To your comment, making games is great and fun and I think it's great you want to do it. Working in the games industry is different from making your own games though.

For one - you pretty much will never have creative input on the game you're making as a programmer (unless you're on a really small team).

Probably the biggest reason to avoid the games industry is salary. Game developers make less than their peers in other areas of software development. Lots of people blame this on there being a huge supply of fresh grads to hire cheaply, but that explanation feels like a myopic/simplified view from people on the outside looking in to me. My opinions aside, the fact is that if I left my job today and got a job programming something that wasn't games, I'd almost certainly make more money. I'm paid well enough to live a very comfortable life, but if your goal is just to maximize how much money you make, game dev is a bad choice.

Next thing to point to is crunch. Game development is notorious for "crunch" (aka - long periods of 70-80 hour weeks). Some studios do this more than others. It always sucks. It's also a fact of life in games. Even teams that "don't crunch" will usually wind up doing something like it at some point. I honestly have no idea if other programming fields do this too, it's just a common criticism that I've seen levelled at games industry jobs.

Being a game developer also means that you're not working with the kinds of tech stacks that the larger software industry as a whole is using, which feels like it would make switching fields more difficult (not that I've tried). For example: I haven't had to build a real database since college, have written maybe two unit tests in my life and don't think I've ever worked anywhere that's used the C++ standard library, despite working in C++ for most of my career.

It's also super unstable. It feels like most game studios will close (or transition to not making games) within ~10 years of starting up. Layoffs and studio closures are also a really common occurrence. Every time a meeting gets randomly added to my calendar at the last minute, my first thought is that a layoff is going to be announced (even though this has literally never happened at my current job). This is less of a concern at large studios (although definitely still a thing), it's a huge deal if your dream is to work at indie studios though.

There are lots of great things about working in games, but the above wall of text are some of the reasons why I'd hesitate to encourage folks who aren't already interested in the field to choose game development as a career.

Making games might be your dream job, just make sure you are fully aware of the realities of your dream job and decide if you are willing to accept that reality day in and day out.

This is one of the best times to be a hobbyist game developer as there are a wealth of tools, assets and knowledge available for free or cheap. If you have no or limited game development experience its always better to start as a hobbyist if possible to build skills, and even find out of you really like game development or want to do something else instead.

My advice to everyone wanting to enter gamedev is the same as for everyone wanting to start a startup: Be realistic about failure. It’s a high risk, high reward business with tons of uncertainty. It’s easy and common to be so enthusiastic about working hard to succeed against impossible odds that failure become a “Voldemort” term that shall not be spoken..

But, if you are realistic about the fact that “risk” includes the possibility of failure, you can be realistic about what failure means and what you plan to do when it occurs. If failure means your family will literally be homeless and starving, don’t take that risk! If it means your dreams don’t come true and you’ll have to go back to some boring desk job… Well that’s a bummer. But, it’s not anything to be afraid of.

Be sure to have enough money in the bank to pay the bills if you suddenly, unexpectedly have no job and need to find another. Be a coworker who people want to work with again because people who leave your company before you are how you land your job at the next company.

If you get lucky with a game, perhaps can ditch the contractor job, but otherwise at least you’ll have a nice income. Perhaps can save money for an early retirement, after which you’ll have plenty of time to focus on game dev.

Also, if your game becomes a big in this situation, you get to reap all the benefits.

I think what I mean to say is: if you get into it and it sucks, don't be surprised. But instead of being discouraged jump to somewhere else in the industry. You may be able to find your happy place full of nice people and fun projects (but still hard work!). And if you never do find that place and eventually move on to something else, don't take it as a personal failure.

'Simple' is the operative word here. Think Flash game, or mobile toilet game. Nothing on a console is a simple game, and neither are 99% of Steam games. Itch.io is another community of experimental games with smaller scope. Use royalty free art from the web; art assets aren't the point of your portfolio.

Once you're inside, you have a lot more freedom to move into the softer roles like design, production, or management. If those interest you.

You seem somewhat informed on the hours (which are bad, hopefully you don't have a family or want one anytime soon) and the pay (far less than webdev TC). You should also be warned that making games will make you hate games. If you don't absorb and accept the business side of making games, you will be constantly frustrated by leadership decisions, and you'll be stuck in the lower ranks. Climbing the corporate ladder means accepting that games are commercial products maximizing shareholder revenue. A LOT of gamedevs fight this their entire career only to their own detriment. Whether you fight it or not, it'll ruin how you view games, as the commercial lens can not be unlearned.

Ultimately I decided that game development is useful for building certain programming skills as a hobby, regardless of the “value curve” of the product. And if you expect nothing (i.e. you’re competing in a huge field of millions of games, nothing is special anymore), you can focus on what you’ve gained, which may be primarily the experience.

I emphasize the hobby part; it’s useful to try it but it’s extremely backwards economically. I would always advise “other” programming jobs, with game dev. on the side.

In both cases, it was very apparent that the industry is built around taking advantage of peoples' passions and love of gaming. Pay is low, hours are ridiculous, and respect is sadly missing. People put their heart and soul into what they are building and get tossed with little to no thought whatsoever.

If you are absolutely passionate about working in the game industry, I say go for it. But go in with eyes wide open: it is a tough place to be.

It is more entertainment industry than software industry, and, just like most other entertainment industry groups have guilds/unions to protect their interests (screen actors guild, screen writers guild, etc), there probably ought to be a computer programmers guild as well.

I know many developers in gaming and I constantly tell them to leave the industry for anything else. But they rarely do. And over time I see them get more run down and despondent. I actually see them age over a short period time. It's some sort of occupational Stockholm Syndrome.

