@swiftcoder Maybe we have a difference baseline for what “can write code” and “doesn't insult coworkers” means then?

Geri said:
if gamedev is your passion, then you would do it even for 0k usd a year

And this, in a nutshell, is how game studios keep managing to underpay gamedevs :/

Geri said:
People don't play that much any more as they did a decade ago

Numbers tell a different story. Gaming is going super strong. Growth is largely horizontal, though, which explains the numbers you quote: Any given service that was big 10 years ago, probably hasn't grown tremendously since then. But entire new services have sprung up! While Roblox existed in 2011, it wasn't nearly like what it is today, for example. (And Minecraft. And all the Battle Royales. And Twitch. And so on!)

I think this is a philosophical / epistemological question. It's more likely that you personally have changed your life situation and now interact with more people who play less, and thus you're coming to that conclusion.

This is similar to the common question “why is the world so broken now? 30 years ago everything was fine!” The world wasn't actually fine 30 years ago, just that younger people have less awareness of how things actually work (and usually, parents shield children from that knowledge.)

Geri said:
if gamedev is your passion, then you would do it even for 0k usd a year

Yes. The question is whether you should work on someone elses project for $0k/year. You can get an IT job, pay the bills, and spend your evenings on a passion project. Some people paint, or play in a band, or build watches. Some people build games! The drawback is that you'll never work on the leading-edge AAA projects that way. To do that, you really have to dive into the business. It might be a good experience for a few years, but always be aware of options.

leading-edge AAA projects can be a different way to describe “games that sell a lot”

It's more than that – it's very large teams, where each part of the game gets hopefully significant attention.

If you want to be part of a world where NPCs have individual AI and desires, vehicles drive and handle robustly and with variety, vegetation dynamically interacts with the environment, the weather and climate changes over time, and where every place you go, is a new, hand-crafted, delightful set piece, then all of that needs to be created, and you just can't do all of that on your own. And, no, you can't buy each of those things on the marketplaces – the marketplace products for the main engines are generally not up to the quality bar necessary, and for the few assets that are, they don't integrate to make a whole bigger than the parts, because they're not iterated together.

If you want to be part of shipping a game like that, there's really no way to do it other than going AAA, one way or another. If you're OK with producing only one small piece of that, or producing something of significantly reduced scope, then you can do it as a passion project. If “making very neat terrain” scratches your itch, absolutely possible to do while doing 9-5 in a non-game company! If “complete integrated world with best-of-breed everything” is your bar … different story!

Agreed! Also, an important distinction that I can read through the lines: “AAA” means different things. Being on the Borderlands franchise/teams is different from being on the Battlefield franchise/teams is different from being on the GTA franchise/teams is different from being on the Elder Scrolls franchise/teams.

The short answer to this is: Yes - game development companies pay less.

All companies who hire people sell a narrative to their employees. For some, it is “we pay the best salaries”. In others, it is “We have the brightest/coolest people” or “You get to work with the coolest technology in the world” or “Our employees deliver value to billions of people”, etc, etc. Every company will milk that advantage for everything it is worth, when trying to hire people - and especially if they can pressure the salary. I've interviewed with big/cool tech companies and heard the “People don't work here for the money” more than once, as an excuse to offer a salary below market average.

Game companies use the “You get to create games” as their narrative, and it is incredibly effective - especially to young impressionable men who are gamers.

For every entry level position I've ever recruited for, there's always been dozens upon dozens of fresh-faced graduates. In a normal situation, you'd be looking for the best candidates - and you're doing that in competition with a ton of other companies who are also looking for the best and brightest. That means you'll have a lot of competition, and one way to beat the competition, is to give a better starting salary. When recruiting for a game developer, there are a number of factors that play in. 1) I would not have much competition; the number of serious game development companies are not that many, 2) Most of the applicants would be passionate about getting into games (as someone wrote above - if you love game development, you'd work for nothing). These factors make it much easier to pressure salaries downwards, because if your preferred candidate says no, there is always a handful of others who will accept.