First job out of school - writing video games professionally. It sucked. Really sucked. This was back in the mid-90s when the profession was in a really bad place.
I got out within 2 years and never went back :(
I heard the industry was much better now, though?
This is the game I worked on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abomination:_The_Nemesis_Proje...
It's not hard to understand what happened to our generation as teenage geeky culture turned into a multi-billion global business in less than a decade. A ton of brilliant programmers got left behind and left out. Not just because there's only room for a few John Carmacks or Tim Sweenys, (there's a good deal of luck in navigating an unfolding culture), but because rapid industrialisation changes the very nature of what it touches.
Industrialisation of games had many unfortunate and unexpected effects. It made creativity a liability. Gaming is one of the most conservative industries on the planet, way, way ahead of music or film production for having cast itself in stone.
Coincident with formulation and industrialisation came specialisation and a great deal of deskilling. I knew guys in the late 90s who built their own 3D engines, knew quaternion geometry, how to mix, reverberate and filter multi-channel audio in C++. Now you just grab and Unreal or Unity engine, plug in and go. In some tragic ways, the smarter those hackers were the quicker they found themselves on the margins, or out on the scrap heap.
Like the music business, in the past 20 years the industry has functioned by burning through a lot of aspirational talent. It leaves a trail of broken hearts and dreams. As educators we have been complicit in overselling it, and feeding it with souls.
You can always tell an industry is a hustle when the marketing machine harps-on about how to "break into" it. Young people are made to feel that if they were privileged to get a job it would have little to do with their merits and talents, but their guile and grit. If you wanted a job you had to "break in to", become a burglar. The hours and the pay are much better. Maybe that's why many of the kids I taught to code switched from chasing that rainbow to being hackers.
What's weird to me is that I feel like we're in a gaming dark age. How can that be if gaming engines make everything so much easier?
The single player game I probably played the most last year was MicroMages, a game written in 2019 for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. Somehow it was more captivating to me than say, GTA Online.
Some of my other fondest memories of games were very, very obscure games with text graphics that aren't even well known among people who play games with text graphics. All made by lone hackers.
Combine that with high budgets and big teams (high price of failure) and you have a recipe for stagnation.
That game had a 3D engine I wrote from scratch in two weeks (the game suddenly changed from 2D to 3D overnight), and it had a multi-channel audio engine I wrote in C++ that was way over the top for the game's need and I shaved a whole yak there.
(And yes, it’s a great place to work!)
But I see what you are saying. The model is very different from a typical game studio.
Valve and Epic both develop big titles in-house. Whereas Roblox’s experiences are developed by entirely separate entities.
Perhaps get a hearing aid? It's extremely toxic.