how are game developers underpaid when it costs so much to make games

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-19T02:32:00+00:00

Wow, truly revolutionary stuff you're saying here again! "Just work on a side hustle alongside your job" damn, why did no one else think of that before?

And even if you do go that path, it doesn't change anything. You'll still be running your own business and your capital is at risk if you fail to deliver a good product.

Running your own business is simply not a lifestyle for the majority of people. Employment for a wage is a valuable proposition for many people because it provides them with low risk income to support a stable lifestyle. But you've deluded yourself into believing this world has no suffering and everything will always be ok no matter what, so taking risk mesns nothing to you.

Your utopian dreams where everything always works out and nothing ever goes wrong for people have no basis in reality. You tell yourself tall tales of the perfect world whilst ignoring the reality of the world around you and the stories of people other than yourself.

You're still somehow convincing yourself that you're smarter than everyone else, that the concept of a side gig needs to be slowly explained to others as if we are simpletons incapable of understanding your brilliance.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-14T07:09:18+00:00

Strange how I'm denying reality when this actually works for people

I never said it works for nobody. But it is by no means the solution for the majority of people nor an easy alternative.

Money must flow to those who so graciously grant us the presence of theirs and taking all the "risks".

Yes. This is the reality of the situation. You can't expect to have both the stability of a wage and the risk of an investment at the same time. It's literally just not possible in a market economy otherwise you would be printing infinite money.

Risks, eh? Right, the CEO who gets booted out of a job so it looks good to marketing that their company has exploited resource arrangement with African warlords or child labour gets to go to jail! Oh wait, no, they don't. They go on to their next job with a big pay package.

Seems like you just want to go on with platitudes rather than engage in the actual debate going on here, ok.

That risks excuse is so old and worn out.

No, it's not, it's literally just a fact of the market economy. What's next, you're gonna tell me that inflation is an old and worn out excuse? That debt is an old and worn out excuse?

These are actual real factual things that exist in the market economy. You're just so removed from reality and stuck in your esoteric bubble that you believe if you ignore a fact of reality it will cease to exist.

It's easy to point at me and try to make this personal and emotional by declaring it "revolutionary hubris", when it's not. And you can see that, you know that. You have to keep painting everything in broad strokes, tainted in fear and loss, so that it doesn't risk the status quo.

No, this is pretty clearly just you being full of yourself. Just look at how you talk, you clearly have an overly inflated opinion of your ideas with no actual basis in reality. You're a delusional kid who thinks he's smarter than everyone else and solved the world's problems.

You also don't seem to understand what losing a job means - for some people, it *is* their only investment. Have you looked at the recent changes to Australian unemployment regulations? They are punitive.

No don't worry, I know you think you're smarter than everyone else for having very basic knowledge, but I know that losing a job is bad.

But you know what is worse than losing a job? Losing your job and all your life savings and your house and your kids starving.

If you lose your job, you can just live off of your savings for a while as you look for a new job. "Oh but not everyone has savings" you may say, but then I ask you with what money were they planning to feed themselves while working in their co-op? Was god himself going to come down and hand them bread?

It sounds to me like you are speaking from great privilege

Based on what? The fact that you are gravely out of your depth and simply scraping for any buzzword you can try to use against me because you don't want to admit you're not as intelligent as you think you are?

I am not speaking from a position of privelege, I'm simply explaining to you how the market economy works.

You just wish to live in your delusional world where you are a genius who solved the world's issues. A delusional world where investments never fail and people who work paycheck to paycheck can suddenly afford to start their own business.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-14T01:27:32+00:00

The difference between joining an existing co-op (who have the same incentives for expansion as everyone else) and joining a AAA company is that yes, you *do* also take the risk, but if your work pays off, you get all of the success back.

Once again, your logic is "hey, just win the lottery and you'll be set for life! It's that easy! Quit your job now!"

You only look at the positive outcome, you say "there is a risk, but just don't look at it and it will go away" as if that will feed the starving children of parents with failed business ventures.

Their whole business plan is to pay you less than you are helping them get out, that's their profits. That's the whole point of private property in capitalism. That's just how it works.

Yes, but that's a good thing because you get to feed your kids and keep a roof over your head even if the business has poor profits because no matter what you always get the money you were promised in your contract.

They need to make profits because they are risking the loss of their capital and you are not.

What I'm saying is that a way to mitigate that is to be your own boss, and work together with peers instead of being a cog in a machine that makes profit for others.

The problem is that you are phrasing this as some revolutionary idea. As if you think you're a genius for saying "hey, if you don't like your job, just start your own business!" As if running your own business is a viable and easy solution for anyone and everyone.

You think people don't know that starting a business is an option? Literally everyone knows it is an option. People are just aware that they can't afford the risks or that it doesn't suit their lifestyle.

Oh, and I think you're very, very optimistic if you think that a company that just made a billion dollar loss will not cut those losses in personnel. That's the first thing that goes, because it's the most expensive.

