[AndyPa32]

> Games are just software engineering. Fun software engineering.

I do question the "fun" part. Midnight crunches, unpaid overtime and - as far as I have read - some of the worst working conditions in all of software engineering. I pass.

[cableshaft]

I've done both gamedev and webdev professionally. I don't miss the long hours or the low pay of gamedev, but I do miss what I worked on. Enough that I'm still working on my own games in my spare time.

I still play the games I used to work on professionally from time to time, and like to show them off to people, even though none were financially successful (a few I worked on solo were at least popular, but we made some 'bad decisions in hindsight' or got really unlucky with release timing for all the games I worked on professionally).

I don't care hardly at all about all the webdev projects I worked on professionally. They each had some intresting problem solving or coding challenges, and some of them were used WAY more than the games I made were played, but I'm still more into the games I made, and those are most likely to still be around after I'm dead, in a Flash game or ROM archive or torrent somewhere.

Also, the worst long hours I ever had was actually in webdev. I once worked in software for a call center, and whenever the phone systems went down, I was expected to be on a call to help fix it (as there was 100+ call center employees that couldn't make calls and we were losing lots of money every minute they were down), sometimes for 16 hours or more sitting on a Zoom call, mostly waiting for people on the server teams to figure things out. And there was a data center migration that had some unexpected problems and required three of us to work for almost three days straight (I literally worked a 24 hour shift, then had 4 hours of sleep, then worked an 18 hour shift right after it).

But that's not the norm in webdev at least. My current webdev job I only worked >40 hours a couple weeks to rework some issues with some junior dev's code for a feature before a big demo.

[jrockway]

That is probably true, but you know you suffer for your art and all that. People don't really like software, but they love games. We know that games are just software, but it's so fun, that people forget that. It's pretty cool. Though to me, I kind of like getting 8 hours of sleep a night and playing other people's games. While getting paid more :/