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Two and a Half Years in GameDev

About 3 years ago, I joined a GameDev company, without any prior experience making games or hands-on exposure to this industry. Statistically, this time is not even enough’s to release a single game. But during that window, I was lucky to meet many talented people deeply involved in modern GameDev, who shared with me their career journeys, war tales, and anecdotes, and helped me shape my vision. One unexpected outcome of this switch was that many friends and former colleagues reached out to me curious about what it was like and how it is comparable to my previous experiences. A surprising amount of them revealed to me that they were secretly planning to pursue this path later in their career, or explore it as a passion project.

Unlike engineering, where senior ICs and managers can and often do stay very close to the code, the general feedback I heard about artists stepping into managerial roles, is that it’s a much more demanding shift with the expense of their own creative involvement. For years, video games flew under the radar, pulling off things that more regulated industries wouldn’t even dream of: aggressive gacha mechanics, loot boxes, wildly relaxed age ratings, and barely existant regulatory controls. Interestingly, this is true for both ends of the spectrum of company type and size: both multi-thousand employee industry giants and lean indie studios share extremely similar expectations of 5-7 years per new title.

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