What happened to my career after 2010? (2021)
Aside the medical misfortunes your story is absolutely typical. The
games industry has a tragic problem with churn. I see eager CS
graduates go off to &quot;get into games&quot;. Within a few years they get out,
bitter and burned, and go into more regular jobs in medicine, defence,
finance or whatever.<p>It&#x27;s called the 20:20:20 rule.<p>Only 20 percent of creative projects ever get to the production stage
Of those, only 20 percent complete production. And of those, 20
percent get through marketing and publishing to become &quot;titles&quot;.<p>That means if you are put into a team on a new creative project it has
a roughly 0.8% chance of being sold online, and then you can tell all
your friends about it.<p>There are two further problems. One is that projects like games or
films take about 2 years to complete. That means it&#x27;s likely your
first project will get canned. And your second. And your third.  I
have spoken to devs in the game business 6 or more years into their
careers who have never seen a title release.<p>If you are lucky to have a successful title and get into the &quot;pop&quot;
stream, then it&#x27;s more likely you&#x27;ll get onto a team destined to have
another success, and a positive success loop can begin. Just like the
film or music business, that can take you 10 or 15 years.<p>The second is that creative people really need validation and
feedback. Each time a management team kill a project it&#x27;s a
gut-wrenching experience for creative developers. Unlike music or the
theatre where you might play out a few bad nights before a show is
pulled you lose everything in a single stroke. Often for &quot;intellectual
property&quot; or &quot;reputational&quot; reasons they want to bury the entire
project assets and act like it never even happened. This leads
creatives to get depressed.<p>I&#x27;ve seen a lot of it and now warn students about &quot;getting into games&quot;
or any other industry that subsidises 99.2% of dead-end misery with
obscene profits it makes on 0.8% of mega-successes. But that&#x27;s just
the Pareto mathematics of high-risk creative work.