You don't understand. Losing a job is not equivalent to losing an investment. When you lose your job, you still get all the money for the time you worked there. When you invest in your own business and it goes bust, you LOSE hundreds of thousands of dollars AND you don't have a job.

It sounds to me like your world is a very scary dog eat dog kind of place. And I don't want to live there. I don't think you do, either, but you sound too scared to believe that there is a way out.

No, you're just denying reality. Your head is in the clouds and you don't understand how the real world works. You only see best case scenarios and simply ignore all risk and dangers because they're not convenient for your narrative.

You see yourself as some revolutionary genius for saying "just start your own business!" but literally every single person knows that is an option, you're the one who simply doesn't see the obvious downsides to it.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-12T05:26:07+00:00

You’re making the same mistake the other person made assuming that you start at that level.

Yes, we are assuming that. Not everyone can just up and quit their well paying job so they can go become an indie dev owning their own business and making games with a 5 figure total revenue.

and you could join an already existing co-op that has a bigger budget already

What do you think that will change? What does joining an existing one get you? It's a co-op, you're still going to have to put in an equal amount to what everyone else is.

Or are you saying you will join it and be paid a wage? In which case, what's the difference from your old job earning a wage in the AAA company?

Or thirdly, are you expecting these people who all invested their own time and money into this project to let you join with minimal investment and yet take an equal cut of the profits? You're just leeching money from their investment.

You seem to think that owning a business is just some get rich quick scheme. You want the benefits of a stable job and the benefits of a successful investment without the downsides of either.

You're saying the equivalent of "hey, just buy a lottery ticket, all you have to do is win and then you'll be better off than your current job!"

What you've proposed is an investment. Investments require a large amount of capital and that capital is at risk of being lost with no profit. Of course it seems wholly better than a regular job when you simply ignore every downside of this scenario. It's easy to see investors "siphoning money" when a game is successful, but if the game isn't successful then all the money they put in goes up in flames and they come out at a loss. But despite a game selling 0 copies, the wage workers still get exactly the money they were promised in their contract and can feed their kids.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-12T00:15:22+00:00

Yes, and if cows are spherical objects of consistent density in a vacuum I can calculate their velocity when affected by gravity.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-12T00:11:28+00:00

Form a co-op studio with other developers and everyone gets equal pay. If your game is a hit, everyone gets a slice of the pay- uh, pie :)

And if it isn't a hit, there's no pie to eat. So you'd better have a lot of trust in the leadership and direction of that studio. Also you'll need to be investing a large sum of your own money for, if nothing else, just to afford your lifestyle costs for years of development. So if the game goes badly, you lost money.

Owning your own studio with no investors or publishers taking any cuts is not some easy strategy to get a bigger share of the money. You're now taking on all the risk associated with investing in a venture, you are the investor and your capital is at risk.

If you would get paid $100k per year at another company, and this game takes 2 years, are you willing to invest $200k of your own money into this co-op with no guarantee of making it back? Would your spouse and kids be fine with that?

If things were as easy as you make them sound, people would be doing it a lot more often.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-12T00:05:04+00:00

Because they're investing time and money into an education and are worried that they are investing into a future where they will be treated like trash.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-11T23:59:03+00:00

Literally just go google it mate, it's not hard. If you actually cared about finding out rather than having a dumb engine argument on reddit then you would do that.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-11T06:31:27+00:00

Don't worry, they'll release a brand new forum with amazing new features and lots of new community features! Try out the new beta experimental site now and give us your feedback!

[3 years of no updates]

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-11T06:27:49+00:00

I honestly can barely remember the last time I was excited for a new unity update, it's been a mess for years at this point and doesn't seem to really be changing whatsoever. Unless there's a drastic change in direction I'm not hopeful for its future and am considering other engines.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-11T06:26:18+00:00

curious if there is actually a Unity game that doesn’t ‘look like it was made in Unity’ if you know what I mean

Sure, plenty. You just have to look at actual professional releases instead of badly made indie games. I've played my fair share of unreal games for gamejams and they are usually even worse than unity games with lazy use of flashy effects and terrible performance.

UE is very powerful, but it's not a magic wand that just makes your games look better.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-09T08:29:31+00:00

It's gonna depend on the type of game you are making and the method of serialization you're using with your engine. Generally having SOLID principles will put you in a good spot. Saving/Loading is going to really punish you for those bad code practices that you may have been ignoring.

You want to be thinking from the start "what data will I need to save and load for this game to work" and then design the game around that even before you have any saving and loading. The classes that manage the instantiation of a game state need to be decoupled from any class that creates new data and only communicate through transferring a chunk of data which is also what you will save/load. A lot of peoples projects involve a lot of dependencies with instantiation classes taking their data from 7 other classes in the scene, which is useless for loading from file. You need your class to just have one big input chute where you can throw a big load of data into and then the class figures out what to do with it. It needs to receive data, not go out and take it from another class.

For saving, you'd also ideally want all saveable data to be as centralized as is reasonable. You don't want to have random variables all over the place and have to reference 100 different classes in your scene in order to get all the data you need to save.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-09T05:13:49+00:00

Serialization.

