Is game dev a viable career option?

>Used his billions
I don't think you understand money. He bought that house for $70 million. Conservative estimates of his proceeds from the Mojang sale are around $1.5 billion.

That means that after buying the house, Marcus Persson literally still had $1.5 billion leftover.

hey notch, i was just being hyperbolic bro

how's the candy room

It's hell lot better than many other jobs.

As if I would even larp as that weird fat fuck.

they make it so easy to steal your money. Go shit somewhere else

One my roommates from college graduated and now works at Sledgehammer, coding Call of Duty games. He gets $60,000 a year

I dropped out of college after two years and just learned server architecture and programming shit on my own by looking everything up on google and then got a job making $90,000/year in DevOps

Don't be a game programmer

This. I went to college originally to major in game design and development but switched when I realized how retarded the professors and classes were. I switch to computer science and I'm making $133,000 a year so fuck yeah.

60k isn't bad at all for doing what is essentially a hobby

Remember this, there are no friends in life. The only people that might always be there for you are your parents and maybe your brother/sister.

The ending of the film The Social Network might inspire what life is really is at the top.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=IRmE2AiabUY

Absolutely not.

This.
t. Full Sail dropout

a newly developed game is highly likely to not reap any profit unless its something highly established like COD. it's a bit of a gamble, just like crypto.

If you mean working as an employee for a game studio then forget it. Programers make way less money in the game industry than they would in any other industry while working like slaves. Artists make less than burger flippers if you divide the salary by work hours.

If you're going the indie route there are two economically viable options that I know of:

A) You sell your soul and you go full SJW and create some walking simulator or pixel art platformer with a LGBT black communist protagonist who has to fight against an oppressive regime or some shit like that. If you know how to market yourself properly, create fake Twitter persona, retweet the right people, make anti-drumpf jokes, etc you'll be picked up by Neofag and Cucktaku in no time, which is essentially free marketing. These SJW games are less economically viable than they used to be, but there still decent money to be made (check Steamspy). The reason why soyboy devs are crying about muh indiepocalypse is because they suck at money management and don't know how to run a company. They spend money on expensive coworking spaces, they don't pirate 3ds max and Photoshop, they fly to expensive conferences to jerk each other off, etc. Stay frugal and you can make these games for a fraction of the money that they spend.

B) There's some money to be made in small ad-supported mobile games. First step is to get good at reading and predicting what the market demands. I would suggest to read Trey Smith's blog posts and watch his lectures on this subject. His methodology is rock solid. Ignore his Buildbox shilling (overpriced crap), just focus on his take on market research. Once you create a game that is somewhat original (forget reskinning), fun to play and suitable for the market, you can approach one of the publishers in that scene which will help you with the user acquisition.

Oh and anyone who goes to game dev college deserves to be poor

If you're developing game for yourself or hobby, no
If you're developing game for profit, yes.
Most people will think they're in for profit but actually not, they just create a game for their own satisfaction, you can just look at game development forum somewhere, 80% of baby lead developer really like to force their own ideals even they doesn't have any experience which result in bad game design.

God damn old facebook looked so much better

C) You find a niche market that isn't targeted by AAA developers

i.e. Factorio, Rimworld, Prison Architect

Free to play, low quality games make a shitload of money.

I want to make a slither.io-like game but stuff it full of p2w shit. It's a lot of work though.

I write indie games for a living.

To make a living as in indie you need to make games so good people will play them over the million games available for free. This is hard, but it's a fun way to make a living if you can swing it.

Being a corporate dev means you get screwed over with infinite work hours, low pay, and layoffs. It will ruin you. Avoid this unless you can't be happy doing anything else.

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Absolutely - ICO's are the best games in town

>Is game dev a viable career option?

No grow the fuck up.

Yeah but those games need to be actually good which costs more than you'd think. They need good gameplay which means a lot of time is spent on testing and polishing (the last 10% of the development will take 50% of the total time). Also it's hard to get away with shitty programmer art anymore, the market has become too demanding.

The examples I've given are games that can be made in less than a year for less than $10k, especially the mobile games.

There are some other potentially viable genres which I haven't researched yet: Visual novels, Roblox mods, Agar.io style multiplayer, Escape the room puzzles

If all indie devs cared about was making the next Flappy Bird, the industry as a whole wouldn't have half the market cap it does today

The best games are works of passion. I say if you are passionate about a genre and you know what makes a good game in that genre, it's worthwhile putting in the time and effort to make a good game for it

Look at the top of the App Store games charts and tell me that the shit spewed out by Ketchapp and Voodoo is work of passion. This is biz. I'm talking about getting a decent ROI in a reasonable amount of time and not fulfilling muh artistic vision.

You're not wrong though. I spend a lot of time doing market research on Steamspy and I have yet to find a good game that didn't make at least a couple of 100k after a year. Although there are still at ton of devs who make good games and fail to break even. But that's because they have shitty discipline and are bad at money/resource management.

