About 3 years ago, I joined a GameDev company, without any prior experience making games or hands-on exposure to this industry.

Statistically, this time is not even enough to release a single game. But during that window, I was lucky to meet many talented people deeply involved in modern GameDev, who shared with me their career journeys, war tales, and anecdotes, and helped me shape my vision.

One unexpected outcome of this switch was that many friends and former colleagues reached out to me curious about what it was like and how it is comparable to my previous experiences. A surprising amount of them revealed to me that they were secretly planning to pursue this path later in their career, or explore it as a passion project.

All those conversations with both seasoned insiders and curious bystanders motivated me to give it an attempt to structure it, make sense of some observations, and share insights that stood out.

Background

I had a phase during my teenage and early university years when I often thought about how cool it would be to make games. Kinda typical for a ’90s kid, right? But I never went beyond just daydreaming about it.

After graduation, I never seriously considered a career in GameDev. I followed the more traditional enterprise developer path: small product company, a bigger one, then regional big tech, a multinational corporation.

I kept following the gaming industry and played games in my free time, but my exposure to professional GameDev was limited to two interviews at local studios, which I attended, to be honest, mostly out of curiosity.

Three years ago, I was actively looking for the next step in my career and ended up with a couple of offers. One of them was a big international video games developer, that I was very familiar with. A long time ago, I had played their games when they were still in beta and followed their major products and esports events. I figured, why not give it a shot? Worst case, I could always go back to a more “traditional” job.

I wouldn’t call myself an industry expert, but during that time I’ve seen just enough to recognize what makes this world a little bit different. This post is a collection of what makes GameDev industry unique and different from the perspective of a person who just has visited this realm.

I. People Are Passionate About Games

You should work in GameDev only if you are passionate about it.

This is the first thing everybody says to you when you strike up the conversation about GameDev career. It seems self-explanatory, but I was not fully prepared for how it actually looks like.

In most other industries with big IT and development departments, it is perfectly normal to not care about the products you are working on. Often, it’s downright impossible, for example, if you work on something like infrastructure or B2B products. And it’s even expected to maintain a healthy distance from the current work to be able to switch to new projects easily.

At my new job, I saw people who really allocated their time to play new games, preorder ultimate editions of fresh titles, schedule PTOs around big releases, and take time to talk about games. It was impossible not to know what was happening in the industry or in the games we were making — all news, controversies, and leaks were thoroughly discussed in casual conversations, chats, and off-topic channels.

There was a period of time, when I stopped following the industry news and playing games myself. But I’m pretty confident that I did not miss anything — just standing near the coffee machine was more than enough to know if the latest DLC for a popular game is good or a total flop.

Can I work in GameDev without caring deeply for games?

A very popular question I got from my friends and ex-colleagues — is it possible to work there and not play any games.

My short answer is yes. However, it heavily depends on the company, its size, its focus, and its current challenges. Bigger studios often need specialists in roles where you rarely interact with the actual game. But in a small indie studio, it’s nearly impossible not to be hands-on with the game itself.

One of the spiciest discussions I saw on the internal Blind hub was the thread about the impact of the “being a hardcore gamer” trait during the interview process. And the consensus was that today there are many roles where this is not a blocker, despite many folks missing the old spirit.

Today, it’s absolutely possible to work in GameDev without a deep passion for games, or gaming background. I worked with people who didn’t play games at all or had moved on from gaming for personal reasons. They still did excellent work. But the limitation here is that it’s a significantly smaller industry, and if you’re not at least adjacent to gaming culture, you might find yourself out of sync with what’s happening around.

II. Focus On Creativity

Besides people playing games, one of the most striking contrasts for me was the emphasis on creative disciplines and creative aspects of work, and how deeply it’s ingrained in everything.

Art Is Everywhere

Art and creativity matter a lot in games. A game can be an unoptimized pile of garbage that barely works on high-end hardware, but gamers will remember its iconic music, unique characters, and plot dramas. Such demand for artistic content creates a supply of artists of many different kinds: 2D, 3D, UI/UX, video, audio, and numerous management layers between them.