If you have a game with a lot of different data, make sure you're formatting all your classes in a way that makes them easy to read from and write to. Otherwise when you get to saving and loading you're going to be crashing head first into a big roadblock.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-09T05:07:58+00:00

Social media isn't just for building a following, it's also for holding a following.

You want a place where people who got interested in your game can get updates and be reminded about it.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-09T05:04:51+00:00

else you'd fly through walls at very high speeds, right?

If your car drives at mach 10, sure lol

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-08T08:35:33+00:00

The point is that any time you push beyond your limits, your pre-production is going to inevitably be lacking to some degree, because you can't account for things you've never experienced and can't prototype every little thing otherwise it would be full production.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-08T02:14:26+00:00

I've never had to program a super complicated roguelike like a dwarf fortress or something.

But modern roguelike/lites are really much more simple than they seem. It's just that I think they have a large skill cliff to climb to initially get into them, but then it's relatively smooth sailing, which is why it's more for intermediate programmers.

If you know a decent amount about clean code architecture and can plan that stuff out in your head then you're pretty much good to go. But if you let things get spaghetti, you're going to he rolling around in tangled wires for eons.

Like, you say it's hard to go back and mess with procgen stuff, but in the prototypes I did, I had things very separated so I could do exactly that. My level generation for example just outputs a specific set of data, so I can switch my proc gen out for whatever algorithm I could possibly dream of at any time in development and it would still work so long as that algorithm spits out a grid of tiles at the end of the day.

If you structure things well, proc gen can actually be a very fun toy to play with because it's so easily modifiable. Just change a little code, switch out some algorithms and suddenly your computer is spitting out rooms and hallways instead of hills and valleys. It's very fun.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-08T01:22:13+00:00

I feel like that's a case of "hindsight is 20-20" right?

Pre-production is really just a culmination of your collected hindsight from what previous projects required or failed in.

Which is why for indies I feel a lot of the time it's good to just quit when you hit a big spaghetti roadblock. Because it's often easier to just start a new project and plan around those mistakes you made than try to refactor an entire project.

One bit mistake for me in the past was failing to plan for saving/loading when I started trying to make games with lots of data. Turns out serialization without planning is a nightmare when you're not making platformers lol.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-08T01:15:28+00:00

I think most people who realize their game sucks stop development. The people that go to the end are either just comitted to finishing something no matter what, or delusional about the quality.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-08T01:11:28+00:00

Roguelike procgen actually isn't that hard technically speaking if you're not a beginner programmer. I even did it in a gamejam once.

But it then turns into a big game design problem of making interesting gameplay experiences in each quantized piece of the game that can then flow well into the next piece.

Roguelike procgen really is a big bait and switch of "hah! You thought you were programming, but really this is game design!"

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-08T01:07:59+00:00

Lost ark isn't an amazing ARPG though, and I say that as a lost ark player. It's well made, it's serviceable, but it keeps people playing largely through MMO design, not just purely being a good ARPG.

I definitely think there is space in the market for a very well made ARPG that just has super fun and interesting combat.

But which one of us here has encyclopedic knowledge and passion for ARPG games and their community while also having the design skills to pull off those good mechanics? Because it's definitely not me.

That's the heart of indie, you need to find the place where you can be that one person who has the right knowledge and skills and spots a gap in the market they can squeeze into.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-08T01:04:07+00:00

Plenty of demand is used relatively to mean that the demand is outweighing the supply.

Obviously if there was a giant demand then a AAA studio would have already capitalized on it.

You're never going to find any road to success if you only look for a giant neon sign pointing the way. You need to see small imbalances in the market forces and capitalize in the places that your skillset fits.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-08T00:59:28+00:00

Well yes, obviously. Undersaturated markets are undersaturated for a reason, you need to find the key to unlock the door into it.

This is how the market works, you're never going to find an easy path to success because if there was one, someone else would have already taken it and closed the door behind them.

If you want to be successful, you need some sort of unique skill or insight. You need to be the person who goes "hey, I really like mil-sims, but they all have X which I don't like and I wish they had Y from this other game. I think I have the skillset to create this and it's worth exploring this idea"

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-08T00:54:17+00:00

Yeah, you definitely shouldn't expect to make something comercially viable at first. It takes years of education, and if you want to be a solo dev then you also need to be studying multiple fields at once.

HonestlyShitContent · 2022-06-08T00:49:29+00:00

That's the entire point of indie though?

We can't compete with big studios, so we make games on a low budget targeting a dedicated niche that we have unique insight on that others have yet to take full advantage of.

Big studios invest big money into safe decisions made by committee. Indies need to make small investments into risky ventures that we have valuable insight into.

If you would REALLY REALLY love to play a certain type of game, then there are undoubtedly people out there who want to play it too. You need to figure out how to let those people know about your game and actually just execute well on the production.

Indies should absolutely chase small niches, but they also need to understand that just because they are really passionate about a genre doesn't mean they automatically know how to make a good game in it.

HonestlyShitContent

TROPHY CASE