Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter
Just to have a bit of a counter argument from me, a game developer who loves games and has worked in the US games industry for the majority of my 20 years career:<p>If your argument is &quot;You can make more at a FAANG company&quot; - well yeah, you can. You don&#x27;t work in gaming because you want to make the top salary. You work in gaming because you love games and you enjoy having all your coworkers also love games and being able to talk to all of them about games and having your company culture revolve around games and gaming. It&#x27;s games all the way down! It&#x27;s a completely different work environment. As someone who loves games, the best years of my working career were when I was working on game teams, not at tech companies.<p>Also, developer salaries in games is still plenty good. It&#x27;s still great money. I never felt like I was losing out.<p>Also the argument that it&#x27;s &quot;grueling 80+ hour weeks day in and day out is&quot; is bullshit! The only time I ever worked 80 hours in a single week was when I was starting out in Quality Assurance and I was getting paid hourly so I was <i>happy</i> to make the extra overtime. As a salaried developer I don&#x27;t think I was ever expected to work more than 60 hours a week, and then after the crunch was over we always got 1 or 2 weeks of extra vacation (&quot;comp time&quot;). To be clear, the normal working schedule was 40 hours per week. Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time. And like I said, depending on how much you crunch, you would get extra paid time off afterwards. So for me, that was a pretty good trade. I&#x27;d much rather work my ass off for a couple months and then get an extra 2 week vacation at the end of it.<p>Maybe some game companies treat their employees like dirt and work them into the ground, but the ones I&#x27;ve worked for, I never felt that way. Don&#x27;t work at those terrible companies! There are plenty of &quot;good&quot; game companies out there who pay good salaries and have good working conditions.<p>As someone who is older now with kids, my priorities are definitely different than when I worked in games during my 20s and early 30s. I would no longer be happy working those 60 hour weeks. I want a better work life balance. So I don&#x27;t know if I could work on a game team like that anymore. But do I regret working there before I had a family? Absolutely not. #gamedev4life