I know that in best conditions game companies earn less than other software companies and their profit is less than software companies.

for example, if we compare the highest level, Amazon company earns much more than Riot Games and also Amazon technical challenges are less than a high tech game company like Riot or Naughty Dog. also skill sets and pipelines are more well defined in other software development areas like backend or android.

to be more accurate, as I searched the internet, a game developer in a great AAA Game Dev Company in Europe earns about 50-60k/year while a backend developer in a regular company the same city earns more than 80k/year and working in a big service software company makes you earn more 140k/year in the same city.

is it the whole story? game developers work on bigger challenges and in harder conditions and earn much less because they love making video games? is there any exceptions to the story?

moeen k said:
Amazon technical challenges are less than a high tech game company like Riot or Naughty Dog

The challenges and required skillsets are different, for sure, but they aren't necessarily that much easier at a BigTech firm. Game companies tend to have more of a focus on low-level performance and developer/artist productivity, where as the big firms focus more on scale (both technical and organisational).

Most game companies don't have to design for a billion unique users logging in every day, or for working in tandem with 5,000 other software engineers, but both of those are just a random Tuesday at Facebook.

moeen k said:
game developers work on bigger challenges and in harder conditions and earn much less because they love making video games?

Much of the time, yes. A lot of people dream about working on games, and that makes their labour easy to exploit.

moeen k said:
is there any exceptions to the story?

Sure, there are always exceptions. If you work for an in-house game developer at a regular tech firm (say, Amazon Game Studios, or parts of Oculus) you can expect similar pay to their other engineers. You'll also find that many smaller studios that advertise better work/life balance than the big AAA developers.

From my perspective from within the rat race, I could say that there are a few companies in my country which offer an somehow avarage payment as the other IT industry does. We don't talk about indie comapnies or such companies that claim themselfes indie to have arguments for paying like an indie, those companies are at a 10% - 20% ratio of what the big IT guys offer in exchange for your work. Hell, I had a busniess talk with a companie which payed their leads round about 1800$ / month because “the city is that cheap”. TL;DR the city is one of the most expensive ones and that company acted like a scammer to it's employees but I didn't took that job so what ?

I know, that a good part of the employees of my current AAA employer are complaining about payment being too low, especially artists and game designers do so. From my perspective, I earn what I need and a little on top so I don't have to worry about paying my bills. And work is very relaxed in comparsion to my indie dev days.

In my opinion there are 2 major problems which games have and that's sales on the one hand and education on the other. Sales is a point which is very complicated busniess thing in our industry. Your product needs to be bought from enough customers to make your and/or a publisher's cut while on the same time, the price must not be too high or you can be sure to sell a lot less. People these days aren't honoring a good game as back in the 90s where you spend 120$ for an Nintendo 64 game. Today Nintendo sells for round about 50$ and that's just the initial release price. Looking on Steam for discount and you're at 80% of the release price or even less when you're part of a specific sale. Looking at general IT companies like Facebook, who lost 3.3 Million $ only during their downtime, you know where the limiting factor of payment is in game companies!

Maybe also some jobs in games business are less challanging as others, I for my career have already sucessfully been involved in game design as well as level design, but I'm a (creative) programmer.

Education on the other hand is quiet a topic which leads to false expectations of people fresh on the market. Especially companies like SAE, who specifically educate youngsters to get into games industry, often raise false expectations on payment vs. the skill level needed to reach that payment. A newby programmer of 2 years in pure chalk and talk education is told to earn 8.000$ - 10.000$ / month as entry level payment. This is a big problem because we often had such people in our indie company, which were rejected immediately because they weren't even able to perform the easiest tasks on thair own.

In general, I can say that game development has it's challenges and maybe other IT companies also have challenges they have to solve (which I don't know because I never worked for such a challanging company). For me, games are exciting and their tech is challanging (especially game engine tech) and that's why I decided to go into games business when I was a kid (back in the 90s!). Reality is that working a AAA company is less challanging and/or I just don't have the right job and/or project to work on, but you as a single individual are affected from a lot of bureaucracy which massively slows down everything and most of the time isn't fun at all. Fortunately, I have my hobby where I design (board) games and our game (engine) SDK project which I spend a lot of effort into. Otherwise I'd already have decided to get unemployed and receive payments from the government

@swiftcoder maybe in general video games give services to less amount of people but a game like league of legends, there are 10m people that playing it in the same time. and consider that number of requests and data that are sent by a user/player is much more than a regular service. consider a turn-based or real-time multiplayer game. there are tons of messages and requests are being sent in a second so I believe many challenges on regular services are even worse in the game industry. and sometimes they are more critical and a simple mistake can break the whole experience.

a good example is that many coding practices like TDD are being used in both sides of client/backend development in video games. os I still believe that game dev is much more challenging.

Yes, game development generally pays less. Early in my career, I didn't realize how bad the difference was, but over time, I've gotten more insight into the absolute numbers.

Some game-related companies may pay alright – generally, the really big ones. Amazon studios pays Amazon level salaries, which are slightly-below Facebook and Google, but way-above your typical game studio. EPIC may pay alright for their developers and the area. Roblox pays alright for their developers and the area (I happen to know they do!) But a general content-producing studio, doesn't. Facebook is paying Facebook-level compensation for their metaverse project.

