The Harsh Truth About Game Development

All right, guys. It's time to get honest. It's time to get real. I'm going to 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 6 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 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 start with the first harsh truth. It's going to 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 AAA sphere. Okay, in AAA game development, so for example, making uh 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 le 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? And 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 uh 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 and 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 Bron 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 for my previous games. um code. In my case, it's Unity with C 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, Hideimero, Fuji Bashi, I think is how

you say it. Um, this guy had to 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 wishlist 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, firstperson shooter game mechanics, game design, level design, how to manage a team, how to manage a team with ClickUp and Discord, how to push to the to uh 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 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 ClickUp, Discord, and also I didn't mention I have to manage relationships with publishers and investors. Okay? Um I have to know ultimately how to do all of that while marketing a digital product. And we're going to talk about all of this in just a second. in particular marketing a digital product because it's 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 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 it's more nuanced than that. And let me explain. So, this is the AAA game developer salary estimate. Um, $91,000 yearly. That's not bad. Now, this is from Zipia, so, you know, take it for what it's worth. Um, but $91,000 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 stu uh AAA industry can be pretty painful. At least that's what the news articles say. It started to make me I 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 its 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 ChatGpt. 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? Um, 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 um this individual goes on to explain that 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. Um I was able to find the the job applications and the email addresses for these studios. uh 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 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 don't 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 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, and he he's so smart about analyzing uh indie games and and the marketing data, but essentially you can see here that the m medium game earned is just around $1,136. Okay, that's bad. That is not good. 68% of all titles released in 2019 generated less than $10,000 to date. 91.5% of all titles earned less than $250,000. 96% of all games generated less than a million. 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. It's the few and far between fringe. Okay, the average we can see here is generating less than $10,000 to date. 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 indie games are actually games. I've put little check marks here to 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 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 who 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 Why who made this game called the first tree again getting great marketing coverage from Rock Paper Shotgun. Okay. Or my buddy who created

Cult of the Lamb. This is Jay Armstrong. Um he created this game called Cult of the Lamb. And Cult of the Lamb actually finalizes my my my or or sums up my final point here about my 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, does it grab your attention? Yep. 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 a 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 um 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 Halflife. Um, 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.