The proper way to work in the game industry is to make your cash in another industry and then start your own game studio.

The pay is garbage and the hours are beyond excessive. Unless you pick a winning studio, stay for 10 years, and that studio has several blockbuster hits your royalties are worthless.

Take your experience doing games and go for a career in regular software development. Plenty of people need to integrate 3D engines into their products and know nothing about it (eg: adding the ability to view a 3d model) and you'll actually get paid for your work.

As others have pointed out, today's content-rich world only rewards the top 1% and that incentivizes repeatedly trying with quick projects. Don't spend years on one thing, slap something together and get it out there. If it isn't an immediate hit move on to the next thing.

A cursory look into opportunities showed that the schedules were grueling and driven by the market, which expects new flashy titles quite often but the demand for the new titles tails off relatively quickly. Worse, it's not like a spreadsheet where you can just fix some bugs, add some new features, then charge people for upgrades. You're constantly rewriting everything.

So I made the decision to not go into that market.

Software development skills are fairly fungible. I'd advise people to not go into game development unless they have a real passion for it and don't mind the demands upon them that are derived from the market forces.

Remember who got rich in the California Gold Rush? Not the folks digging the gold, but instead it was the shop-keepers, bankers, real-estate men and similar infrastructure-like people. Be one of them. I don't mean go into things expecting to be rich, but don't be a starry-eyed fool and start at (say) EA just out of college, get burned-out and then expect to have anything out of it. Make sure you can use other things than a shovel.

Get a grounding in systems. Do graphics, do networking, do LAMP, basically do as much as you can "wide" and focus on some areas that interest you ("deep"). Then you can work on games (great!) or servers or UX or whatever you chose. You can work at a games company (great!) or you can work some place else (also highly recommended). Don't focus on games because they're cool, do the tech behind them, with games as an incidental.

Don't get into games and expect that rewriting the same piece of code in the same soccer game year after year is going to be fulfilling. You'll wish you had the ability to go somewhere else, so ensure that you do.

And for God's sake, never think that you're going to get a foot in the door by starting out in Q/A. Just don't do that.

If you're in gamedev(as I am), you're essentially going into it as your lifestyle. You can make it a reasonably sane, healthy one if you can find a niche and make it as an indie, but good money won't ever be the motivating factor, and working in the studio environment is harsh and essentially requires migrating to find new work every time you're taken off a project. When new segments take off, like casual gaming did a few years ago, or social gaming more recently, you have a better chance of money and stable employment, but it'll fade away when the market saturates.

That said, the bar to make it is really high. It's not as impossibly high as making it as a musician, I think, because the variety of situations and skillsets is exponentially larger in the interactive multimedia context - so you always have less competition for your particular skillset - but it's definitely harder than "business programming" because you can add as many technical challenges as you want(soft real-time simulations, physics, graphics, audio, world persistence, networking, tools+scaffolding....) and still have only scratched the surface on what the computer is potentially capable of as an entertainment device.

If you take pains to avoid technical challenges you can make games more quickly, but you have to take on at least one or two to have a game, and adding more usually helps quality. Plus, the code alone doesn't make a game. The final game is the result of code+assets+design+player feedback - and lots of meticulous details. Game design isn't terribly different from business in that you have to make tons of hard decisions with little information immediately available. And like in business, you can get more info, but you have to work at it.

The pay is shit and the work is grueling. You'll make more money shoveling some enterprise's Spring Java shitpile than you will developing games, and you will still be able to see your wife and kids.

If you like making games, make one yourself, or help out a small indie studio with people you know. Hobby stuff. Don't let the business quench the flame of passion for the art form.

There are good AAA gamedev jobs. I knew a chap who worked with Ken Levine workshopping gameplay ideas for the BioShock series with Python prototypes. But he was in a very fortunate intersection of "has the right skills" and "knows the right people". If you come in cold, you're most likely going to find yourself "texturing the right eyeball of NPC #642" or "fixing glitches that arise when the player presses a certain combo of buttons" or something, 12-14 hours a day, 6-7 days a week. Every bit as grueling as enterprise-shop work, but under constant crunch and for very little pay, comparatively speaking because the demand for game-dev roles vastly exceeds the supply. Every kid wants to get into games, so if you're not willing to accept the shitty working conditions, there's always someone fresh out of Full Sail University who is.

Today's "mid-size" to AAA game development culture is ultra-conservative, both technically and creatively. Ballooning team sizes and budgets mandate this. Do not join a studio bigger than ~10 people. Smaller teams/studios imply better jobs, in my experience.

They say not to make your hobby your job- unfortunately, there's no other way to break in to this highly competetive industry (echoing others here). So start with hobby game dev in your free time. It's worth learning C++ while doing so. C# is another option, but one that mostly locks you in to studios using Unity.

Beware of relatively low compensation and "crunch time" (really a perpetual, cyclical issue in game dev). I largely escaped the latter, but most in the industry can share overtime horror stories.

The thing is that gamedev is one of the few industries you reliably hear people bully 60/80/100 hour weeks outside of say - medicine, law, finance. Or startups where you grind for a couple years hoping the lottery ticket of your equity pays off.

However, it does not pay anything near medicine, law, or finance wages. Nor do you get equity like a startup. And the labor practices of game studios in terms of benefits, layoffs, etc have always sounded far worse.

If the ROI is worth it for you, great (and $160k ain't bad to be fair, I've heard lower than that in gamedev). People just need to go into it with eyes wide open though and not foreclose their options early (by overly focussing on gamedev niche coursework in college for example).