The Harsh Truth About Game Development

all right guys it's time to get on it's time to get real I'm gonna give you three harsh truths about making games full-time I'm a full-time game developer I've been running my own small Indie studio for six years paying the bills I have two kids I'm married I have a dog I have a mortgage I have a life that I've got to pay for full-time game development does this now the truth is is that half of the time I'm just being honest here half of the time I'm unhappy even when I was working on this game Never song it was 50 50. sometimes I was having a blast it was really fun doing the artwork but half of the time I was kind of miserable it's a tough gig so I want to talk about those three harsh truths as to why that 50 of the time is not so fun okay it's even true for games like breath of the wild right I'm sure the developers weren't 100 happy all the time creating this masterpiece so we're going to talk about those three harsh truths and listen the last harsh truth Might Sting it might be the nail in your indie game career coffin or your AAA career coffin or my hope is is that it will be the fuel and the fire that you need to propel you into the full-time game development atmosphere okay so stick around to the end for that final harsh truth I think it's going to help you before we move on guys I did want to let you know that my program YouTube Game Dev it's brand new it's all about how to build a YouTube channel and sell your games and sell your digital products it's 40 off right now open for enrollment for the next 14 days and it will close at the end of these 14 days click the link below to learn how I built a YouTube channel and how you can do it too and use it to make over a million dollars in revenue from digital sales for games or online courses or art packs that's what I was able to do and I want to teach you how I did it and how you can do it too and also if you enroll now you're going to get my course stream my game and that course is all about how to well get streamers and YouTubers to play your games I'll teach you all about that and it's totally free if you enroll in YouTube Game Dev click the link below I'll see you there all right let's start with the first harsh truth it's gonna sound weird most of the time you're not making games in fact most of the time you're just a feature tweaker you're creating widgets and tools and editor tools or just working on small elements of a game this is especially true in the triple a sphere okay in Triple A game development so for example making breath of the wild or tears of the Kingdom the developers are working on tiny little aspects of every little element of this game okay the sand the particles the the the the flying uh bosses and the the physics and the lasers and all the models that you see here it's all individually crafted by a full time position now if you don't believe me let's take a look at the credits of the game okay for example we've got a level editor here wrong not true it's a level editor developer what does this mean it means somebody who's creating the editor tools like I said widgets tools that are going to be used to create the levels so you're not necessarily editing the levels you're editing the level editor tool okay you can see here we've got five full-time positions here that create those tools another example is even stuff like localization which seems like such a small thing localization is when you translate the game to a variety of languages right this is a localization tool developer so they're not localizing the game they're actually creating the tools to localize the game right it's a very granular but full-time task okay so all the elements you see here all the elements you see here in terms of the 3D models that sounds really fun to create so maybe you might be really excited to say you know what I just want to work on the horse models I would love if that was my full-time job okay I would love if I was just working on the flowers or maybe just the landscapes in general well just remember that if you decide to do that you're going to be competing with a ton of other people okay now competition's fun and also teamwork is fun Community is fun it could be lonely in the indie game Space so in the AAA space you're definitely not as lonely but just remember that you're going to be working on the granular elements of the 3D art okay so you might be tasked with just working on the humanoid models you might be tasked with just the textures of the temples or the textures of the weapons right and if you're okay with focusing on that for years then you might love working in AAA okay but maybe maybe this brings me to my second harsh truth maybe you really want to be in a directorial position or maybe you just want to go the indie game uh Studio route where you it's like one or two people making an indie game well the truth about that is on the opposite end of the spectrum and that is you're not just mastering one skill you have to master dozens dozens of skills okay so for example Eric Brown stardew Valley Eric had to learn everything related to this game the pixel art the Sprite sheet animations the particles storytelling music either writing music or in my case sourcing music even though I wrote music from my previous games code in my case it's Unity with c-sharp or you can learn blueprint which is the visual scripting tool in unreal marketing how to build trailers right how to do sound effects using audacity or Logic Pro so suddenly you're going from AAA which is small granular tasks that