creating personal art. It’s about creating a product to make profits. They’re really fun games a lot of the time but they get there by limiting who can contribute to what.
An engineer trying to give feedback on design gets shut down. A lot of smaller studios are the opposite and people wear multiple hats daily. I love wearing multiple hats and it helps me understand my own art creation process.
Some folks in the industry as well only see this like a job not an expression of themselves through art. That’s fine but limits them to studios who only want workers not artists.
That said, the average has came up. About 10 years ago that average time in the industry was 5 years. Now it’s 7. People are finding the industry more and more stable but the industry does have a problem keeping juniors. I almost left the industry several times but as I got over 5 years I started to see a change in job offers. Lots more recruiters contacting me. At 10 years I’ve started to see a lot more people wanting to pay me for an hour talk. It becomes easier to stay in the industry as you gain experience but those first 5 years are really rough.
There's a mod that adds a metro system. The on-rail trains present throughout the city.
I'd shift my version of that complaint more toward "post-game doesn't let me be a passenger". Delamain quests, side quests, main quest complete? Congratulations, you are officially the only driver left in Night City. Sitting and watching in the passenger seat is no more!
Yeah I am hoping they overhaul or embrace a new engine because that is what apparently killed mutliplayer for Cyberpunk. I dream of playing as trauma team and extracting patients.
I’ve worked with Unreal Engine 4 since 2014. I was a part of games that got the engine early. I adopted Unreal 5 last year when it was reasonable to do so. It’s honestly one of, if not the most powerful game engine out there. It has its own set of issues of course. A lot of people use its features without regard to their proper usage or pitfalls of using them. It’s also not an engine that caters to small indie developers. Every engine has its flaws. That said I’ve constantly watched as large indies to AAA studios switch to unreal over my career. It’s probably the best engine out there for those studios. It’s good to see major studios dropping their clearly buggy engines and being able to put out better products.
That all said, boy that 5% to Epic is making them a lot of money. I’m really hoping in a few years that Godot Engine will really start to compete but even talking with one of the major engine contributors: “godot lacks people who know what they’re doing.” I also see this in a lot of engine issues and poor architecture choices. It’s disappointing to see someone so close to the project confirm. Unreal needs a strong competitor though, something ideally open sourced.
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Aktywne