IGN can exclusively reveal the details from IATSE's 2023 Gameworkers.org Rates and Conditions Survey, where the organization asked hundreds of video game developers about their pay, benefits, and working conditions.
Not shocking. I just hope people learn from this and react by not getting into the gaming industry until the shortage of workers forces it to change. Same thing with the entertainment industry outside of gaming at large.
The way the movie / tv industry treats most of its employees who aren't at the very top is just horrible, and if people didn't have such stars in their eyes for Hollywood and such, working conditions would be so much better all around, along with pay and mandatory breaks.
I've been in the entertainment industry, and so has my sister. It's amazingly how terrible people are treated, including crew and lower end actors, and all for a product that's not really necessary or all that important for the survival of the world. People don't think about it, but we've been around for MILLIONS of years without TV and Movies. Sure there were plays and such, but it doesn't take much for humanity to amuse itself. Simple conversations, board games, some sticks and balls... if the writer / actor strikes kept going on, and new content stopped coming out, it'd suck at first, but we'd get used to it.
I work at a company which doesn’t make games, but interacts with a lot of game devs, and employs a lot of ex-game devs; and everyone I work with is either glad they got out of game dev or glad they skipped it altogether.
I used to work for a very reasonable (smaller) game studio, and while it was fun, I still got a massive pay and quality-of-life improvement by changing careers away from making games.
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