you do full time to the indie game Space which is doing it all from the business side all the way to the creative side okay but even if you're getting a directorial position let's say for tears of the Kingdom right you have to understand well frankly so much more if you want to get a director's position which is highly highly competitive obviously for a game like tears of the Kingdom hitomero Fuji biashi I think is how you say it um this guy had had to know everything and more about developing a game as big as Zelda okay so not only in the indie game sphere do you have to know dozens of skills it gets even worse and more competitive for AAA okay now even for my game which I would call is I think it's a double a game right it looks like a double a game it's a double a shooter called Twisted Tower you can wish list below um even games like this require me to understand a ton of aspects of game development I need to understand 3D modeling or at least the basics of 3D modeling texturing shaders materials animation rigging first person shooter game mechanics game design level design how to manage a team how to manage a team with click up and Discord how to push to the to GitHub repository so ultimately in marketing creating this trailer ultimately I have to fully understand how to create this game I have to know the nitty-gritty if I'm going to even manage a team and that's what I do I'm the Puppeteer sort of for my small team it's not like I just tell them what to do I have to know how to do all of this for me to be able to direct a project so again just for full clarity by the way this is this is me I I I was Googling a picture of my face for this presentation and this came up does this look like me I don't know um but just to reiterate here as a director I have to manage a small team on click up Discord and also I didn't mention I have to manage relationships with Publishers and investors okay I have to know ultimately how to do all of that while marketing a digital product we're going to talk about all of this in just a second in particular marketing a digital product is going to make your life so much easier but in conclusion with this harsh truth what do all these skill sets as a director what do they have in common ultimately it comes back to our first harsh truth which is you're not making a game in the traditional sense you're not just sitting there building a game it's not that simple it's a lot more complicated it can be very granular or very abstract it's never as simple as just like like baking a cake it's not that simple all right let's move on to the last harsh truth this one is tough okay so the money situation for indie game developers is frankly kind of interesting I wouldn't say it's bad or good I mean it's it's more nuanced than that and let me explain so this is the Triple A game developer salary estimate um ninety one thousand dollars yearly that's not bad now this is from zippya so you know take it for what it's worth um but ninety one thousand dollars yearly sounds pretty good but just remember guys that this is working for AAA and I don't know if you've been reading the headlines lately but working in the AAA student uh in AAA industry can be pretty painful at least that's what the news articles say it started to make me I started to think after seeing these headlines come out is it necessarily true that all AAA Studios suck well according to Bloomberg the video game industry has a lot to learn about excessive overtime or according to Kotaku allegations of sexism bullying and burnout are inside Microsoft Studio behind State of Decay 3 right or this isn't a surprise apparently blizzard is caught up in another Scandal again it's all about ranking it's employees doesn't sound great does it but but just remember guys that's just a few Studios there are a ton a ton of Studios now this is just a list generated by chat GPT look at all these indie game studios look at all these AAA Studios now not all of them are perfect but don't let the headlines scare you away from working for a studio you don't have to create your own Studio to avoid the burnout right you can work for generous kind people focused Studios they do exist and and this Reddit user I think really says it great and this is in response to the question about working in AAA this user says I'd caution that you tend to hear bad things not good things all AAA Studios aren't the same some AAA Studios work people to the Bone and crunch a ton others have reasonable work schedules and this individual goes on to explain the ratchet ratchet Clank team didn't have that crunch okay so again feel free to reach out to these Studios and by the way there's a link below with all or many of these Studios I was able to find the the job applications and the email addresses for these Studios again using chat GPT um so be sure to click below if you're interested in applying for these jobs or submitting your game to the Indie publishers let's move on to talk about indie game Studio salaries and I'm going to put salaries in quotes Okay indie game salary is a strange term because I I've been an indie game developer for I think a decade I never would have called it salary I call it Revenue right I'm not salaried I'm not being paid by somebody other than steam or Nintendo or Xbox or my Publishers I'm not getting a salary I'm getting Revenue okay so that's the data that I think matters you can look up an indie game developer's salary instead you should really look at how much are Indie Games selling on Steam and Chris zakowski is my all-time favorite