Case in point: in my spare time I've been working on a game in an underserved genre. I've worked out how to limit the game so that it can be made on a small budget but still have most of the core features I want it to have.

Only reason I am going through with this is because this is a genre that I know very well, so I have a good grasp on what kind of game can be successful in this genre

>Also it's hard to get away with shitty programmer art anymore, the market has become too demanding.

The market is saturated. No one's going to play the another Tetris clone when there's hundreds of thousands those out there already. In fact, almost no one will be able see your game, regardless of what it is, unless you have a very large advertising budget.

Agreed, that's a good strategy as well. Especially if you're active in the community of that niche genre and you actually enjoy playing these games.

Like the guy from Spiderweb Software who makes Ultima style RPGs. He's making a decent living doing what he loves. If you can build a business like that, more power to you.

I never said anything about clones. Marketing is cheap if you know what you're doing, especially for PC indie games. It's just very time consuming that's why partnering with a publisher can be a good idea.

Maybe. The fact that you think you could be one is why video games are shit though.

youtube.com/watch?v=o-VbtnSaYMs

Games have an incredible low chance to succeed unless they are published by a major studio. You have a much better chance to turn a high-school dropout garage band into rock-stars than selling an indie game (enough to even pay the cost of 2 people developing it in a wealthy country)

Forgot to add the reason: both PC and mobile (especially) markets are incredibly saturated and without major advertising bucks only you and your grandma (and some friends if you have any) will even see your game.

>Can you imagine sitting in front of a classroom full of stupid kids and just teaching the same crap 6 times per day for multiple hours straight, why would anyone want to do that?

>Can you imagine standing in front of a conduit pulling wire for multiple hours straight, why would anyone want to do that?

>Can you imagine driving around in a crown victoria and just wroting tickets for multiple hours straight, why would anyone want to do that?

>Can you imagine sitting in front of a courtroom and just judging people's divorce cases for multiple hours straight, why would anyone want to do that?

>saturated meme
You don't know what you're talking about. Read my posts.

Full of failed humanities B.A. POS, overweight outcasts, fucking freaks and in general LOTS of real life losers. I worked with a bigger company, Paradox Interactive, and that was my experience. And they are like Top20 in the global market. With smaller companies its even worse. If you‘re only 1/4 a Chad and have your shit together you will be fast tracked for CEO in no time. That‘s an industry that is devoid of any real masculinity for a long time now.

Pubg didn't invent much of anything. And everything about it from the UI to the title music to the animation is subpar. If you have an ok spinoff of an existing idea, go for it. You don't always have to invent new things.

Chef Tony is on late night television for a decade cutting through drywall and leather boots with the miracle blade kitchen knives. It's a fucking knife. They've been around forever.

what genre

I've been in the mobile gaming (indie) business and some (little) part PC.

Posting on reddit and the likes will not nearly generate enough momentum to rank in the app store to get ad-views money or enough money if you are selling the game.

I am strictly speaking about my case at the time..a very light funded 1-man developer. I didn't have the time and resources to put all my eggs into one bask developing a game for 10-12 months hoping a publisher will take me on or the game making money on it's own.

So i went the reskinning route (dozens), made very little money compared to working or other business routes (software).

To make money following your way (making a good game) you need at least a decent budget, time and you need to take a lot of risk (developing a game for 10 months as you say). At the time i didn't have any financial resources for this, and even now i would not do it simply because of the risk (all eggs in one basket).

Still..wanted to ask you...can you still rank for keywords in the Apple Store without ads? I'm speaking first 1-8 positions on 10k-100k views keywords.

I once went to a convention for luls
and there was a corner full of developers shilling their college
when I asked them if they worked in the industry or had made any games
none of them had, all ideas men and designers
kek
wasnt exactly a stellar advertisement for the college and industry

Well I made an android game. It has gotten about 4000 downloads and $40 in revenue and it's still growing. Planning on updating it since it's not quite complete. Hopefully I can start making $1000 every month.

I do it as an hobby, but i already have a decent day job, so even if i don't make money out of it i'm still gonna be happy that i finished a game myself. The problem is finding the time.

Tbh this is a part time thing. No way I'm doing fulltime indie dev I have enough funding to get by without pay for several years

Life simulation, there is basically only one game, The Sims. There are other similar games like Harvest Moon but these are sufficiently different I don't consider them to be in the same genre. The trick is creating a life sim that is different enough from The Sims that can also be made on a small budget.

I've played every single Sims game since the first one

>reddit

Social media marketing doesn't work that well for mobile games. There are 2 options for marketing mobile games: If you have a paid game and it's somewhat original and polished, an App Store feature is almost guaranteed if you follow some basic rules.
If it's a free Ketchapp-style game you need to partner with a publisher. The latest trend is doing UA on instagram, which is very difficult to do because these ad supported games have a very low average LTV per user.

