Two and a Half Years in GameDev

Summary

About 3 years ago, I joined a GameDev company, without any prior experience making games or hands-on exposure to this industry. Statistically, this time is not even enough’s to release a single game. But during that window, I was lucky to meet many talented people deeply involved in modern GameDev, who shared with me their career journeys, war tales, and anecdotes, and helped me shape my vision. One unexpected outcome of this switch was that many friends and former colleagues reached out to me curious about what it was like and how it is comparable to my previous experiences. A surprising amount of them revealed to me that they were secretly planning to pursue this path later in their career, or explore it as a passion project. All those conversations with both seasoned insiders and curious bystanders motivated me to give it an attempt to structure it, make sense of some observations, and share insights that stood out. Background# I had a phase during my teenage and early university years when I often thought about how cool it would be to make games. Kinda typical for a ’90s kid, right? But I never went beyond just daydreaming about it. After graduation, I never seriously consider a career in GameDev. I followed the more traditional enterprise developer path: small product company, a bigger one, then regional big tech, a multinational corporation. I kept following the gaming industry and played games in my free time, but my exposure to professional GameDev was limited to two interviews at local studios, which I attended, to be honest, mostly out of curiosity. Three years ago, I was actively looking for the next step in my career and ended up with a couple of offers. One of them was a big international video games developer, that I was very familiar with. Long time ago, I had played their games when they were still in beta and followed their major products and esports events. I figured, why not give it a shot? Worst case, I could always go back to a more “traditional...