Is a game developer job in the future, like winning in lotto?

Im 15 years and working as a full time indie developer in the future (when im old enough) is my dream.
The day we live in today, its so easy to download a game engine and begin making games. That means a lot of people are doing that, and a lot of people are far better than you are yourself. Is it possibly to have a full time game developer job in the future? When there are so many game developers, that you need to compete against, and the odds for a succesful game must be small. And if you dont earn enough money, you need to get a other job, and then you dont have so much time to make games in.

 

Yes, it is possible

apart from that there a numerous threads on this very topic including a sticky one:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/184797-The-answer-to-every-Can-it-be-done-and-I-ve-lost-my-way-post

You really should not rely on opinions from people on a forum trying to live pretty much the same dream. aget educated on the topic and be honest to your work and open for critics and guidance

 

No, it's not like winning the lotto. It's like anything else, you practice and you get better at it. If you can put in the work in all the various fronts you have to deal with in game development and wear all the hats a smaller team has to manage, then you will shine among the riff-raff. It's all up to you and your own actions, there is no luck involved. Even things that people attribute to luck are based on conscious actions.

Since you are 15, assuming you live in a middle class family situation, you don't have to worry about getting a full time job for many years. Within that time, you can work on developing a skill in order to make game development a full time job. Even if you are in a less ideal financial situation, you can still live off of low paying jobs and do game development in your spare time to try to make it your career. Just look at Edmund McMillen if you don't think that's possible. It's all up to your own motivation and desires.

 

It seems to be a common belief or misconception that 'Success' means Flappy Bird, or Angry Birds, or Fruit Ninja, or Minecraft, or any one of the extreme cases of popular games.

Believe it or not many people are successful game developers working on games you have never heard of. You may never get to that level of popularity, and you may never make a million $$$, but if you're able to make enough to sustain yourself, that's already a big success and the majority of people in this field is in that category.

It's the same as in the Music or Film industry - there are lots of people there doing stuff you've never seen, or heard of, but they are doing just fine

 

No it means very little job security, 50% less wages, higher competition and the constant threat of being replaced by someone younger and more energetic.

 

And that's if you win.

 

yes, but better.

 

Except in the sense that sometimes the Internet can take a product and run wild with it. Best example is Minecraft but Dwarf Fortress isn't a terrible one either as the developer is able to live reasonably well off donations.

 

I tend to think of it as more about skill rather than luck. You need to come up with new, creative ideas. You need to know things about how to get your game known. You need to know how to program, of course. And how to make players happy, and how to make them love your game. There's a lot to it, really. A lot to learn.

But in the end, I say do what you love. What's money if you're doing a job you hate and are living a miserable life? Doesn't mean a whole lot. Have to do what you enjoy doing.

 

My definition of AAA is described here: http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/more-pixels-more-manpower-why-hd-gaming-has-left-us-with-fewer-big-titles/

There are 450 players in the NBA. That's about the same number of AAA character artist jobs in the entire world.

Environment artist jobs, maybe 2,000 world-wide. For comparison, there are about 5,000 neurosurgeons in the United States.

Designers are probably somewhere in between.

As the budgets have grown in AAA, the studios are forced to lay people off if a game isn't a mega-hit. They also layoff employees they consider easily replaceable when the game ships. You have a much higher chance of losing your job every two to four years in the future. When you hit your late 30's - early 40's, you might not want to move your family all over the world.

The population of the Western world is rapidly aging and will slow down the economy for the next 20 years. People will have less money generally and elderly people aren't going to buy a lot of games. Expansion into countries like China might help offset the problem.

So, if your goal is to work in AAA development you are going to face significant competition.

A safer path is to work independently, part-time or full-time.

 

People attribute stuff like that to luck, but it's not. Marketing, public relations and business strategy are all learned skills that you have to develop as well, and a lot of indie developers completely ignore this. They think they can just make a game with no marketing, release it, and expect it to be a huge hit. When their game unsurprisingly tanks, the developers say "all of these popular games must have just got lucky man!"

Sure, instances like that rely a bit on luck, but in reality the people behind those games did a lot to increase their chances of "getting lucky". For example, if you are constantly pushing your game to everyone who will listen, you are way more likely to get tweeted by a big youtuber or something and get a massive amount of fans just on that. Getting tweeted by the youtuber is an act out of your control that requires luck, but you vastly increase the chances of that happening depending on how you market your game, do PR, etc. This stuff isn't magic, there is a reason why certain games get popular and why some don't.

Even if you can attribute a game completely to luck, for every game that the developer got lucky I can point you to a hundred where the developers consciously pushed their game. Just because one person wins the lottery doesn't mean that's the only way to get rich, if you understand what I mean.