And these people bring a lot of creativity into every part of life.

For example, at all-hands meetings and office events, there was always some kind of art or craft on display. People would casually cosplay game characters during office parties using extremely high-quality costumes they had been building for years. They’d play their own music or show off digital work. And I’m not even starting to talk about sketches and drawings, their workspaces and homes were filled with high-quality illustrations and prints. One of my favorite meeting rooms had a whiteboard that was half-covered in a complex, detailed drawing. It stayed there for months because no one had the heart to erase it.

That’s a stark contrast to the generic office vibe.

How It Feels To Be A Boring Part

And, honestly, sometimes I felt a bit out of place.

Confession: I’m not a very creative person. I never learned how to draw, not even at a basic level. My attempts to learn how to play musical instruments failed miserably. I just feel significantly more comfortable in the world of precise, technical work. So being in a high-creativity environment was sometimes challenging.

My favourite story about this contrast is my first presentation at a game team all-hands.

I was working on a new project and successfully delivered the first version of a new piece of payment integration. Sounds boring, but it took me a couple of months to get alignment with multiple teams across multiple timezones, put the wheels in motion, and unblock a lot of further work for the next year, so I felt rather confident in my achievements. My presentation was fairly simple: 3–4 slides on a light-grey background with a few architecture diagrams, some graphs, and a couple of key metrics.

Things started to feel weird as the all-hands began. I saw that all other presenters created a proper shows out of their short presentations. There were memes, music, storytelling. I kid you not, people were telling whole stories from the perspective of a fictional in-game character that encountered a bug or performance issue like it was a plot arc, and fought alongside with developer to defeat new type of enemies to get to the core of the bug and help developer to fix it. It was wild.

And my presentation had black-and-white UML diagrams.

Timing wasn’t helping the situation much, as my presentation was one of the last ones. The more memes I watched, the more I dreaded my 2 minutes of air time. Presentation of a guy before me had a game character twerking over a hip-hop beat. How can you beat that?

After I talked through my slides, there was a pin-drop silence, followed by a question from the host “Is that it? … Cool!”. I wanted to close my laptop, leave the building, and go straight to the airport.

We had a good laugh about it with my manager later.

Creative Roles Careers

Another unexpected area for me was exposure to artistic career paths.

There’s a popular stereotype of the starving artist. So it was eye-opening, and even a bit surreal for me, to meet people who had built successful, high-paying careers in art, often outperforming many other roles in the company. As someone without any creative background, my first instinct was to ask: is there really a difference between those high-caliber artists and “just good ones”? More experienced colleagues actually pointed out the nuances for me: composition, anatomy, stylistic cohesion, and other details I wouldn’t have noticed on my own. And even that, they said, was just scratching the surface.

But the caveat is, that it’s nearly impossible to move up the ranks in a corporate environment by focusing solely on hands-on work. Advancement requires stepping into leadership and scaling the process. This transition can be especially tough in creative fields. Unlike engineering, where senior ICs and managers can and often do stay very close to the code, the general feedback I heard about artists stepping into managerial roles, is that it’s a much more demanding shift with the expense of their own creative involvement.

En masse, a purely artistic IC role in GameDev is quite often underpaid. The industry heavily relies on using the highly visible impact of art and the internal appeal of a creative space as an alluring non-monetary benefit.

There’s a popular career tip: when you join a new company, figure out what people are getting promoted for. During my time here, standout promotions and career breakthroughs were often tied to creative wins: a surprisingly successful cosmetic item or a new skin line that went viral. After some thought, I believe that these kinds of successes don’t fit cleanly into the usual “product” or “tech” success definitions of the traditional industries. They belong in their own category, a creative track that’s deeply aligned with the core of game development and its creative values.

III. High Creativity Scope Expectations

Being passionate about something is a double-edged sword. If you truly believe in your work, it can greatly elevate your experience, and for many, it’s a crucial part of professional life. On the other hand, many people struggle to stay passionate about being creative within tight constraints.

