True, we’ve a couple of developers who’d love to work in the industry, but in reality the roles until you reach the senior roles are often very poorly paid in comparison to the wider IT industry, and often require prior experience of games development for anything more than the most junior roles.
There’s also still often hundreds of applicants for every role, as everyone still wants to work in gaming - which doesn’t help as it makes it difficult to get into, means the directors often think devs should feel lucky to work there and don’t offer as great pay.
Often the ones that do are the ones started by developers who are still in charge of the studio - too often, once they’re part of a big machine while the perks might be decent (as they are for many corporate jobs) the pay is often a crunch point
I’ve said my piece & it’s what I see & know. You can idealize as much as you want.
Also, I really don’t see how a dev working at Asobo (in France for example) would earn 30% more elsewhere. Jobs are tough to find everywhere & it’s not like money is growing on trees. If what you said was even remotely true (which it isn’t), you shouldn’t even feel bad for layoffs because they’ll all land on their feet & earn more elsewhere.
MS was in an unwinable situation here. Both studios no longer had the staff to reach their ambitions, and weren’t profitable enough to justify the heavy reinvestment it would take to reach that point. It sounds like becoming support studios would be the only way forward, and they may have very well been offered that and rejected it.
I don’t even know what you’re arguing for or about.
If you want people to believe game devs could earn up to 50% more elsewhere & only stay in gaming for the ‘passion’ of all the projects they work on (& some work on a lot of projects, i.e. in games & in film as well considering a lot come direct from film school where they studied 3D art), then no, I don’t believe that to be true. Certainly not in high enough percentages to make it noteworthy.
It’s a job & the competition to fill openings is very real & very tough.
We have no idea what the staff situations were, what ambitions were, etc. People keep making up narratives with no actual info to support what they think must have happened.
I work in a large organisation (not gaming but we do have many tech roles) and just went through a pay restructure. Essentially they compared our salaries with many other organisations to analyse if we were being paid fairly. I was one of the fortunate ones and received a 4.5% pay increase but that was very rare, among the tens of thousands of employees I think less than a handful got around 7%.
Most people received nothing at all which they are appealing on deaf ears.
I did my own comparison and the only way I could get more was to sacrifice my many other benefits such as my annual leave entitlements.
Spiderman is a character whos been around since 1962. Sony has fuck all to do with that game’s success beyond funding and getting Insomniac to make it. There have also been Spider Man games since the Atari ( and many of them were good despite the narrative that there were no good ones until our lord and saviour the all mighty Sony came along) 2600 so no the impact wasn’t that big. Starfield was straight up SEO bait even gamers who didn’t own xbox talked about it more than Spidey. Every COD release and Fortnight Skin has 10 times the “impact” Spider Man 2 had. Sony has barely done anything this generation game wise and I am not going to pretend that they have. Sorry.
That’s a fair stance, it just basically means there’s no discussion to be had. I feel there’s basic assumptions that are fair to discuss. MS is a for profit company, they saw these studios as not being able to make a profit. The question is why, and how they same standard views other studios under MS.
Many people say this is a change in previous stances by MS. I say this is the same stance as they always had. Tango and Arkane Austin would never have been acquired standalone. Despite being in a bad place, they got in due to being apart of the more desirable whole of Bethesda. They were given time to recover, and it sounds like things mostly just got worse. Arkane Austin never made money. Tango Had two major bombs, and then Hifi did well, but not enough to save them. I don’t think any other MS studio is directly comparable. If Hellblade 2 or South of Midnight are major busts, then the pressure would be on for those studios, but these two were already on the ropes. There’s no need for a broader alarm unless we see more games have receptions as tepid as Redfall and Ghostwire.
They even had an “Online pass” for Uncharted 2 where if you bought it second hand you had to pay extra to even use multiplayer.
Pepper Ridge Farm remembers.
There are lots of reasons to stay in gamedev, but most of them are because of passion, yes.
Not every position is played badly, you can make a good salary. But developing for Corp, bank, industry sim much better pay. And the hours are often times alot better.
Even people grinding away at shitty games are very passionate about what they do. People making FIFA (Or EA Soccer or whatever) each year, are super passionate. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t last very long in the industry.
It really comes down to the skill level of the developer. There are plenty of high level developers whose skills could earn them a higher salary as a software programmer elsewhere. They stick with gaming because of their passion to create something and publishers have been abusing this passion for decades.
Tim Cain, co-creator of Fallout and Director of The Outer Worlds, talked about this a few times in his videos.
If you are at all interested in the video games industry and development, I highly recommend Tim’s channel: Timothy Cain - YouTube
FWIW I originally wanted to get into gaming but decided to work in a different industry because I gaming SW developers typically work more for less pay. I am sure being in an industry people enjoy is a positive when choosing your career path and for some may outweigh the negatives, it’s still ultimately just a job though.