Video games are the bigger than movies AND music COMBINED. It’s a 101 BILLION DOLLAR market.

INSANE.

But don’t become a game developer, it’s one of the most brutal jobs you could probably have at a desk. (imo)

I went down a game developing rabbit hole yesterday while working on some art.

It was actually pretty interesting.

Guys that code/make games are some of the best coders in the world. They have insane productivity.

But there’s no money in being a game developer (unless you own the company obv). Because there’s such high-demand the salaries go lower and lower bc people just want to code games, they’ll take any money bc they just want to code.

This results in studios paying them little and over-working them. Thankfully, many of them quit and take their skills elsewhere.

Banking, web design, commercial programs.

Ex-game programmers will take work like this because it’s REALLY easy.

One of the coders I was listening to an interview on, he said he’s creating an algorithm/program for a national bank. Big $$ and he said the work is a joke. They can’t believe how fast he works.

The client can say hey, we want this and this and this done, and ex-game developers can do what should take a week in barely two days, and do it cleaner and better than others (code wise).

And then they’ll spend the rest of the time working on passion projects.

If you need a coder, find someone who used to design games. Best coders around.

This is an interesting interview, the man Julian LeFay was the originator of The Elder Scrolls Series (Skyrim is part of the series).

Julian was a major part of the development of the 1st major TES game, Daggerfall which is a open-world game. Released in 1996, it still has one of the biggest maps ever to be created in a video game. It takes 64 hours (real time) to travel from one side of the map to the other.

Some interesting topics/things mentioned in the interview.

- Julian talks about how he wanted to prove himself as a coder, and the Bethesda (game developed for TES) environment was extremely cut-throat.

- Was in a band before being a coder

- Just wants to make good games, doesn't care about business/money

- Talks about how limited computers were and how they had to work-around limitations

- Says that SCHOOL is USELESS. (cont).

The programmers that come out of schools know how to code, but they don't understand how a computer works, they don't understand how everything is processed. In lay mens terms, they don't know the basics. At all.

School works from consumer backwards.

- Gamedevelopment is BRUTAL, he continues with a story. A company wanted an easy pay check, so they made a Madden game.

Then with that money they made some terrific games. Beautiful.

Which one sold more?

The Madden game. (not even close comparison)

Which is why developers aren't pushing the edge like they used to (Goldeneye N64 Hello?) the market has been determined and stupid games like Madden SELL and they are easy to make. Win - win.

Its all about business now, (it was before, but not as commercialized) developers are creating games that sell and they don't have to be great games to sell either.

Skyrim is a good example.

It's HEAVILY stripped down compared to it's predecessors, Oblivon & Morrowind.

It's a relatively shallow game but it sold like CRAZY, one of the best selling games of all time.

And I think we can draw the same parallel with music and art as well, the music that SELLS is pretty basic and shallow. The deep, extremely well crafted stuff doesn't sell as well.

Im sure @romanopiumtales can weigh his opinion on this. Same with art. The stuff that sells isn't necessarily good art (think of the feminism shit that the art world is infested with). Same with movies. Masterpieces hardly break even but another super-hero remake kills it.

- If you're into it, he talks about some pretty technical stuff in some parts of the interview. Mainly about old technology, and how you designed games back then. Everything that to be done scratch, including the engine. Couldn't just use a premade game engine.

There's something interesting about movements when they are just beginning, like video games in the mid-late 90's and early 2000's. It was kind of a rag-tag environment and I love that whole beginning stages of something, before corporations take over and the big money comes in.

I'm reminded by another game called Runescape which I watched a documentary for a while back, in the early stages of the game the two Growler brothers used in-house sounds for the sounds in the game. The sound of their mom cooking bacon was a cooking sound.

A pickaxe mining rocks was literally one of the brothers recording themselves mining with a pick outside. In many ways, its creation in it's purest form. Doing whatever you had to do to get what you wanted. Which is a very masculine trait. Probably why it's so interesting.

Its the same energy that Arnold Schwarzenegger had when he lived in a little tiny closet in a gym in Germany when he was trying to make his breakthrough into the body-building industry.

Or when Picasso BURNED his canvases for heat because his first apartment in Paris was a joke.

Back to games though, what's interesting about games is that there's a ton of Indie Developers now that do insanely well for themselves, even beating the major companies in sales and profits. Yet staying small.

Which is interesting because games don't have to be created by major developers to be insanely successful. Minecraft and Terraria are a few examples. Whereas movies, music, etc, you rarely see something created by a small team, without a ton of money, out selling the big-dogs.

I'm gonna wrap this up with the following, because I know a ton of you are against games.

I think a well thought out video game should be treated like a movie. An experience, something to make the player see the world differently, change how they think.

And it should be consumed like a movie. You play a few hours here and there, take in the story and then when you're done that's it. You don't go on these 8+ hour long stretches, you enjoy it for the art it is (if you're playing the right games) and that's it.

A game that does this beautifully is Shadow Of The Colossus. You are a young man, who lost the love of his life and the only way you can get her back is bring her to a forbidden land and slay the Colossi that inhabit it.

The Colossi aren't inherently evil. They aren't causing harm. But you must kill them for your own selfish motives. And each death is a bitter-sweet cinematic victory.

Shadow Of The Colossus is a game that transcends entertainment and is a work of art. You play it, complete it and are left contemplating your own life and motives. You reflect on the experience. It makes you think.

It's not just about killing shit and beating bad guys.

And one last thing, I wonder if games are not living up to their potential. Do games have the ability to go so much deeper than most do and are we wasting their potential by looking at them as entertainment and an escape instead of art?

I'm not sure.

I've said all I wanted to say, (and went a tad off topic), I hardly play games now but I don't seem them as the devil like many do. But I do think they are on the most heavily abused forms of entertainment.

Anyway, hope you enjoy some of these topics and the interview mentioned

I hope this thread gets some traction, cause I think it's pretty relatable and a nice change in the content that usually is produced.