GameDev industry generates dozens of small and medium-sized games daily, but even as a very dedicated player, you are only exposed to a small number of popular titles. Unsurprisingly, the employee experience is quite similar. There’s a good chance that you will end up working on something that you, as a gamer, would never play.

It’s an extremely common story, when someone with lots of experience, maybe even at a tech lead or managerial level in a small company, joins a FAANG or Big Tech firm, only to find immense disappointment because they now work on a very limited scope in a remote corner of the organization.

Now multiply that feeling by 20 for people in creative industries, who must work within the tightly defined and specific context of a game and its established style. Many expect to design new systems from scratch, drive art direction, and be praised for breakthroughs. But in large organizations, it’s pretty much expected that you’ll be pigeonholed into a narrow area. Very few dream of working on the 50th swipe animation in a match-3 game or arranging the layout of a store in yet another gacha.

A very common trajectory of a creative IC I’ve repeatedly seen, even during my relatively short tenure, is a quick change from the excitement of joining a team with a popular game to frustration with the limited creative scope, further narrowed by corporate politics and a stack of management. In the end, it was often the reason that motivated people to leave for smaller studios or their own indie projects where they can have full creative freedom.

I was primarily talking about artistic craft in this section because, in my experience, that’s where this issue is most visible. But it would be unfair to not mention tech and development. From my experience, this is a significantly smaller issue for developers and the technical side of things, because there are still many small and large unsolved challenges that one person can take on, especially given the immaturity of tools and the complexity of technical systems. And in tech, creativity is valued more as a force multiplier, rather than as a primary driver.

IV. Industry Maturity And Growth

Game Industry Grew Up (Sort of)

GameDev tends to distance itself from other, “more boring” industries. Difference exists even on the terminology level. For example, office is a studio, product manager becomes a producer. But by many measures, video games have become a mature industry, getting very close to becoming a big and boring corporate job, while internally and culturally maintaining a big distance from other fields.

For years, video games flew under the radar, pulling off things that more regulated industries wouldn’t even dream of: aggressive gacha mechanics, loot boxes, wildly relaxed age ratings, and barely existent regulatory controls.

Even owning the game is a gray area today, when most of the platforms allow you only to get a license to play a game, or worse — a license to rent in-game items. Even physical copies can’t protect you from servers going dark and blocking you from accessing your game progression and collections.

Yet despite those shenanigans, the industry’s growth has been steady, positive, and relentless.

Disconnected Between Internal and External Growths

Having this image creates an interesting conflict, that I felt sometimes is hard to get a grasp on for people who have been working in GameDev exclusively. Despite being a full-fledged industry by economic metrics, both internally and in the eyes of the general public, GameDev is often seen as a creative space without rigid rules or bureaucracy.

I worked at a large company by GameDev standards: several thousand employees, and multiple international offices. And I’d routinely see teams actively rejecting existing practices for managing large-scale projects and work. I often felt like saying: “Guys, we’re not working out of someone’s garage anymore.”

At first, I thought I was the problem. I thought that I needed to adjust, and that the friction I felt was a sign of immaturity on my part. But over time, I connected with a few people who had been there for a long time and had previously built successful careers in other industries before moving into GameDev. They independently echoed exactly the same experience and emotions from their side after working on different projects and teams over their time in the company.

Need To Get Up To Speed

Compared to other mature companies, processes in GameDev are far looser. Whenever I heard genuine praises about well-geared processes, It was often accompanied by the story of how they reached this level by going against the established patterns and due to powerful individual initiative rather than from systematic efforts.

Historically, that made some sense. Games didn’t deal with things like sensitive data and real money for a very long time, and were not as highly regulated. But that’s no longer true. With modern game practices like online multiplayer, real-money purchases, lootboxes, DLC, and in-game content the stakes have changed dramatically.