 

Yes, game competition is gonna increase a lot, but think of the bright side...
With so many lazy/half-trained developers out there asset demand is gonna skyrocket.
Even if every gamer on the planet became a developer of some sort, you could still make some decent money selling assets.
It's all about adapting to the market. Also remember this, high skill and diligence will always be in demand and valued.
It's never in vain to work and train hard.

 

It takes skill to bend the truth.

 

Here's an example.

The below image is made a person who doesn't want to work, wants to take advantage of others, takes more than a month to do something right. Keeps complaining that no game studio wants to hire him. This is image #1.



This is made by a Mixamo finalist. She entered the Mixamo contest, submitted her artwork, was declared a finalist. She works here. The below image is well done, fully rigged, fully animated, high-quality stuff. Less than 2 week of work. This is image #2.



For the price I pay the person in image #1, I can hire 10 of the persons who can make image #2 and give them full-time jobs.

If I hire semi-skilled, I can hire around around 21 to 28 semi-skilled developers, artists, modellers trying to break-in to game development.

You can either go for instructor-led courses (game development course) or find a job as junior game developer.

 

Which is why I specifically picked Minecraft. Notch may have made some intelligent decisions that helped his product become successful such as lower rates for alpha/beta stages and semi-regular releases, but the majority of it really came down to chance. It just happened to get popular with specific Internet communities and those communities essentially marketed it for him.

 

Things are changing and progressing so fast nowadays that you can't be sure of anything. Of course, games will exist in future and they'll be more immersive and more varied. However, what kind of software you'll use, how you will program them, where and how will they be distributed and what kind of employment options you'll have 10, 20 years from now is really hard to predict.

In any case, solid work discipline and ability to reinvent yourself and adapt to new things from time to time will be crucial. Being an independent developer is definitely not a simple career path.

 

Too bad the person that make the 1st image isn't motivated. The 1st image I like better towards the direction they should of finished it in.

 

Also, I'd like to add to this... if game engines are making it really easy to make a specific type of game, then that game is going to be made a lot. So my advice: don't make that kind of game! Make something that really stands out. Use the engine as a platform to stand on, but then build way up higher from there. What I mean is, having the game engine opens up new possibilities. You don't have to do all that work. But that allows to do all kinds of work that you wouldn't have been able to do before because you would have had to focus on the engine.

So you can still make things that are crazy and really stand out, and then I think your chance of being successful will be a lot higher.

So basically, if it's easy, don't do that. Go beyond that.

 

I think someday there will be plenty of environmental simulation programming jobs that will require cross-disciplinarian cooperation to safely manage environments with over 7 billion people and limited resources. That's more or less 'advanced gaming programming'.

Wall Street and modern economists used and may still use algorithms on Non-Cooperative Gaming developed by John Nash. Of course the wisdom of using a theorem developed cooperatively by John Nash by a large number of non-cooperative people on Wall Street and various governments can seen to be foolish and detrimental to the wise allocation of money and natural resources which is what governments and banks are indeed created to do.

The game engines and PCs aren't even setup to handle such complex simulations now but I can see the interest growing as a way get attention in a way that reams of dry government PDFs can never hope to get attention. They'll be better simulations and more useful than Hollywood disaster flicks.

 

v Yeah basically. You are probably going to need to take abunch of crap jobs to pay the bills. Right now you probably no bills to pay you should take advantage of that, if you have the discipline, determination and good work ethic (which even 20 something dont have) then you could really put it good use.

If you think the game store is not a lottery look at the top #5 free apps in the app store and explain why they are at the top and other better ones dont.

Top 5 right now - piano tiles, stay in the line, toilet time, make it rain, 100 balls. What do you notice about these games, all simple games, they dont have good graphics or high production values (so they can be run on any device), they have simple mostly 1 button controls(and played by anyone from grandma to baby). Most of these games could be made in less than 1 week, so why certain games works and others dont thats the mystery. 96% all of money from the appstore comes from free games, only 1..3% of your customers are going to buy anything, which means you need millions of downloads. There are literally hundreds of apps released every single day on the app store, so unless your app gets traffic from somewhere (a blog, youtubers or whatever or featured by an editor) its basically dead on arrival.

And yeah there are success stories people that do put out high quality content, the rebeltwins, mikamobile etc. But thats more risky because you are going to have to sink 6+ months to that project and it might not even pay off.

 

You don't have to be in the top 10 apps to be successful. Maybe getting #1 in the app store is closer to winning the lottery, but that's not really necessary.

