What keeps you in the industry? What makes you passionate about gaming? Why do you stay in the industry?
Op, I wanna hear your answer if you have one
Low TC and zero WLB, what's not to love?
I'll bite. I work on one of the game dev teams at Playstation and have worked at many first party studios before that. I average 40 hours a week until we are half a year pre-ship. WLB isn't even close to my #1 concern and nowadays is quite manageable. Journalists only focus on companies doing it wrong for the narrative, the larger picture is far more varied. TC for senior programmers is quite good for any studio that has product bonuses. A friend of mine made over a million dollars in bonuses from one Call of Duty game last year, and between product sharing and annual bonuses I am averaging 220-250k TC a year in SoCal as a game industry programmer -- this isnt average but it's also not rare.
Thanks for sharing. 1M is a tremendous bonus. How many YOE does your friend have and, why don’t all game devs work for studios with product bonuses?
They want to keep the money to the company rather than reward the cattle who make it
I’ve been in games for a while and finally hit 300+k TC. I’ve been lucky to work at small/medium sized companies that care about WLB.
I’m no longer in the industry, but I stayed around because once in a career you may get the chance to work on a great game that makes you excited to come to work everyday. I had that feeling once early in my career, but failed to grasp it again and eventually left when I was tired of the 135 TC with 10+ yoe. I doubled my TC by going to FAANG and regret not doing it earlier.
Can u go fix the matchmaking instead of wasting time here ?
Can you work on beating Lyft at your own game instead of wasting time here?
No