indie game marketer um he's so smart about analyzing uh indie games and and the marketing data but essentially you can see here that the medium game earned is just around 1136 dollars okay that's bad that is not good 68 of all titles released in 2019 generated less than ten thousand dollars today 91.5 of all titles earned less than two hundred fifty thousand dollars 96 of all games generated less than a million dollars okay so all those stories of Millionaire game devs you hear it's kind of similar to all the bad headlines you hear about AAA it's the one-offs if few and far between Fringe okay the average we can see here is generating less than ten thousand dollars today but I want to encourage you here so that might have been painful that's a harsh truth but I thought about this while creating this presentation and I realized that I've been overthinking this data or maybe not thinking about it enough so I put together this little graphic here not all indie games are equal okay I know this sounds harsh but it's actually I'm trying to help you guys not all 80 games are actually games I've put little check marks here to show these are the individuals or these are the games that are quote unquote real games everybody else here is what I'm going to call zombie games trashy shovelware or asset flip games that the developer didn't really care about to begin with but these check marks are games that were developed over the course of a year two three years by developers who know how to make games and if you're working on your second game or your third game that's you and I apologize because I know a lot of you are working on your first game might be offended just know your first game probably isn't going to be successful it's probably going to be that game that makes a thousand bucks that's just that's just statistical data that's just the way it is I know that's kind of frustrating or difficult to hear but if you want to make any games you need to be in it for it for the long haul and if you want to have that green check mark above your head you need to be on your second or third game so those are the real games by real I mean the commercially viable games okay hope that makes sense the commercially viable games then they're not out of the woods yet okay they also have to know how to scream and shout AKA Market themselves okay the real games need to shout louder than the zombie games if they want to succeed and you can see here one of my buddies Gavin who who made game called choo choo Charles incredible marketing skills created some insanely viral Vlogs on YouTube or my buddy David Whaley who made this game called the first tree again getting great marketing coverage from Rock Paper Shotgun okay or my buddy who created call to the lamb this is Jay Armstrong he created this game called Cult of the lamb and Cult of the Lamb actually finalizes my my or sums up my final Point here about my heart the harsh truth here Jay Armstrong accomplishes something in this game better than any game I can think of he accomplishes what I'm going to call the Trinity hook the Trinity hook are three hooks what's a hook a hook is something that grabs your attention when you see this just grab your attention yup that's the visual hook okay now when you see the call outs on screen here describing the gameplay and the mechanics those are the mechanical hooks so in this case it's a game where you build a cult that's a mechanical hook it's also kind of a story hook as well okay if you can find three hooks you have the Trinity hook that Trinity Hook is what allows you to stand out in this massive crowd of games so not only do you have need to have a quote unquote real game a decent game maybe your second or third game but also you're marketing it with the Trinity hook now listen this is easier said than done it is easier said than done this is actually the hardest thing to do in a game the hardest thing in game development is this right here it's not the technical side it's not building a team it's not the money it's this most people don't know how to create the Trinity hook and I'm still learning how to really Master the Trinity hook you need to create a mechanical hook kind of think about like portal okay portals mechanical Hook is the portal right that's what helps sell the game is just this idea that you can go through portals visually it looks incredible at least for its time it looks kind of like half-life but also just the visual of the portal is cool too and then the story can I point to it the story here the story is awesome in that game okay I would say the primary hook that really works is the mechanical hook which ties into the visual hook okay so you really need to find all three find all three if you want to avoid ultimately the three harsh truths okay this right here is the solution to all three harsh truths okay I hope that was helpful guys this was really really fun I will talk to you later cheers

Channel: Thomas Brush

Views: 31,578

Keywords: game development, the reality of being a game developer, truth about being a game developer, game developer salary, should you become a game developer, game developer, game developer abuse, game developers long hours, game developers labor abuse, ea labor abuse, ubisoft labor abuse, game companies labor abuse, working for a game company, truth about game development, game developer career, game developer day in the life, game companies workplace culture, game companies

Id: JldGfEh2hv0

Length: 18min 26sec (1106 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2023