 

Certainly makes the hub-bub over the necessity of having UE4 type graphics to be successful look misguided at any rate (when creating a game). The most interesting thing is no 'Angry Birds', Zombie type games (I guess technically 'Dark Room' can be considered a Zombie game) but there are 5 types of 'War' type games in the Top 20 'All Around' in Paid, Free, or Top Grossing.

And only 9 game type apps (maybe 10 or 11 I'm not a gamer so I'm not sure) in the 60 slots were based on IP that existed before the Apple App Store (excluding Google and Facebook apps).

 

Unlike sports, if you dedicate yourself to this profession, you can make it on your own. My only advice is to do something related to game design every day. The more you keep active in something, the faster you become at learning it.

 

What? It's very well known in sports if you're willing to cheat you can be successful, although you're right in that talent and dedication alone aren't quite enough to be successful in sports anymore.

 

I used to believe that, but I recently encountered some anecdotal evidence that suggests that your statement is not true.

My company recently saw one of our old games go up into the top 1000 paid games on the App Store.

We made $60 USD from it that day.

If games in the top 1000 don't generate enough revenue to pay for future development, then it truly is a go-big-or-go-home market, at least for iOS paid games.

 

Oh, don't be ridiculous. To say you have to be at the #1 position to be successful is absurd. There are plenty of games out there that haven't ever been in the top 50 even and are doing great. I think Order Chaos MMORPG might be one example - AAA studio working on it, they would have dumped it fast if it weren't profitable. And I don't think it's been in the top charts. (Admittedly, though, it was featured by Apple at one point. Being featured DOES help).

 

I'd have to agree with that.

For further evidence I help correct the English translation to a Apple Apps Store apps and I talked to the manager and it got up only to about 175 (this is 2nd half of 2012) in the Games section and he was very disappointed. He said that was only about 10,000 users and that since it was a free app that you must buy virtual goods for the game maker to profit it was a money loser. The game was pretty good though nothing astounding.

I've heard you must be Top 10, maybe it's Top 20 by now.

 

You also have to factor in how long you're up there. Your friend got to 175, but I'm guessing he didn't stay there for long. If you're in the top 100's for months it's a different story. This can certainly happen if your app targets a niche market, where things aren't quite as volatile as the big hit-or-miss games.

 

I know it stayed in the Top 200 for a couple of months. And I know there were a lot of players that spent so much money it's wasn't long at all until I couldn't compete against them. I agreed to play test (only buying virtual goods once as a transaction test) as well to have better understanding of what they were trying to translate into English.

I did also do the same translation job for them for they're planned sequel so I know they did well in their home markets just not in the west like they were hoping too.

 

Obviously I wasn't saying you can be successful REGARDLESS of where your app is in the store. I just said you don't need to be at the very top (#1) or even top 10 to be successful.

 

I would refer you to this little piece by Jeff Vogel, probably the epitome of the classic successful indie developer (he's been doing it for decades), so his words and wisdom are of some value indeed.
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.ca/2014/03/this-miraculous-money-of-old-people.html

Basically it comes down to taking a good look at the market pie you want a piece of and judging which slice of that pie you have the highest chances of dipping your fingers in. If you are dreaming of competing with AAA FPS/Action titles aimed at the adolescent market, or competing in the mobile F2P market, then that's just silly. Even a cursory knowledge of business is all you need to understand that without some particular market advantages you have no chance at competing and that you'll be leaving all your success to mostly luck - not a business model you ought to go with.

On the other hand, the gaming market pie is gigantic and it's boundries are really unknown. Just as everyone thought that certainly everything must have already been done before, and there is no more room for any new innovation, out comes a game that proves everyone wrong and makes millions.

The fact that such games make millions isn't really the point, and trying to be a game like that isn't a good business model either (because again, high amount of luck is involved). The actual point being is that there exist vast amounts of underserved or entirely unserved regions of the market. The market "niches", as they are commonly called.

These niches are where you can, with a good business plan and some business sense, exist quite comfortably, as demonstrated by long-time successful indie devs such as Jeff Vogel, mentioned above. And heck, who knows, maybe you'll get lucky and be the next Minecraft or DayZ?


But if you would allow an old grumpy fool to impart some unsolicited advice, diving head first into an unstable and risky career of an entrepreneur (which is what you are as an indie dev, unless you are working for someone, in which case you are simply a dev, albeit working for an "indie" studio), might not be the wisest of life's decisions. Consider, perhaps, to first minister to your personal finances and secure a comfortable financial future for yourself and your coming family. One where you can comfortably retire by the time you are 30 or 40 years old, because if you think salaried work sucks now, it's not going to get any easier when you have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay off, plus all the other financial responsibilities that you acquire as you and your children age. Once you have a got your personal finances in order, doing things like indie dev becomes so much easier.