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Ask Slashdot: Experiences Working At a High-Profile Game Studio?
msheekhah writes "I have a friend who, when he gets out of college, has been promised a job at well known electronics company with a salary around $70k. However, he wants to instead go work for Blizzard or some other game company as a game programmer. I've read enough on here and on other tech websites to know that he should take the job he's been offered. Can you share with me your experiences so I can give him real life examples to convince him to take this job? If your experience is contrary to mine, I'd appreciate that input as well."
Having left Blizzard in the last year I can say that it was once a really awesome place to be! Just not any more sadly. The politics have stunted too many people's ability to get things done. On top of that revenue is down so the idea of "low base pay with more from profit sharing" doesn't make up for how overly stressful things are. That said, working somewhere where the other "perks" of the Blizzard Culture aren't apparent will make working for a game studio a bit better; just have a decent savings account first and be ready to work twice as much for half the pay you used to get. From my friends that decided to say in the industry many are going to indie developers or starting their own small game companies so they can get back to what they really wanted to do in the first place: make games! On my end I've just created a bit of a "gamer culture" on the engineering teams I've started since I left to get the best of both worlds. My suggestion would really be to take the decent paying job for a few years while making some indie games on the side to make sure that they really want to make games for a living.
I had an offer from Bioware that I ended up passing on because I had another offer from another company to do full time iOS development which is what I really wanted to do. A friend of mine ended up taking the same job at Bioware that I had been offered. I left a year later. His experiences can best be summed up in a single line from a chat he and I had one time -- "they cancelled Christmas" ... he had been working 80hr weeks for almost a year by that point. I felt like I dodged a bullet.
If writing games is your passion, and you can't live without it, and you don't mind doing it ALL the time, then that is the only time I would say it's okay to work for a games company. If you do, try to find an indy shop that works a sustainable pace. The other downside is that the people working there were very grouchy and mean. Not a happy place.