>reskinning
lol every Pajeet and his mom are doing reskinning. I guess you learned your lesson

>eggs in one basket
Well no risk, no reward. If you worry about that, entrepreneurship isn't for you. If you're a NEET, it takes way less than 10 months to create a decent mobile game if you have some experience with Unity. If you're wagecucking you basically have to sacrifice every evening and weekend, but it can be done if you're disciplined enough.

>keywords
I don't know, my publisher handled ASO

this. it's incredibly creatively satisfying and intellectually stimulating

>normies will never have the palpable rush of dopamine that happens when you finally test 2000 lines of code you wrote in a single waking period
haha we're so based r-right?

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because they realize it is survive or die in this world and the only way to live with dignity is not to give in to degeneracy but rise above your own weakness

the rest, like you, who dont realize this and “complain” about work have never been taught what work really means and stay poor and bitching forever

Game dev is same as investingo into crypto. It's 80% luck and 20% skill

It depends on you being able to find a hole in the market and fill it in which is what notch did with minecraft.
Basically people (autists) will tell you that he ripped off infiminer, but that game was trash, notch only took the digging idea from there and made a great game around it.
Finding a hole like that is harder and harder as more people get into game dev in hopes of getting rich.
In the end, game dev is a full time job and the chances are you won't make any money at all.
If you are in it for the money invest in crypto.

t. hobby game dev

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no, it's the most terrible branch of software development, the pay is bad and the competition is insane, all those success stories are merely a result of survivorship bias

I just want to learn enough about coding to be able to hack and exploit games. It seems more promising than game dev

Also if you are a strugling game dev, why not focus all of your attention on crypto gaming where you have an opportunity to be a pioneer and be creative. There is no big companies that run the crypto gaming industrie. Im sure some creative indie devs will create some very succesful crypto games and become rich as fuck. I would be very exited if i could build games right now.

Just look at ethertanks. That lucky prick made 250k in a month for selling pics of tanks. Because he was a pioneer. I know there are more and more shitty eth games coming out everyday but there is still lots of time to inovate and make something half decent, and not have to fuck around with adds and shit.

Yes, pays bad tho and entry isn't easy

Crazy pareto effects, extremely competitive and motivated workforce, growth industry.

I'd say it's a bit like being a poet - you do it if you can't imagine not doing it, and you do do it you should be prepared to have a day job that you rely on for income. That said, if it really is a calling you might be one of the 4% that goes home with everyone's money before you turn 35.

STAY AWAY FROM THAT INDUSTRY!

It's full of stupid shiny eyed kids who always wanted to be game devs because all they did in their childhood was to play games. The thing is, these people are willing and/or easily coerced to accept a shitty salary because it's their "dream job". You'll often hear excuses like this "I'm doing what i like, and that's all that matters". This is why EA businessmen are so rich. There are just so many easily exploited, cheap labor nerds fighting for the gig.

Do yourself a favor and aim for something like DevOps / webdev(front, back, fullstack, whatever) / DBA

so you mean a gambling sub-game using gambling money?

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Buy my token and i'll tell you

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Indeed. Besides, we need less fucking video games in this world as it is. It's better to create things that inspire and move people to do things instead of creating dopaminergic skinner boxes.

As long as you don't mind blowing all your profits on marketing.

Anyone who still plays videogames past high school deserves to be poor

It's called having fuck you money. What scares you about that?

He made bank off an incomplete game. People actually believe minecraft graphics are "retro" kek.

you're sitting in front of a computer right now dipshit the only difference is that it's not productive

>not writing the tests first
user..

If you have the ideas and the know-how, sure.

But go your own way, don't become an employee at a large gaming company. I worked for one and we were forced to follow guidelines that limited us.
Create your own game and publish it under your own name, trust me.

A friend of mine has a MS in computer science, and used it to get into game dev. He's been working for at least 5 years and makes ~40k. I have a BS in computer science, have been working for 3 years, and make 85k.

Do what you want, but be prepared.

i meant manual testing, i don't use any automated tests

whatya do

Oh yeah, I guess I forgot to mention that. I'm a normal software dev. I work on business management stuff.

Notch is literally how I image gamersgate anons. Fat, bitter, lazy and autistic about shit nobody cares about.

it scares me that he's rich as fuck yet wastes his time on twitter seemingly hours every day.

Doing indie game dev by myself for the next six months - a year. I might post how that goes later

This is one of the cringiest rants I have ever seen

Senior Artist in the industry for 8 years. Ive hit a salary cap of 98,000. Depending on the studio you will get a bonus once a game has shipped. Bonus could be 10k-150k ususlly based on seniority/title.

You're actual artist?

3d or 2d? What software you workin with mainly?

If you are. Totally optional. Do you mind sharing a portfolio or somethin?

i assume its all done in china now

this. It's a fucking small industry in terms of employment. Good luck breaking in, but if you do the day to day is pretty fun since it's majority younger dudes that share a hobby. Pay is less than you could get elsewhere, but your boss is probably fun to hang with and not an asshole.

is learing everything on your own a viable career path?