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After Spending 45,303 Hours As a Video Game Developer Here’s What I Learned
Nobody wants to know how the sausage is made.
Video games are fun, so making them should be a blast, right?
I developed video games for 14 years. You had high moments with lots of fun. But, it was a very demanding industry.
There are different tiers of video games — my expertise was in the AAA video game arena. These were big-budget games that were tentpoles to the companies that put them out. Think of a summer blockbuster. Those were the kind of video games I worked on. The advertising and marketing budgets were in the millions.
This is for those not in the video game industry. It’s for those who want to be or are a bit curious about game development.
Here are the lessons I learned.
Not every game developer drives a Lambo
As with everything in life, the extremes get viewed on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. The video game developer world is no different. It shows the top developers driving fancy cars and living in mansions.
The guys who work in the trenches rarely get to the rarefied air of a private jet and travel across the globe. You may get rich if your games do well. You are more likely to get rich if you…