So, game development studios have to compete in other ways. “You get to work on games!” is actually a draw to some people, especially creative ones. “We don't require the same level of professionalism that the higher-paying companies do” might also be a draw, and many studios seem to offer that (and the baggage that comes with it.) “It's actually exhilarating to live for the ship date, together with a team of others who do the same,” is also a draw. This is why cohesive military units are so effective, too – they form a tribe, which is something humans have evolved to thrive in. And, finally, “you may get royalties” used to be a thing, but given how big teams are, and how long they take to develop, and how much people cycle in and out of teams, and how much shareholders want their profits once the game ships, that seems to be much less of a thing these days.

If you are a well-performing engineer who can do alright in a corporate environment, you will absolutely make more money in the enterprise than you would at a game studio. And if you can work the necessary hours and focus on the necessary profits, you can make even more money in finance (hedge funds and trading/investment banks, especially.) And many game developers may actually be more temperamentally suited to finance, than they are to a typical enterprise, so I would expect there to be a flow of talent going that way.

It's a question that comes up often, and answering it takes some nuance.

First, “other programmers” is tricky. Which other programmers?

It's easy to look at the highest paid, highest profile programming fields and say they're normal. But they really aren't.

FAANG companies are an outlier. That's why we have the label for them. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google pay unusually high rates, but they are big and employ a lot of people so it gets treated as “normal”. Many make 3x-4x or more than the average and median wages across all fields (which covers everything from flipping burgers to CEOs), and much more than the programming field in general. Many are in the top 5%, nearly all in the top 10% of wages. Their highest pay tiers are 1%'er income (being a 1%'er is lower wages than many people think) but few people in the company earn those rates.

Investment banking is an outlier. Investment banking programmers pay unusually high rates. Likewise, many make 3x-4x or more than the national average and median wages, and more than the field in general. Similarly, these companies pay a fortune that puts a person in the top earnings tiers.

If you look at the vast world of programmers, people work in every industry on the back office cobbling together accounting and ordering database stuff, logistical software, tools for their staff, and more. Programmers at manufacturing plants, programmers at stores of all industries from sporting goods to dairy goods to forklift delivery to shampoo distributors, all of them have inventory systems and web sites and POS systems and many of them employ programmers. Hospitals, schools, mining, construction, transportation, farming, banks, real estate, lawyers, entertainment, etc. Every industry employs programmers these days once they get large enough. Then you have more mundane stuff, all the little microcontrollers and chips that run the world: the wristwatches, the Bluetooth headsets, the dashcams, the store security cameras, the software driving those cameras, the TVs, the set top boxes, the microwaves and kitchen ovens, the little scales used to see if you need a second stamp on your postage. The software driving the retail stores where those items are sold. Their IT departments. All of it needs software, written by programmers. These are the real “normal” programmers. Normal programmers make about double the typical average wages crossing all fields and are generally well paid, but nothing as glamorous as the FAANG or investment banking programmers.

That said, the game industry has its own elements.

Supply and demand play a part. The allure of game programming certainly is a draw to the field, so it depresses wages at the entry level since lots of young fresh blood wants in. That goes away with experience, because there is less competition for people with 5+ or 10+ years of experience. As you advance in the career any specialties you have will help with wages. Experience helps generally. Senior and advanced programmers are paid more. Specialties like networking and graphics are paid more. Remember that wages are whatever you negotiate, they aren't dictated from the heavens.

From working in various industries inside and outside games, once you've got about 10 years experience the wages are similar with other industries. You might be able to negotiate higher or lower based on your background, but it's what you negotiate. If you are an outlier in some fashion, somehow you make a name for yourself you can command a much higher salary, but that's rare. They aren't FAANG wages, nor are they investment banking wages, but if you're a fair negotiator and know your worth you can get a good pay in line with “normal” programming in other fields. I've compared notes not just with salary surveys and public numbers, but also with two brothers who are programmers plus a few extended family relatives in various software fields. The pay rates in games aren't out of line, none of us are buying mansions on the hill but we all have fairly nice upper-middle-class lives.

As programmers generally we have pretty great jobs. We make far more than average wages, we get to twiddle our fingers sitting at a desk all day with little strenuous effort nor danger, and we get to create worlds. We have relatively good benefits and perks. If you want to change careers to something outside of games that's generally an option if you've developed competency as a programmer, so if you feel there is a pay disparity and that issue becomes an overriding concern you can work in some other field without much difficulty. And if you do that and discover that the grass really isn't any greener (I've worked programming in several businesses including broadcast television software, office accounting software, financial reporting, and boring generic data storage when game jobs weren't immediately forthcoming) you have the option to come back if you want.

frob said:
FAANG companies are an outlier.

Except they're companies that hires anyone who can write code and show up to work on time and not insult their coworkers. They are sucking the markets pretty dry of talent, where they can. So, while they might be just a handful of companies, they set the rules by which everyone else have to play, if they want people who can write code, show up more or less on time, and not insult their coworkers. (If you're OK with compromising on one of those axis, you may be able to do better.)

jon1 said:

frob said:
FAANG companies are an outlier.

Except they're companies that hires anyone who can write code and show up to work on time and not insult their coworkers.

This is… not the case. FAANG hiring processes are pretty infamous for rejecting experienced engineers over algorithms trivia and culture fit. And they tend to aggressively “manage out” (i.e. fire) anyone who doesn't perform to expectations, or who is just a bit too slow in securing their next promotion.