I worked in the video game industry for about six years. I worked for both major publishers and some startup MMOs. Specifically, I was doing online infrastructure kind of stuff.

The gaming industry wasn't something I was actively trying to get into, and I had worked in telecommunications and manufacturing prior to this. When the big telecom I was working on started losing customers back in 2001, I knew what was about to happen and wisely jumped ship. I just happened to land with a company in Denver Colorado who was producing an MMO game as a startup, and they had no clue about how to actually get their product on the internet, or where/how to buy or manage server infrastructure.

I worked for a major publisher who was booming at the time, making tons of money. I also worked for a number of startups who went ended up going chapter 7, chapter 11, and one got sold out to an Asian firm who immediately told everyone to move to South Korea or get laid off.

When I left the gaming industry, the following things immediately happened:

I made 20% more money, instantly. The gaming industry pays lower than average wages in most cases, across the board. This is a supply and demand problem: there is a huge supply of goobers who want to make video games for a living, and a limited number of employers willing to pay them to do it.

I worked 20-40% less hours. Just about in every department in every company I worked for, people kept sleeping bags under their desks, had no lives outside of work, were present on weekends, and put in 50-80 hour work weeks. I once literally lived and slept in my office for two weeks, except when I went home to shower and check on things for an hour or two per week. That is what pushed me over the edge and when I finally quit.

My psychological health improved. I was happier, less stressed out, and stopped getting angry over little things. When I think back about it, the gaming industry basically gave me PTSD.

My physical health improved. I started putting on muscle weight, I was less tired, and a number of persistent physical issues went away. For example, I had a bad habit of biting my tongue, possibly out of nervousness, which magically went away immediately.

I started working with more talented, competent, people. I didn't realize just how unprofessional and disorganized some of the people I was working with were until I had another reference point again. As I shifted from being a server monkey to programmer, I realized that most of the developer guys had never worked in another industry before, were high-school and college drop-outs, and most of their code was crap. I saw from the inside a huge multi-mullion dollar Atari-funded game studio go down in flames because the developers didn't know that you can't use disk drives as a CPU: they built almost all of their MMO item inventory logic into SQL triggers and events. Let's not even talk about sexism and anti-social behavior.

Employment stability went way up. The gaming industry is very unstable, and companies crash and burn all the time. There is a constant flow of new startups who fail every year without ever having shipped/published a product.

Unsurprisingly, most people don't want to hear this negativity about the industry.

The people who I know still work in the industry don't argue that I'm wrong, but instead argue that it's the price you pay for doing what you want (note: most of these people seem pretty miserable to me). It's not a subject that I will often bring up, less I get a hostile reaction. After all, most of these people are emotionally bought in to the idea that they are the next John Carmack.

The kids who want to get into the gaming industry just ignore me or discount what I have to say. What else are they going to do? They can't even imagine getting a job in some boring industry like finance, government, manufacturing, health care, retail, or any of that nonsense.

And that brings us to the gaming schools. Like I said before, it's a supply and demand thing. There is a huge supply of kids who want to make video games, and not enough employers for them all. It's kind of like little boys who want to grow up and be astronauts, and little girls who want to me marine biologists. The numbers say it ain't gunna happen for most of them.

There is indeed money to be made in the gaming industry, but it's not in working inside of it. It's in selling the dream that all these dumb kids have, thinking they can grow up and make video games for a living.

I don't really have much good to say about working in the gaming industry. I met some cool people there, but as a whole, it's just an immature bunch of kids who have not grown up and gotten real jobs yet.