Many mature GameDev companies are no longer small teams running on thin budgets and betting everything on the next hit. They’re established businesses with long-term roadmaps, real revenue, and high expectations. And while many mature industries learned how to scale with success, In GameDev scalable development is still a problem in search of a solution.

When you mix that chaos with the passion and creativity that drew most people into the industry, you get something volatile: scale problems, career trajectory confusions, and the painful process of transforming creative unbound work into a mundane daily job.

V. Projects Are Long

Development of a new AAA game takes about 5-7 years. If things go well.

Slightly less known metric — creating a single skin (in-game cosmetics like a weapon, outfit, map, car) in a pipeline of AAA game can take up to a year.

There’s almost no “fail-fast” style in GameDev, which is very common in the tech start-up scene. You don’t ship an MVP to the first 100 users, gather their feedback, iterate, and scale. Instead, you work towards the final product with full release, an event when the game earns the bulk of its revenue, momentum, and visibility.

Interestingly, this is true for both ends of the spectrum of company type and size: both multi-thousand-employee industry giants and lean indie studios share extremely similar expectations of 5-7 years per new title.

In recent years, early access has become a bit more popular, and it helps to acquire some funding and build an audience during the final stretch. But it’s significantly more common for indie titles and usually happens just 1–2 years before release.

This long-cycle nature of development amplifies every other difficulty: burnouts, conflicts, passion, and career progression.

The disconnect between a fast-paced, crunch-heavy environment and projects that span half a decade takes a serious emotional toll.

This leads directly to another interesting phenomenon…

VI. Releasing a Game is Part of the Biography

Hi, my name is Mike, I’m a game developer, and I’ve worked on Truck Simulator 2, and its spin-off Dark Trucks: Shadows, excited to meet you!

— a totally realistic introduction I’ve heard many times during team onboardings and interviews

When people in GameDev introduce themselves, they often start with the list of games they’ve worked on. The studio or company name can matter less, since those entities can be even more fragile than the actual games.

This approach actually works well in the industry, since games are public-facing entities and provide immediate insight into someone’s scope and achievements.

There is a less obvious flip side of this convenient approach.

Some of my colleagues with decades of experience have shared unfortunate stories about their peers who have been working in games for avery long tim e, but because of project cancellations, bureaucracy limbo, development hell, they never got the chance to actually ship a game.

That can be a harsh reality check — in an industry where visibility often equals validation, not shipping can put years of work into a dead weight on your resume.

VII. Technology

Mindset and Priorities

Technology in GameDev is rarely the main focus, and often lags behind the broader tech industry.

There is a range of reasons for this. Creative aspects will always be a priority, the scale of the user base is often smaller, even for big live games, and the error cost is less significant as well. In addition, games remained a boxed product for much longer than other software, live games(games-as-a-service), is still a fairly new model, and the industry keeps figuring it out.

This sets quite a different set of expectations for the development process, more often cultural, rather than backed up by real industries discrepancies. I’ve often heard the explanation, “That’s just how it’s always been in GameDev”. But nearly every my peer, who came from the non-GameDev industry, admitted that this is often an excuse rather than a real unsolvable problem.

It often leads to unfortunate situations, where industry-wide standards are considered to be redundant, affecting player experience, before anything else.

I firmly believe that this is not set in stone, and can be changed for the better. That said, besides known difficulties, GameDev has a range of interesting areas and unique problems to tackle, that are hard to come by outside of this industry, which often can require more depth than typical enterprise-dev work.

Tech Art

Not surprisingly, many of those unique areas are located on the edge between art and technology.

There’s a whole specialty that is commonly referred to as tech-art. It’s an umbrella term, and exact specifics highly depend on the company and even the team, but the main part — it’s a bridge between people who explore and create new content, and integrate of this content into a game engine.

More specifically, it can include such things as shader programming, particle systems, model rigging, ray tracing, 3D texturing, performance optimization of the visual part of the game, and fitting all those things into memory budgets.

