Why games-as-service suck, and Fortnite's bad example: (Gaming)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Thursday, April 25, 2019, 06:28 (2048 days ago) @ Harmanimus

Article goes over Epic paying substantially over bottom market price, as well as having trouble hiring people even though they are trying. So I don’t think that is the case here.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that management... simply aren't to be trusted blindly on such statements.

I'm sure that those people believe what they are saying, but they are also not examining their assumptions at all.

What we're suggesting here is that Epic Games-- the company that developed, licenses, and supports the Unreal Engine, which powers quite a few successful games in the market-- is unable to recruit enough qualified developers to work on what has (rather unexpectedly) become their flagship game, despite (they claim) paying "over bottom market price" which if you think about it, probably means below average market value, but not the *bottom*.

So my questions would be:

What is their median dev salary-- and what are they broken down by discipline, and how do they compare to industry medians?

How much experience are they looking for? How much training and professional development are they willing to do?

I would not be surprised if what this comes down to is that they want people who are experienced, already know all of Epic's preferred tools, are willing to work long hours for less than median pay, and are unable to keep enough of these around to fill the content pipeline without crunching. But as long as it continues to be more profitable to do that than to raise salaries, provide training, or increase head count, they will do so.

Absent labor organization, this is nearly always what happens-- the pressures that would normally cause head counts and salaries to rise get pushed back, and the result is crunch.