This category should be Best Theme Park. Written lore, or built out level, which one of these would make the best theme park to go visit. Like the Star Wars Land they are building at Disney.
@olivaw: Part of me wants to think that but the other part of me understands the business side of it. Its the same thing you are seeing in the film industry. It's not a service industry where you need to be somewhere to produce that thing. Your not making some un-shipable good like building roads or buildings. Games can be made any where in the world. It'd take the whole US industry to unionize to get it better in the States. But that doesn't stop companies from moving to Canada or China or India or Brazil or wherever. They do it all the time for Tax incentives already. Usually incentives the publisher receives but never actually goes to the developers. You see this happen all the time in film. They'll just shutter a studio in one area and tell everybody you can pay to move over here where we are opening up the studio if you want to transfer, or best of luck to you. Their profits will be better and they have no responsibility to those people.
@sickthrads: I think people do feel lucky but that's part of the problem. It's not a dumb job that anybody can do. It takes four to six years of usually very expensive school to learn how to do this. And usually when you get out of school you still aren't employable because you don't have experience. So you will take whatever you can get, which might seem like a livable wage, but only if somebody paid your tuition to you and you don't have student loans and you've been lucky/smart enough to not have kids yet. You have to bust your ass to get there, bust your ass to stay in there and also just be very lucky along the way by being the right right places and knowing the right people at the right times. And in the end it's like the Logan Run of job professions where there's a good chance you get to a certain age and all that hard work is worth nothing because you can't afford to live on those types of wages any more and your body just can't handle crunching that long every day. Especially as you get older and have more medical needs or have to think about the future of what life looks like when you retire. But you tell yourself you're lucky to have what you have and you'll get chewed up again and again and somebody is likely going to make a good profit off of you until one day you realize you've been training your replacement.
I've worked in the games industry for a while this has increasingly been a frustration. Especially as I've gotten married and now have a kid. Staying till 1 A.M isn't realistic when you have a family any more. I've watched friends as their contract end just pick up and move to another state or another country for the next job. Which is maybe fine in your early 20's but not when you have a kid in school who has friends.
The wages are all over the place. Contract work is rampant and I've heard many stories where the recruiting agency is making more money than the person getting paid to do the work since the employer only knows what they pay the contract agency and the employee only knows what their agency pays them. And they put in more and more "safe guards" to try to encourage hieing people on full time rather than continue as permanent contractors. I can tell you first hand it doesn't open up any more full time positions. It mostly prevents them from being sued by people saying no, I've been here 5 years now, working in your facilities, with your equipment, I'm not a vendor, I'm a full time employee by definition. They just cycle people out like replaceable commodities.
It's fairly common to lay people off right at the end of the year as projects ship for Christmas, usually before Black Friday, right before the holidays, which is also a no-mans land time of year. No company is hieing during the holidays because projects are ending and everybody that is still there is taking vacation time so even if there was a position they can't schedule the interview. You are basically waiting two to four months waiting for the next year, people to get back in the office (The leads you need to talk to have often been crunching for the last two years so they have like a months of vacation time to use up or loose very often), new projects to start and new budgets to get set. It's entirely realistic to be unemployed for half a year until enough new projects start up at a time where there's a lot of people looking. Oh, and say like Microsofts policy of vendors can only work 18 months before having to take a 6 month break. Guess when that policy started? Around the end of the year for a ton of people. And while it hurts Microsoft in the short hunting for talent, in 6 months they suddenly have a lot of talented people competing for jobs when it's time to negotiate pay rates.
I love working on games but as I get older I am seriously contemplating trying to figure out another industry to go into to provide something more stable for my family. It's hard to plan anything. We go on vacation every other year or two because inevitably one year you are saving up all your PTO so you maybe have an extra pay check or two of time for when they end your contract. The longest I've ever been at a given studio at a time is less than 3 years, the least is a few months before the work was out. You burn through all your savings hunting for that next job and each year the idea of retiring some day gets scarier and scarier. You worry about how you are going to put your kids through school, or if you will have time to see them grow up when you actually do have a job to provide for them. You worry about what happens if somebody gets sick or injured because half the time you don't have health insurance, or can't afford the deductibles when you do. Even the times I've gotten a full time gig and think phew, I'm out of this contract cycle, inevitable the company folds or the division is cut because management changes or stock prices weren't good enough or whatever. There's no stability to it and love for games can only take you so far at a certain point in life. Hell I hardly play games any more because I spend most of my time making them or trying to learn the next new thing so I'm still employable and not a dinosaur in six months. I keep up with games by watching Giant Bomb quick looks. The games I play a year I could probably count on my hands at this point, including the ones I'm developing.
Now I wouldn't still be here if it wasn't great and there weren't great things about it. But something is very broken with this system where it seems to be in place to support stock holders more than the people making the games. We shouldn't be disposable commodities. But that's currently very much how workers in the game industry are treated. For every Will Wright or Cliff Bleszinski there's a 100 people tossed aside as soon as their part is done.
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