There are interesting challenges and there is a lot of very specific skills and knowledge involved. During my last year, I was often having lunches with a tech art team, and conversations with those folks were making me feel like 1 semester of 3D graphics in uni 10 years ago was definitely not enough to understand the finer details of their work.

This area of expertise is also highly valuable in the movie and entertainment industries, and to some extent in others, where 3D visualization is a first-class feature, though game development is where it gets the most external visibility.

Content Tools and Pipelines

There’s an enormous layer of content management tooling and tech.

I’m talking about plugins for editors and artists tools, content pipelines, the content management systems tailored to in-house needs. Those things might look less sexy compared to writing shaders or gameplay code, but they are quite impactful, critical for scalability, and very often overlooked.

Scale that to multiple editors, integrations with game engine tools, dozens of in-house and outsourced artists teams, and multiple games being developed at the same time, and suddenly, you’ve got entire departments dedicated to support this layer.

This also puts a lot of pressure on build and CI/CD systems. Building a game from scratch and preparing the content (asset “cooking”) without any additional assistance can easily take a full working day for a big game. To make it practical, there’s a whole world of distributed build systems for both code and content, a lot of engineering effort goes into making the process work for feature teams, content production, and delivering new iterations of game builds.

Testing

Testing is very big in GameDev. While in other industries it’s often delegated to developers and product-management roles, in GameDev testing is a very integral part of the process and no one even begins to talk about fully reducing/automating QA.

I believe there are multiple reasons for it.

Firstly, a lot of QA work is focused on testing graphics and visual content, and how things actually look in a game. For many games, in-game content and cosmetics is the main source of revenue, and naturally, it becomes a part that requires a lot of attention.

Second can be a lack of testing tooling. More experienced folks here might point me to some UE/Unity tooling or automation frameworks, but give it a layer or two of in-house customizations, the novelty of the tooling in general, and multiple independent platforms, and suddenly manual testing begins to look not that long and expensive.

I’m not even starting on in-house engines. Those things can vary so much and their tooling can be in any state, from state-of-the-art masterpieces to a mash of ideas working together by a pure miracle, and unsurprisingly, it often leans towards the second one.

I heard from an acquaintance who worked in a mobile puzzle games company (match-3, hidden-object, that kind) that they relatively successfully leveraged AI for testing their games, and it worked well due to the more limited scope of the game.

Hardware & Platforms

Another interesting perk is that GameDev is demanding on hardware, and most often you’ll have a very powerful PC, especially when things come to graphics.

Speaking of your PC, you are going to work with Windows.

Despite the perennial “year of the Linux desktop,” the Windows platform remains dominant for gaming. From the developer’s perspective, it’s the same story — a significant part of engines and tools are not expected to work in Linux/MacOS.

As you can guess, writing and porting tooling to those systems is also not a very profitable business, and you’ll have tough luck having full-stack experience. So prepare to learn some win-specific tools if you ever plan to touch the game.

Closure

Despite my short tenure, I was lucky to be in a place where I could absorb a wide range of experiences from people who have been in this industry for much longer. People who were deeply invested in it, for better or worse.

There is one thing the gaming industry does exceptionally well — it connects people who are passionate about it, and leverages this passion, making it a reward in itself.

In GameDev you will find people for whom making games is the main goal in their lives. You will meet those who left traditional industries to finally chase a childhood dream. You can find yourself hyper-focused on the specific technical challenges you’d never encounter elsewhere. You will witness strange and beautiful blends of tech, art, and storytelling that few industries can offer. You will work with corporate ladder climbers who, despite being skilled at internal politics, still have to collaborate with people unafraid to challenge decisions that conflict with gamers’ values.

And you will see a passionate, chaotic industry fighting with the realities of scale, and growth pains, and accepting its maturity.

The same passion that drives innovation and creativity can also create instability, accelerate burnout, and make it challenging to sustain long-term balance, for both individuals and companies.

It’s a space where hobby and career blur into something messy, sometimes magical, quite often — frustrating. It definitely doesn’t feel like a regular office job. That’s both its greatest strength and its most persistent challenge.